In Steven Soderbergh’s beguiling new movie The Christophers, a reclusive artist (Ian McKellen) tangles with the quiet art forger (Michaela Coel) who his greedy children have hired to secretly finish further entries in a well-known painting series. The movie is smart and provocative about the nature of artistry and authorship, exploring what it means to create – and to stop creating. It’s especially fascinating coming from Soderbergh, who has made movies with workhorse dependability (The Christophers is his third theatrical release of the past 18 months) and also spent four years retired from directing features entirely.
It also provides particularly jarring context for Soderbergh, in interviews promoting the film, to voice his interest in something that a lot of great artists have pointedly refused to embrace: using AI in films. Soderbergh mentioned in an interview with Filmmaker Magazine that he used what sounds like generative AI to produce “thematically surreal images that occupy a dream space rather than a literal space” for his upcoming documentary about John Lennon and Yoko Ono. He also said that a movie he’s hoping to make about the Spanish-American war would use “a lot of AI”. In a subsequent conversation with Variety, Soderbergh didn’t sound like an AI evangelist, but nor did he back down: “I don’t think it’s the solution to everything, and I don’t think it’s the death of everything. We’re in the very early stages. Five years from now, we all may be going, ‘That was a fun phase.’ We may end up not using it as much as we thought we were going to.”
