Actor-writer-director Joseph Gordon-Levitt is making a new movie, a thriller centered on artificial intelligence, and that appears to be what brought him and his cast and crew to San Francisco this week, with a fake homeless encampment in the Financial District being one of the first clues.
The film industry trades haven't yet reported on Joseph Gordon-Levitt or any of his cast being on location in San Francisco. But it would appear that a previously announced feature film he co-wrote, titled 2034, which stars Rachel McAdams and Jeff Daniels and which has been acquired by Netflix, was shooting here on Wednesday and Thursday and perhaps earlier in the week, after doing principal photography in May in Serbia and Montenegro. Filming was scheduled to conclude this month.
A Redditor snapped photos of Gordon-Levitt looking directorial in Civic Center on Wednesday, and possibly actor Nnamdi Asomugha in costume crossing the street near City Hall. The film also features Toni Collette, Alfre Woodard, Caleb McLaughlin, Joel Edgerton, Chloe Coleman, and Sagar Radia.
And both Reddit and the Chronicle caught photos of a staged homeless encampment on Battery Street at California, which was set up there on Thursday night, though their photographer did not catch any active film shoot going on.
This is Gordon-Levitt's third directorial feature, and it's co-written by his previous collaborator on Snowden, Kieran Fitzgerald, with a story credit going to actress Natasha Lyonne. Nothing has been publicized about the film's storyline other than it's an "AI thriller," but we know from Gordon-Levitt's Instagram feed that he is passionate about the dangers of AI and the missteps of AI companies, and Deadline referred to him earlier this year as Hollywood's "town crier on AI accountability."
Gordon-Levitt reportedly "conceived [2034] nearly a decade ago but waited for AI to percolate into the collective consciousness before pursuing a greenlight." As Deadline said of the unknown plot of the film, "It’s probably safe to say that the story is unlikely to be a love letter to the tech titans currently building their AI empires."
The film is being produced by T-Street Productions, the production company of Rian Johnson that produced his Netflix features Knives Out, Glass Onion, and Wake Up, Dead Man, as well as American Fiction, and the TV streaming series Poker Face (starring Lyonne) and 3 Body Problem.
Gordon-Levitt previously starred in Johnson's 2005 feature directorial debut Brick.
We eagerly await further details about the film, which we may or may not get before it pops up on Netflix, likely next year.