The celluloid dead are always with us. They’ve been sneaking around our homes since television channels introduced reruns in the 1950s. Even the worst movies perform a certain kind of magic, trapping actors in time like insects in amber. But for decades, Hollywood has been trying to take this strange brush with immortality one step further.
Ana de Armas told Another magazine that just before production, the crew of the new Netflix original, blond (2022), Monroe asked permission to make the film and left a card full of heartfelt letters on her grave. The film’s director Andrew Dominik not only placed his close-up shots of Ana de Armas at eye level to maximize her physical resemblance to Marilyn Monroe, but he also filmed Monroe’s death scene in the actual house where the late actress died on Helena Avenue. in Los Angeles.
The public seems to love it when Hollywood brings its dead back to life, with modern biopics like Bohemian Rhapsody (2018) grossing nearly $1 billion and Elvis (2022) raising nearly $300 million in the midst of a global pandemic. Stars Rami Malek and Austin Butler, respectively, garnered much acclaim for bringing their late pop culture icons back to life. While every actor had an edge with certain physical features that resembled Freddy Mercury and Elvis Presley, these were enhanced by the excellent work of makeup artists like Jan Sewell On Bohemian Rhapsody, who made 20 sets of Freddy Mercury teeth for Malek.
But what would have happened if the filmmakers behind Bohemian Rhapsody, Elvisand blond chosen to not only enhance their protagonist’s physical resemblance to their real-life character with practical makeup, but instead digitally replace their faces with the likenesses of Mercury, Presley, and Monroe?
Bruce Willis is the highest profile Hollywood star involved in CGI cloning
This question may sound hypothetical. But it’s getting more practical than ever after news broke that Bruce Willis recently co-created a “digital twin” or CGI clone of himself to appear in a series of Russian ads. Willis called the experience of CGI cloning herself “very new and interesting,” as well as “a great opportunity to go back in time.” Although the die hard star did not sell his likeness to the Russian deepfake company he collaborated with on the ads, as originally reported by The Telegraphthe head took on a life of its own.
This is because Willis is the most prominent Hollywood star to date to give CGI clones his blessing. But there are other filmmakers who are interested in the futuristic possibilities. Universal and Disney have already invested millions of dollars in this new technology, receiving a mix of praise and vitriol for their CGI resurrection from late actors Paul Walker in Furious 7 (2015) and Peter Cushing in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016).
Chris Evans Disapproved of a Movie That Would Revive James Dean With CGI
In 2019, Anton Ernst and Tati Golykh announced their plans to direct an adaptation of a 2011 novel by Gareth Crocker, find jack. To play the lead role of a soldier who refuses to leave his dog at the end of the Vietnam War, Ernst and Golykh were given the likeness rights of an actor, contemporary of Marilyn Monroe, James Dean. This was after Paul Newman’s estate passed up the chance to revive their handsome blue-eyed patriarch on the big screen, where he spent most of his life.
Though the shadow of Dean’s career has made it big in Hollywood history, the late actor only starred in three films before his untimely death in a car accident in 1955; Rebel without purpose and east of Eden was released in 1955 with Huge posthumously in 1956. So if Ernst and Golykh succeed, find jack would be (sort of) the fourth James Dean movie. While Dean’s estate has signed the film, not everyone is happy with it. In 2019, Chris Evans took to Twitter to voice his opinion after announcing James Dean’s CGI resurrection.
While Chris Evans and many others have criticized the ethical gray area purely from a filmmaking standpoint, the CGI resurrection of deceased actors is one of the most exciting technological innovations of the twenty-first century. While still in its infancy, this special effect will soon provide current and future filmmakers with a classic movie star dollhouse.
At its worst, Hollywood is about to tarnish the legacies of its greatest actors, as Chris Evans suggests. At best, these CGI resurrections, when combined with other modern filmmaking techniques, could bring audiences compelling revisionist works in the vein of cinema’s old masters.
CGI Resurrections would be safest in the hands of filmmakers like Martin Scorsese
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Imagine an Alfred Hitchcock movie with a higher level of tension than the master of suspense could build under a glass ceiling of dated filmmaking techniques. Perhaps this is reminiscent of 80s neoclassical Hitchcockian thrillers like Dressed to kill (1980) and Doppelganger (1984), directed by Brian De Palma, a self-proclaimed disciple of Hitchcock. Or maybe Martin Scorsese’s 1991 remake of? Cape Fear with Robert DeNiro. After Scorsese already played with the sister effect of aging from ILM (LucasFilm’s Industrial Light & Magic) in his 2019 film, the Irishmanwhat’s stopping him from taking all the dolls in the classic dollhouse?
Instead of two hours of Nick Nolte’s dreaded face as the protagonist of Cape Fear, Sam Bowden, Gregory Peck’s photo. Not with all the wrinkles and white hair he had in his cameo role on the sidelines in Scorsese’s 1991 remake, but with all the youthfulness still intact from when he first starred as Sam Bowden in the original 1962 version, Cape Fear (1962).
It’s worth noting that although J. Lee Thompson directed the original Cape Fear, it was initially developed by Hitchcock, who had already storyboarded the film. And when Hitchcock leaves a storyboard for you, shoot the storyboard. Thompson shot the storyboard. Aside from notable script rewrites, Scorsese also shot the storyboard. Scorsese’s Loyalty to Hitchcock’s Original Cape Fear storyboard, along with the music in the film, made for a mesmerizing, neoclassical film that was reinvented. For its remake, the wolf of wall street director wiped the unused score for Torn curtain (1966) by Hitchcock’s frequent composer Bernard Herrmann.
But Scorsese raised the tension to eleven with modern filming techniques like the zoom. In his Cape FearScorsese often zooms in on the actors’ faces to squeeze the paranoid tension of the story, effectively cramming it into the characters until it reaches a boiling point where it bounces back to the audience. The result is a relentless paranoia trip of the kind that Hitchcock devoted his life and filmography to gift to the public. If Scorsese, who is as devout for filmmakers’ pasts as he is sensitive to film history, could pay tribute on this scale to the live-action actors available to him in the 1990s, just imagine which Hitchcockian nightmares he could create with James Stewart’s CGI resurrection. Or Cary Grant.
Admittedly, for any Scorsese who could honor deceased actors with this technology, there are countless other filmmakers out there who would blow the opportunity. Who’s to stop them from sullying the good names of old Hollywood legends? In short, their estates.
The future use of this technology is likely to spark a greater debate about the ethics of estates themselves, with famous families shining a light on the otherwise drab world of probate. The CGI resurrection of Hollywood stars hits squarely at the kinds of complex philosophical questions about death and individual rights in the face of emerging technologies that people of the twenty-first century will increasingly have to answer.