You don’t have to be dead to work here
You don’t have to be dead to work here (but it helps)
Digital technology allows actors to return to the big screen after their death — but how is it done and what are the ethical challenges?
There is a spectre haunting Hollywood. It is a nightmare vision of the future where movies are populated with the digital doppelgängers of long-dead actors, where the power-play decisions are made not by studios but by the holders of likeness rights to Brando, Bogart and Monroe, and where real performers have a secondary status, confined to voice work and line readings for a brave new pantheon of hi-tech Hollywood resurrections.
Fanciful? Not at all. As recently as last week the Disney-owned production company Lucasfilm announced, in an apparent effort to allay public concerns, that it had “no plans to digitally re-create Carrie Fisher’s performance as Princess or General Leia Organa” in the next instalment of the Star Wars franchise.
It was a reaction to the frenzy of speculation and panic-mongering that followed Fisher’s death ten days after the global release of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, in which she appears in computer-generated form (aged roughly 19) with a computer-generated Peter Cushing (aged roughly 63), who died in 1994. “Creepy!” yelled the fans. “They’re going to use her digital self in every other Star Wars movie,” gasped the sci-fi nerds. “Is this the end of actors?” asked the industry.
The computer can simulate the way that light bounces off skin
“I understand why people find it creepy, but we are a long way away from being able to populate a movie with believable human computer-generated characters,” says Tim Webber, the chief creative officer of the special-effects company Framestore (he won an Academy Award for best visual effects for Gravity). “Creating lifelike human beings is both expensive and unquestionably the most difficult part of computer effects.”
Webber has practical and groundbreaking experience. It was in his office in 2014 where the first Hollywood icon was resurrected, when Framestore agreed to create an entirely computer-generated Audrey Hepburn for a Galaxy chocolate bar commercial.
A digitally resurrected Audrey Hepburn in an advert for Galaxy chocolate
Yes, using old Hollywood stars in modern commercials had been done before Galaxy. Remember Elton John, in 1991, singing and playing for Diet Coke, with Humphrey Bogart and Louis Armstrong in the background? Or the Steve McQueen Ford Mustang advert from 2004? Or Gene Kelly body-popping in the rain for Volkswagen in 2005? In all of these cases footage of the actors was simply altered or tampered with through a basic cut-and-paste process to achieve the often slightly odd result (Webber calls this the “uncanny valley — where the result is human but not quite human; it feels disturbing and uncanny”).
And, yes, actors who died during movie productions, such as Oliver Reed in Gladiator or Brandon Lee in The Crow, have also been re-inserted into fleeting closing scenes through the magic of technology. But again the process was a matter of searching through recorded material, finding the right sequence, then cutting out the appropriate talking head and pasting it on to the body of a double in the new scene.
Webber’s Hepburn, however, was the game-changer. This did not involve searching through, say, Roman Holiday, plucking out the scene of Hepburn saying, “I’ve never been alone with a man before”, then splicing it into a chocolate advert. Instead it required the Framestore team to painstakingly, through the study of photos and old frames, build up a fully functioning (with muscles, movement, eyes and expressions) digital “face mask” of Hepburn that could be laid over a double who served as a stand-in for the physical shoot.
This process was replicated by the Rogue One effects team when they asked the actors Guy Henry and Ingvild Deila to stand in for, respectively, Cushing and Fisher (both Henry and Deila were chosen for being similar physiological “types” to the dead actors). Again, while the flesh-and-blood performers walked through the motions on the Rogue One sound stage at Pinewood, the special-effects artists created meticulous digital face-masks (in Cushing’s case they were able to scan a cast of his face that had been made for Hot Shots) that were applied to their skulls and meticulously animated in post-production. So the process that wowed in a galaxy far far away began with a Galaxy much closer to home.
When challenged about his use of the computer-generated Cushing, Rogue One’s special-effects guru John Knoll appeared to take a pot-shot at Webber’s work on the Hepburn commercial, saying that his Cushing was not the same as “Audrey Hepburn selling chocolate. That’s not what we’ve done here. I’d like to think that the role we created in this film is one that Peter Cushing would be very excited to play.”
