The first film to play at Cannes in 2026 originally debuted there two decades ago. In 2006, Pan’s Labyrinth garnered an unprecedented 20-minute standing ovation. On its return in 2026, the film played with a similarly rapturous reception. As filmmaker Guillermo del Toro turned to the boisterous crowd gathered at the Théâtre Debussy, he had one message: “Fuck AI!” A day later, honorary Palme d’Or recipient Peter Jackson—asked to reflect on AI during a Q&A—spoke broadly of the technology as another tool in the creative’s toolbox, provided that the correct rights are respected. Open to the use of AI even for performance replacement, including the resurrection of dead performers (provided the guardians of their legacy sign off), he hinted that the creative drive outweighs any grander concerns about the technology usage, provided a mechanism is in place to regulate usage. The crowd reaction was muted, to say the least, compared to the rapturous reception of del Toro’s cri de coeur.
A few days following that chat, Steven Soderbergh premiered his 100-minute documentary John Lennon: The Last Interview, which has drawn fire due to the filmmaker’s explicit embrace of generative AI. Drawn from recordings made on the 8th of December, 1980, mere hours before Lennon’s assassination outside of his home in New York City, the film is a celebration of his final collaboration with his wife and creative partner Yoko Ono.
In talking head interviews, San Francisco radio reporters Laurie Kaye, Dave Sholin, and Ron Hummel contextualize their conversation with the musicians. The three speak of the restrictions set by the label (the central focus was to be the new album, not the past), their giddy feelings about the exclusivity of the chat, and how open and conversational John and Yoko proved to be that day. The majority of the ensuing conversation is presented as voiceover, with topics ranging far wider than the previous agreed-to restrictions.
The interview will be familiar to even casual Beatles fans, as much of it was used as part of the Anthology project to buttress the late musician’s incorporation into that documentary’s telling. This means that despite the film’s title focus, it’s Ono’s participation that is the most novel, with her providing more detailed context not only about their meeting, but also about some of the more challenging aspects of their relationship, including the “Lost Weekend” where John was kicked out of the home and went off to L.A. for a year-plus of drunken debauchery. This talk is buttressed by recognizable photos and video clips, many of which have been given a distorted or colorized patina. Soderbergh and his editors intersperse slow, panning shots of vacation pics, family photos, magazine covers, news reports, and concert appearances in surprisingly straightforward ways. It’s all on-the-nose, the repetition dulling the pace of the conversation, all simply making up for the fact that no cameras rolled while that December chat took place—and that no better way could be thought of to augment its visual impact.
Well, there was no better way thought of, but there was certainly a different (and far more egregious) way implemented. It’s here that Soderbergh and his team spice up the visuals via a slew of AI-generated animated pieces. Scattered throughout like so much clip-art scat, this series of dreary elements are meant to break up the monotony, but actually just make a bad situation worse. To borrow del Toro’s penchant for profanity, Soderbergh’s film was already awful, but with the addendum of the AI nonsense set atop the other poorly executed elements, the crap atop crap truly makes John Lennon: The Last Interview a shit sandwich.
Sean Lennon, in a letter read by the Festival director before the film’s screening, admitted the very idea of taking one interview and making a feature film out of it was a bold move with plenty of pitfalls. One could believe that Soderbergh could have made something compelling with this material, but the balance is all wrong and the contemporary interviews with the original radio reporters are aggrandizing. But it’s the intensely distracting generated imagery that truly devolves the film into something offensive. This even extends to the archival footage, plastered with color overlays and floating particles: One can posit that these formerly restored clips have been sullied in order to match the gunky aesthetic of the generated imagery.
Charitably, the early elements could be confused for generic stock imagery, the kind of innocuous filler often used to pad things out. But towards the finale, Soderbergh throws the gates open, generating everything from bodybuilder-shaped Neolithic warriors to strange scenes of marching individuals from different periods, a heavy-handed and overly literal approach where one can practically guess the prompts at play. By the time the film gets to sloppy shots of people literally walking on water—or surreal moments of people floating through the sky, then seen through a window in the back of the head, then pulled out further to see a series of small houses dwarfed by a metropolis in the distance—the video-game-like nonsense truly irritates. While swirling geometric shapes fill one side of the screen, the other is littered with strange, waxy figures staring eerily at the audience, somehow meant to augment the final moments of the captured conversation, but inevitably distracting from what’s being said thanks to its chintzy, plasticized sheen.
Sure, Lennon himself adopted the term Plastic for his band with Ono, embracing an ironic artificiality that equally gave a previous record Rubber Soul its cheeky realization of simulacra rather than authenticity. If the use of AI was meant to provide some sort of commentary on the use of the world’s largest plagiarism machine, it’s not evident that that level of introspection is at play. Of course, any sense of meta-commentary is undermined when one realizes the film is in fact produced by Meta, which makes this celebration of Lennon and Ono a Trojan Horse—an AI sales pitch in the guise of a documentary.
The irony of using AI to tell the story of these two is central to this film’s very existence. Lennon tells the story about heading to the gallery in Soho to experience a show, where a ladder and a spyglass invited the visitor to see what was written up on the ceiling. If the message had been negative he would have left, but the simple word “Yes” made him feel akin to Ono’s aesthetic. What to do, then, when the film uses AI to recreate that moment, with mushy imagery stretching out archival photographs and disjointed letters swimming in slightly sickly fashion. What happens to conceptional art when the ideas are vapid, and there’s no artist? John Lennon: The Last Interview doesn’t even hint at giving a damn about these larger questions.
Would Lennon’s response to John Lennon: The Last Interview have been akin to del Toro’s? Would he have been disgusted by the lazy replacement of artists in favor of prompt engineers? Or would he see it as a tool, just as his use of “artificial double tracking” was a technological solution to his annoyance around having to sing the same song multiple times? These, of course, are questions that cannot be answered. But the question of “What the hell was Soderbergh thinking?” is an open one, and the obvious answer of “Because Meta paid him a ton of money” feels unsatisfying.
Equally, del Toro’s dismissal feels too pat, while Jackson’s reaction conveniently ignores the moral component that disgusts del Toro so much. As for Soderbergh’s contribution to the discourse? He refused to stand in front of the audience at his premiere, choosing to stay seated as the Festival director introduced his work. Maybe it was a case of jetlag, or perhaps just deciding to let the festival staff do his work for him. Or maybe it was due to something more unsettling, an embarrassment that this is where his filmmaking has taken him, where he’s left taking money from a multinational corporation to sully recordings of legendary artists by slathering upon them ridiculous imagery as a mode of advertising generative AI.
We are left with a film that speaks to a version of the future, where the line between what’s been captured versus what’s been generated will blur to the point of insignificance, just as people are now unable to tell the difference between the synthetic and acoustic musical elements that make up modern pop. John Lennon: The Last Interview regurgitates a positive message about the role of the artist, but in its construction showcases a way forward that erases an army of collaborators, replaced instead by a near-instant creation that is decidedly anti-humanist.
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