!["Steven Soderbergh Discusses His John Lennon Documentary and the Role of AI: 'I Asked Sean, Who Said, "He Would've Wanted to Engage"'"]](https://backingtracksfullcollection.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Steven-Soderbergh-Discusses-His-John-Lennon-Documentary-and-the-Role-758x426.jpg "\"Steven Soderbergh Discusses His John Lennon Documentary and the Role of AI: 'I Asked Sean, Who Said, \"He Would've Wanted to Engage\"'\"] 1")
The film director Steven Soderbergh has been talking about his latest project, for which he’s teamed up with Meta. It’s an AI-enhanced documentary about the last recorded interview given by John Lennon, to RKO Radio in December 1980.
Yes, we know. Yet another John Lennon doc. AI. Meta.
Soderbergh has defended the idea in an interview with Deadline magazine. “I think people, when they heard about this project and that I was using AI tech, jumped to the absolute worst conclusion, which is, ‘He’s going to try and bring John Lennon back to life.’ And all I can say is, have we met?
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“Do I look like somebody that would do that? So it’s a little hard to talk about also because I feel once you’ve seen the movie, you go, ‘Oh, of course.’”
The filmmaker explains that AI is essentially used in the project like CGI. “There’s a way of using AI in which your intention is to fool somebody or manipulate them, to create an image that you want them to think is real. And then there’s a use, which is what we’re doing in the documentary, where it’s obvious that it is AI and that it is being used essentially in the way that you would use VFX or CGI or any sort of non-photographic technology.”
One of the AI sequences is a scene where babies are dressed up in ‘Sixties’ outfits – “It’s a way of comically illustrating something that John is talking about. You can’t shoot that. And even if you did somehow – you came up with some justification for shooting a bunch of one-year-old babies dressed in tie-dye outfits, crying their eyes out – even if you did it, if people knew it was real, it wouldn’t be funny.”
Soderbergh says that when it comes to AI he’s “pro-choice” but also suspects that Lennon himself would have been open to working with it. “I asked Sean (Lennon), “What do you think your dad’s take on this tech would’ve been?” And he said, “Oh, he would’ve wanted to engage.”
“He loved all new technology. All The Beatles did. He would want to play with it just to see what it could do. He goes, ‘That was the way he was.’ How he would’ve felt about it ultimately, we’ll never know, but he said he would’ve wanted to play with it.”
The doc is titled John Lennon: The Last Interview. There’s no release date as yet because Soderbergh is still looking for a distributor.
