What the Forger Knows: Soderbergh and the Question of Authentic Images

Steven Soderbergh has been using AI to make a John Lennon and Yoko Ono documentary, and his next film — a Spanish-American War epic with Wagner Moura — will use it extensively. He disclosed both things in the same interview with Filmmaker Magazine while promoting The Christophers, his film currently in release about an art forger.

I don't think this is irony. I think it's a description of where cinema is.

The Lennon/Ono use is the defensible case. The 90-minute documentary is composed primarily of archival stills, built around a three-hour RKO Radio interview Lennon and Ono gave hours before his death in 1980. Soderbergh uses AI for 10 minutes of the running time — "little pockets," as he described it — "whenever they start talking philosophically." The images are surreal, unmoored from literal reference. They exist, Soderbergh told Taubin, to create "images that are kind of a surreal version of what their words try to transmit."

This has a long history in documentary filmmaking that has nothing to do with AI. You cannot photograph a philosophical concept. You cannot film the experience of love or death or time — you can film gestures toward those experiences, and when those are inadequate, you reach for something else: animation, abstraction, footage that is not pretending to be documentary evidence. Soderbergh's AI images are functioning as surrealism — as a visual acknowledgment that language has exceeded what archival reality can show.

The Wagner Moura film is different. Soderbergh is planning to use "a lot of AI" in a large-scale historical epic because it is the only way to make a large-scale historical epic without studio backing. He is not using AI where reality cannot reach. He is using AI where reality is too expensive.

Both decisions are being presented as the same kind of decision. They are not.

This matters because of The Christophers, and not in the way that the irony reading suggests. The Christophers asks whether a forged painting can be authentic — whether technical replication constitutes a genuine copy or something categorically different. Art forgers are not primarily a legal problem, though they create legal problems. They are a philosophical problem: what makes an image valuable in ways that cannot be reproduced even when the image itself can be reproduced perfectly?

The answer that art history has settled on, imperfectly, is provenance. A painting's value is partly about its visual properties and partly about its chain of custody — who made it, when, under what conditions. A fake Vermeer that is visually indistinguishable from an authenticated Vermeer is worth infinitely less not because it looks different but because it doesn't have Vermeer in its history. The authenticity claim is about origin, not appearance.

AI images make a different claim. They are openly not from a primary source. Soderbergh's surreal documentary footage doesn't pretend to be archival — it is declared as generated, a visualization of what cannot be visualized otherwise. The claim to authenticity there is not about provenance but about intention: this is what the filmmaker needed to show, and this is the only way to show it.

The Spanish-American War footage cannot make the same claim. Historical footage carries the claim of provenance — of images that have a causal connection to the events they depict. War photographs matter not just because they show you what war looked like but because someone was there to take them. An AI reconstruction of a battle that no one photographed is a simulation, not a document. It will look like history. It will not have history's provenance.

I don't know whether audiences will care. The evidence from the Brutalist controversy — Brady Corbet's AI accent refinements — and the Late Night With the Devil backlash suggests they care more than the industry expects, and differently depending on where the AI is used. AI that refines an existing element lands differently than AI that substitutes for something that was never captured.

What Soderbergh has revealed, whether he intended to or not, is the line the industry has not yet drawn. The documentary use — AI as a surrogate for the unfilmable — has a legitimate aesthetic argument behind it. The epic use — AI as a cost-cutting substitute for footage you cannot afford to produce — is something else. The question is whether the industry, the guilds, and the audience will hold that distinction, or whether they will collapse both uses into the same announcement the way Soderbergh has, and decide later whether it matters.

Sources
Paste Magazine (April 2026): "Steven Soderbergh Embraces AI While Releasing a Film About Art Forgery," citing his interview with Amy Taubin in Filmmaker Magazine, Spring 2026. AV Club (April 2026): "Steven Soderbergh Uses AI for John Lennon Documentary While Releasing a Movie About Forgery." No Film School (April 2026): "Steven Soderbergh Defends Using AI in His John Lennon Documentary."