It is nonetheless the Framestore work that made the digital resurrection a reality. “We didn’t even know that it was possible when we started,” says Webber, adding that he was initially encouraged by his team’s work on the expressive character of Dobby for the Harry Potter franchise. “But human beings are different. We have developed over hundreds and thousands of years of evolution to be able to judge the tiniest of signals from other human faces. And so if anything was even slightly wrong it would stand out a mile, but we had a gut feeling that we could achieve it. And it wasn’t a single piece of technology that made it possible. Instead it was a coming together of hundreds of bits of technology as well as the craft and understanding of what needs to be done.”
For instance? Light and skin, he says, is a big one. “The computer can now simulate the way that light bounces off skin. In fact, light doesn’t bounce off skin. It bounces into the flesh, and bounces around the flesh and comes out again at different angles. It does something we call sub-surface scattering. And if you get that wrong it can look like a plastic dummy.”
Once the digital work was finished and the character created, Webber and his team were free to use their new Audrey in the commercial how and where they pleased, yes? No. Certainly not. For this is where the resurrection business gets slightly more complex. Hepburn’s estate, says Webber, “were concerned about how she came across. They were very on top of it and would only allow certain things. They would not have allowed her to smile cheesily to camera, for instance, and say, ‘Buy Galaxy chocolate.’ ”
If they want to restrict what is done it’s best to put it in the will
Hepburn’s estate have a legacy to preserve (Hepburn is associated with class and style, and nothing crude, crass or indecent) and it’s the legacy-preserving business that will surely carry the burden of this new creative development. According to Audrey Wessel, the in-house counsel for CMG Worldwide, an agency that represents dead celebrities, stars today have already seen the possibilities of a digitally resurrected future and are making it very clear what they will and won’t do after death. “Recently, such personalities have figured out that if they want to restrict what’s done, the best thing to do is to put that in their will,” says Wessel. “And for the most part if they don’t restrict it themselves, whoever receives their rights will have the right to determine that.”
CMG represents the estates of Hollywood legends such as Marlon Brando, Humphrey Bogart and Bette Davis. Wessel says that her company has clients who in their wills have forbidden their digital future selves to smoke or take drugs. “We have seen clients do that,” she says. “And even if it’s not in their wills, the people who are managing the rights and the brand of the person after death might find that it’s something that doesn’t fit with the brand they created while living so it’s not something they’re going to permit after death.”
Robin Williams, who died in 2014, was clearly aware of the potential use of his image. According to recently released court documents, he banned, in his will, any use of his image for commercial means until 2039 and has denied permission for his image to be inserted into movies or TV scenes for the same period.
Wessel plays down the idea that the technology displayed in Rogue One is going to initiate an era of headache-inducing rights-management issues, saying that it boils down to people with a vested interest in preserving the legacy of a star being careful with that star’s likeness. And besides, most actors’ agents, and certainly those based in California, already negotiate contracts that extend beyond their client’s lifetime (in California the law states that film-makers cannot use an actor’s likeness after death without permission from their estate).
It only gets complicated, Wessel says, if after their death an actor’s contract with a studio clashes with the wishes of the estate over the issue of rights. “When I say ‘the rights’, there are often quite a bundle of rights involved,” she says. “And they may involve a couple of parties, and it would be up to the parties who have received the rights to determine what they’re willing to accept.”
Time for a hypothetical scenario. Let’s say CMG is told that one of its clients, Marlon Brando, has been digitally recreated for a Godfather spin-off, only this time it takes the form of the escapades of the young Don Corleone, in which he does something seemingly out of character for the Brando brand by having, say, gender reassignment. What does CMG do?
“That’s a really good question,” says Wessel, politely ignoring the sheer absurdity of the premise. “That would be a situation where we would need to research what the prior contracts were. What rights they [the studio] would have versus what rights the estate would have. But most of the time it needs to be cleared through the estate.”
Disney argues that Rogue One had the blessing of Cushing’s estate, just as Fisher approved of the use of her likeness (“She saw the final result and she loved it,” says Knoll). Yet it’s easy to find the whole discussion depressing and to see us drifting sadly into a film world of limited likenesses and restricted images, where everything is a few frozen cinematic selfies rehashed and replayed ad infinitum.
However, says Webber, down that road madness lies. “You have to remember the reason why film stars are film stars. It’s about more than just their faces and how they look on the surface,” he says, adding that the ethical discussions around digital resurrection have slightly run off the rails. “All we in the effects world can do is provide digital make-up and open up some storytelling possibilities. But what we can’t give you is the performance. We can never bring that back. And that’s what makes a film star.”
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