In 2015 director Steven Riley released his intriguing documentary about the life and times of one of Hollywood’s greatest actors, Marlon Brando.
Brando, who died in 2004, was an early advocate of technology related developments in the movies and had worked with a special-effects supervisor named Scott Billups in the 1990s to create a digital scan of his face, which Riley unearthed and then used to bring a ghostly version of the dead legend to life for his film.
Brando, who had made thousands of hours of tape recordings in which he talked about everything from his career to his thoughts about society and the future of film, predicted that in the future actors would be immortalised because they would no longer have to rely on their physical presence to perform, having had themselves captured in a computer, allowing them to become ever-living ghosts in a machine.
In the eight years since Riley’s film, developments in artificial intelligence (AI) have accelerated at a speed that makes Brando’s prophecy far more of an imminent possibility than either he or Riley could have imagined.
With the current writer’s strike in Hollywood focusing on fears about the rise of AI technology and its ability to replace human creativity and productivity in the movies, the spectre of ghostly actors in machines was this week raised again by one of the world’s favourite Toms.
You might think that it would be blockbuster sovereign and suspiciously unageingTom Cruise who would be talking about the idea that he could continue acting decades after his death thanks to the power of AI, but in fact it’s everyone’s favourite nice guy — 66-year-old Tom Hanks — who said in a recent interview: “What is a bona fide possibility right now, if I wanted to, is that I could get together and pitch a series of seven movies that would star me in them in which I would be 32 years old from now until kingdom come.”
Hanks further pointed out that “anybody can now recreate themselves at any age they want to be by way of AI or deep fake technology ... I could be hit by a bus tomorrow and that’s it, but my performances can go on and on and on. Outside the understanding that it’s been done by AI or deep fake, there’ll be nothing to tell you that it’s not me and me alone, and it’s going to have some degree of lifelike quality.”
Hanks is no stranger to digital technology and its ability to realise the seemingly impossible on screen. In the 1994 tear-jerking classic drama Forest Gump, director Robert Zemeckis used what was then ground-breaking digital magic trickery to place Hanks’ character in archive clips of some of 20th century American history’s most memorable moments.
In 2004, as Hanks told the Adam Buxton podcast this week, he reteamed with Zemeckis for the animated feature The Polar Express, which was the first film to be animated entirely using digital motion-capture technology and demonstrated to Hanks and Zemeckis that “there was going to be this ability in order to take zeros and ones inside a computer and turn it into a face and a character. Now, that has only grown a billion-fold since then, and we see it everywhere.”
The pair’s next project, the comic-book adaptation Here, starring Hanks alongside Robin Wright and Paul Bettany and taking place over a number of years, will use Metaphysic AI technology to create deep fake de-aged versions of the actors.
In 2019 when Martin Scorsese used de-ageing technology to create younger versions of his stars Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci and Al Pacino for his gangster epic The Irishman, critics and audiences were more than a little put-off by the results. In the four years since then the process has been improved and refined and will be used in the upcoming Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny to de-age star Harrison Ford by placing a deepfake of his face over his actual body — in a version of the technology that Brando foresaw.
What Hanks is proposing goes further than Brando’s idea and poses questions that will probably have very real consequences for actors and the film industry at large in the not-too-distant future. Though one can argue that in some ways, great actors never die because the fruits of their labour remain available to us to watch long after they’ve died — the idea that they could be endlessly resurrected for AI-constructed performances is scary and horrifyingly uncanny.
What will happen to the dedicated method actors and their performances that we all love to recount and how exactly will we judge the quality of these phantasmagorical afterlife appearances? Who wins the best actor Oscar for an AI-generated posthumous performance — Tom Hanks, the Tom Hanks Estate or the 9,000 developers who created the AI technology? What rules will govern how actors’ images and voices are used after their deaths and will their wills now have to include rules and procedures for their use?
These and many other questions are undoubtedly fascinating to ponder and no doubt some industrious sci-fi writer is already pitching a film about an actor named Tom Hanks who, wanting to embrace new technology and ensure his own immortality, strikes a Faustian bargain with an AI company and allows for his performances to continue long after his death — only to spend the afterlife ruing the awful consequences of his decision.
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