Steven Soderbergh first came to the Cannes Film Festival in 1989 with his debut narrative feature, Sex, Lies, and Videotape. At 26 years old, he became the youngest solo director to win the Palme d’Or. “How little we expected,” he says. “We slipped into the competition because of another film dropping out, so it all just felt like pure upside.”

Since that career-launching breakthrough, the prolific filmmaker has mixed beloved commercial hits (Erin Brockovich, Magic Mike, the Ocean’s franchise) with innovative filmmaking techniques, like shooting the 2018 film Unsane on an iPhone.

In his latest film, John Lennon: The Last Interview, Soderbergh again explores a new filmmaking tool: generative AI. The documentary uses an in-depth radio interview that John Lennon and Yoko Ono gave in New York on December 8, 1980. Lennon, who was killed later that day, was strikingly open and thoughtful in the interview, talking about art, music, being a parent, and his relationship with Ono. “It really felt like the creative equivalent of finding this Spanish galleon sunken off the coast of wherever and it’s filled with, like, gold coins,” says Soderbergh of the first time he listened to the audio. “I just couldn’t believe it.”

Soderbergh set out to make a visual journey that would complement the audio, using more than 1,000 archival images that he had access to via the Lennon estate and the son of the two musicians, Sean Lennon. He partnered with Meta to use AI technology for about 10% of the film, during times when something Lennon was saying was more philosophical. The AI sequences, which include flowers blooming, cavemen, and babies crying, are very clearly not realistic, which is exactly what Soderbergh was aiming for.

After the film debuted at Cannes, Soderbergh sat down with Vanity Fair to talk about creating the intimate Lennon doc, why he’s okay with being a spokesperson for AI, and what he would say to other filmmakers (like his friend Guillermo del Toro) about their resistance to the new technology.

This interview has been edited and condensed.