Guadagnino transforms Turin into an AI Silicon Valley
TORONTO – Perhaps it’s apropos that in 2025 a sporting complex, La Continassa (Juventus FC), is being used as a studio lot for a film about OpenAI. The company that founded ChatGPT is now getting the movie treatment by none other than Italy’s golden boy and unofficial Film Ambassador, Luca Guadagnino. Amazon MGM and Guadagnino’s Line Producers looked to the self-prescribed “avante garde area” that is the J Village – where Juventus FC train and play – to shoot six weeks of scenes for his upcoming film Artificial.
“It’s our little Cinecittà, where we work even on August 15th,” says Lorenzo Bassi, CEO of Smart Spaces. The $40 Million Hollywood Production is now the largest scale production in terms of equipment, to ever shoot in Turin. That includes the blockbuster racing franchise Fast & The Furious. “Filming will continue until September 18th in a 21,000-square-meter space. We even had to borrow 400 square meters from the neighboring Juventus headquarters to install the tensile structures for the set painters”.
The plot, though it’s been mostly kept under wraps, is described as a “comedic drama set in the world of artificial intelligence”. While unconfirmed, the film is apparently based on OpenAI’s co-founder Sam Altman and the 2023 events around his firing and rehiring.
OpenAI was founded by a consortium of entrepreneurs, one of them Elon Musk who famously left the company after seeking majority equity and initial board control – a proposal rejected by the group. Naturally, Musk proceeded to publicly feud with Altman and OpenAI, filing lawsuits over a violation of the company’s original mission – to remain nonprofit.
And while Musk has sounded the alarm on AI’s “profound risks to society”, he’s also been developing his own A.I. projects, to rival his former partners. What’s most interesting about Guadagnino’s Artificial is not just that he’s chosen to reconstruct Silicon Valley in Turin, using green screen and reconstructing the San Francisco setting. But that Amazon MGM has chosen an Italian to helm the project.
It’s not without a sense of irony that an Italian should be chosen to tell the story about a subject that many connect with End Times. The prevailing belief, at least among A.I. naysayers, is that this technology will quietly take over countless small tasks to the all-important ones, including law enforcement, legal rulings, financial and healthcare decisions. Guadagnino, if he’s a student of his ancestral history will know that an overreliance on A.I. is in direct opposition to what humanist philosophers like Petrarch taught.
A 14th century scholar and poet, Petrarch is often cited as the father of the Renaissance. He led the Humanist Renaissance movement and believed that humans possessed great, divinely-given intellectual and creative potential that should be fully realized. His was a view that centered the human experience and gave breath to a movement that inspired great artistic, engineering, architectural and political feats. It would make for some story if Guadagnino were to bring an Italian sensibility to the subject matter.
Image of Guadagnino on set of Artificial courtesy of Amazon MGM
Massimo Volpe is a filmmaker and freelance writer from Toronto: he writes reviews of Italian films/content on Netflix
