The topic is quite topical, but that a discussion of Artificial Intelligence in a film could come from Leonardo Pieraccioni is a move many might find fairly counterintuitive. After all, “those who work in this field reveal their age,” the Tuscan actor notes, “and if when I debuted I spoke of the dreams, the aspirations, and the uncertainties of people in their thirties, at sixty I wanted to tell the hopes of those who began replacing question marks with exclamations, to stop asking questions and start expressing certainties.”
And if there is one certainty Pieraccioni expresses in his new film, titled An Artificial Weekend and which we will see in cinemas from November 12, it is that “AI envies something in us, not the other way around,” and that something is the spark of the human spirit.
In the film — which at the opening also presents a few brief sequences totaling two or three minutes, created precisely with AI — we begin with a visionary engineer, a kind of Elon Musk in our own country wearing the look of a Japanese bohemian, who invents a highly sophisticated humanoid (obviously equipped with an equally sophisticated artificial intelligence) essentially indistinguishable from humans. A bit from hubris, a bit from a bet, he decides to invite six strangers to his home for a weekend to put them to the test: after the first day and the first night spent there, they must indicate who among them is the humanoid in disguise. The problem is that this artificial creature is convinced it is human as well, and when, thanks to the hairdresser Leonardo, it discovers, a bit like in Blade Runner, the truth about itself, it will fall into crisis, and will ask this improvised travel companion to lead it toward the discovery of real life and the true feelings of human beings.
An Artificial Weekend: the trailer of the film
For Pieraccioni, not only a director and lead actor but also a screenwriter together with Filippo Bologna and Andrea Bassi, AI is “a topic that interests us a lot, something with which we all have to deal with and perhaps the most important discovery in history alongside that of fire, but here we’ve translated it into a fairy tale: there’s a bit of Pinocchio in this film, in this humanoid who would like to become human”.
As you’ve seen in the trailer — so there are no spoilers, no deception — the humanoid in question is female, named Cristiana, and she is played by Giulia Vecchio. “At a certain point Cristiana loses all references and the memory she thought was hers, and she tries to restart from zero,” the actress explained, adding that she believed it is something “that can happen to all of us after a pain; often we are tempted to rebuild an identity by meeting new people. When you use AI you try to understand what you are really looking for, she in the film tries to understand what it means to feel.”
According to Pieraccioni, the film imagines that “AI could envy us for our stumbles, our errors, the imperfections that are part of the human condition. Cristiana falls in love with human desolations and human pleasures: she is perfect, but perfection is useless without our emotions, and the wonder of humanity also lies in feeling human pains.” In the film the Tuscan actor has somehow echoed the view he holds about the topic in everyday life, where, he said, he often talks with AI: “but I’m convinced that sooner or later it will come knocking to ask me to go have a pizza together. AI is wonderful, it’s the contemporary version of the Eleven I used to consult as a child, it serves for a lot of things, it reads my blood tests and helps restart the boiler: but it is also democristian, it tells you what you want to hear, it flatters you. And it does not have the spark, it lacks melancholy, it will never tell you something poetic, it will never write a song like Vasco’s ‘Sally‘ that I used in a scene, it will never have the lovely human whims nor will it ever feel the joy of when a whim vanishes.”
One time, the actor and director recounts, when he entered his daughter’s room he glimpsed a long handwritten letter for her fiancé: “certain empathies will never be matched by AI.” But does Pieraccioni harbor a fear about AI? “Of course, the fear is that one day it might replace me, that it could write a screenplay like Sonego, who has been the greatest of them all.” For the moment, however, he writes, directs, and stars in An Artificial Weekend. And in the film it even happens that his character, an idealist yes but also somewhat disillusioned about love and others, might learn something from his humanoid traveling companion.
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