After 12 Years of Silence: Bennett Miller Returns with a Documentary on AI

It’s been twelve years since Bennett Miller’s drama “Foxcatcher” premiered at the Cannes Film Festival. Since then, the director hasn’t released a single feature. All this time, he’s been trying to get another project off the ground—a film about artificial intelligence written by Charlie Kaufman—but rumors suggest Kaufman left the project, and no updates have surfaced since.

However, it turns out these years haven’t been wasted. Miller has been working on a documentary exploring “how technology has changed our reality—both in obvious and frighteningly unknown ways.” The film promises to be a deep meditation on the costs and benefits of AI technology.

The documentary, titled “The World Naked,” features star speakers: former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, the Dalai Lama, and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman. For a long time, however, the film remained in limbo during post-production due to legal disputes.

And now, finally, some good news. In an interview with the French newspaper Le Monde, Miller confirmed that the legal obstacles have been cleared and this summer the documentary will be shown to the public.

The premiere will take place in New York, at a theater whose name is being kept secret for now. But the most interesting part is the format. According to the director, screenings will happen “in a fluid way”: “The program will change every night” depending on the guests present and which segments are shown. Miller also hopes to arrange screenings in Paris.

Who knows—perhaps the next stop will be the Cannes Film Festival in May. That would be a symbolic return for a director whose three previous works—”Capote” (2005), “Moneyball” (2011), and “Foxcatcher” (2014)—have become part of the golden fund of modern American cinema. Despite his modest output over thirty years of filmmaking, Miller remains one of the most significant directors of the 21st century.