John Lennon: His Last Interview Turned Into a Film by Steven Soderbergh With the Help of AI

Steven Soderbergh takes on an almost impossible challenge: turning three hours of radio conversation recorded on December 8, 1980, just hours before the assassination of John Lennon, into cinema. From that audio comes “John Lennon: The Last Interview”, presented in a special screening at the Cannes Film Festival, a film that puts the voice of the former Beatle back at the centre, along with his political, artistic and personal thinking at perhaps the most lucid moment of his adult life.
The interview had been secured by KFRC in San Francisco through the mediation of producer David Geffen. Laurie Kaye, Dave Sholin, Ron Hummel and Bert Kean enter the Dakota Building while Annie Leibovitz is shooting the famous photo session destined for the cover of Rolling Stone. Lennon hadn't given a radio interview in seven years and hadn't released an album in five: “Double Fantasy”, recorded together with Yoko Ono, had come out just three weeks earlier. It was meant to be album promotion, with an agreement to avoid the topic of the Beatles, but the conversation quickly widens to cover private life, politics, creativity, family, and the relationship between art and society. A few hours later, Mark David Chapman would kill Lennon outside his home.

Soderbergh builds the film as a mosaic of photographs, archive footage, home material and abstract sequences, while avoiding the celebratory form of the classic music documentary. The dialogue always remains the heart of it. The director chooses not to overwhelm the viewer with the vast iconographic archive available on Lennon, often limiting the material to the early Beatles years and his youth. The goal is to leave room for the words: Lennon's voice becomes the true narrative engine. More than the myth, what emerges is the thinking of an artist who, at forty, seems to be entering a new creative season. Lennon speaks like a man who has moved past the burnout that followed the Beatles' breakup and the marital crisis with Yoko Ono, finding balance again in family life and in artistic collaboration with his partner.
The conversation continually expands beyond music. Lennon rejects labels, attacks capitalism, calls himself a pacifist and a feminist, and asserts the centrality of fatherhood and domestic life. Many images come from holidays in Bermuda with his son Sean, born in 1975 on his father's birthday. Even episodes often reduced to folklore, such as the “lost weekend” spent away from Ono with May Pang, are reframed within a more complex arc of crisis and personal rebuilding.

In this sense, the film fits into a long tradition of works devoted to the Lennon-Ono couple — from “The U.S. vs. John Lennon” to Peter Jackson's “Get Back” and “One To One: John & Yoko” — but it tries to set itself apart by opting for a leaner form focused on listening. Soderbergh seems mainly interested in reviving the relevance of Lennon's ideas: his opposition to cultural conformity, his trust in creative freedom, his conviction that art can still play a political and civic role.
The most debated element remains the use of artificial intelligence. Soderbergh employs it to fill in certain passages lacking visual material, especially when the conversation shifts to abstract concepts or historical references impossible to illustrate with archive footage. Meta appears in the credits as a technical partner and financial backer of the project. The director has explained that he worked through prompts and constant revisions, using AI more as a production solution than as an aesthetic choice.

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