Multiple publications recently picked up a false story about Bruce Willis sold his likeness to a Russian deepfake company, Deepcake, to create a digital Bruce Willis clone that could appear in new movies in its place. This followed an announcement earlier in the year that the die hard star had retired from film acting due to an aphasia diagnosis.
The headline of the deepfake story, which sounded like something out of Rian Johnson’s sci-fi movie looper (2012), quickly went viral. But shortly after, representatives for both Willis and Deepcake denied that such a sale had ever taken place. Each side claimed that Willis still owns his effigy. It’s true, however, that Deepcake recently used Willis’ likeness for a project that the actor himself has been working on a bit from a distance. A spokesperson for Deepcake said: Variety that the company “used 34,000 images of Bruce Willis and created its ‘digital twin’ for a series of advertisements” with an outside Russian company, Megafon, and that Willis was pleased with the result at the time.
Even if some details of the news that emerged from an article by The Telegraph turned out to be incorrect, after the CGI resurrection of Peter Cushing’s likeness in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016) the idea no longer seems far-fetched that an old Hollywood star would sell their face for a digital clone to continue their film career. It may not seem normal either. But one day this will be the ‘new normal’. While still in its infancy right now, CGI cloning is the strange but inevitable future of film and television.
The CGI Resurrection of Peter Cushing
Despite rave reviews from critics and box office records broken at over a billion dollars, the greatest achievement of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story comes down to a single visual effect; the groundbreaking resurrection of the late English actor Peter Cushing (1913 – 1994). It allowed him to reprise his role as Grand Moff Tarkin from the original Star Wars film (1977), for which: Rogue One is a direct prequel.
Like a monster rising from the grave in Hammer Film Productions’ goth horror films that landed his breakthrough roles, there in 2016, twenty-two years after his death, Peter Cushing was seen on screen opposite the very much alive Ben Mendelsohn.
While Cushing was not literally brought back from the dead as in the biblical story of Lazarus, his likeness was digitally superimposed over the face of living English actor Guy Henry via CGI, thanks to technological breakthroughs from ILM (LucasFilm’s Industrial Light & Magic). Henry shared Cushing’s physique, mimicking his wooden body language and cold voice for dialogue scenes.
Early on in pre-production, the filmmakers behind Rogue One posed the question to ILM: “Can dead actors be brought back to life through CGI?” But upon the film’s release, some critics who took offense at the groundbreaking visual effect posed the more controversial question, “Should dead actors be brought back to life through CGI?”
Robin Williams Prevented Hollywood From Cloning Him Until 2039
A critic of ILM’s CGI resurrection of Peter Cushing in Rogue One is film writer Joseph Walsh, who in his 2016 article in the guardsaid:
“[ILM’s Cushing] effect is eerie, and the technology is breathtaking. Then come the questions about this necromantic cinematic feat and what it means for the industry: ‘Can you copyright and package an actor after death?’ It would seem so. So where do we draw the line? The late actor Robin Williams [passed] about the rights to his image from a trust protecting the use of his image until 2039.”
Robin Williams died two years before the release of rogue one, but even he knew which way the wind was blowing. Peter Cushing wasn’t so lucky, he passed in 1994. This was when the best CGI ILM could muster was the T-1000 melting through walls in Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991). If Robin Williams has blocked his beloved legacy of iconic characters from beyond the grave for at least two decades, then ILM’s Cushing Effect clearly holds a promising position in the future of cinema.
As groundbreaking as ILM’s Cushing Effect was in 2016, the flaws show that CGI cloning is still in its infancy, as the Cushing clone made minor mistakes in facial movements, which subconsciously signaled to moviegoers’ brains that it face they were looking at did not belong to a real human being. In other words, ILM’s Cushing effect was still trapped in the “uncanny valley,” a phenomenon that Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori devised in 1970 to describe human discomfort with androids. This kind of kinking is to be expected for any special effect in its primitive state, but will evolve over time. And it will evolve. It already has.
Planet of the Apes movies pushed the technological boundaries that will perfect CGI clones
Keep in mind the Planet of the Apes franchisee. Practical makeup, prosthetics, and costumes were pretty much all that was available to director Franklin J. Schaffner for the original film, Planet of the Apes (1968) to convince audiences in the late 1960s that human actors like Roddy McDowall (who played Caesar) and The Shawshank RedemptionJames Whitmore (who played the assembly chairman) were actually monkeys. Fast-forward 40 years later: the filmmakers behind the 2010 reboot Apes trilogy took the CGI/live-action hybrid technology known as motion-capture or “mo-cap” to mind-boggling humanistic heights. While much of its success can be attributed to veteran mo-cap actor Andy Serkis’ brilliant performance as Caesar, each entry in the trilogy took mo-cap a step further.
Rupert Wyatt’s Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011) mainly starred live-action people like James Franco and John Lithgow. Dan Matt Reeves (who would go on to direct) the batter) beautifully expanded mo-cap’s emotional resonance in its sequel, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014), who gave equal screen time and emotional weight to mo-cap monkeys and live-action humans. Finally, the technology was perfected in Reeves’ bleak final entry, War for the Planet of the Apes (2017), which mainly featured mocap monkeys.
Thanks to the work of scientists working with James Cameron and ILM on films like Avatar and the upcoming sequels, the Apes Franchisees’ 40-year gap between monkey costumes and mo-cap suits is no longer an accurate model for how fast technology is currently developing. So if Andy Serkis’ intoxicatingly intimate performance can make modern audiences cry by seeing the ironic and tragic humanity in the eyes of a monkey pitted against the superior weapons of real humans, imagine what an artist as Serkis the audience of the future with the sparkling blue eyes and expressive face of Paul Newman… Or Bruce Willis, for that matter.
This all sounds rather far-fetched, doesn’t it? One day it won’t work. And that day is only getting closer. Just read Bruce Willis’ statement he made recently after the release of those Russian deepfake ads that used his CGI clone:
“I loved the precision with which my character turned out [in this] mini-movie in my usual action comedy genre. For me it’s a great opportunity to go back in time. With the advent of modern technology, even when I was on another continent, I was able to communicate, work and participate in filming. It is a very new and interesting experience.”
It will be a very new and interesting experience for all of us to see more CGI clones like Peter Cushing and Bruce Willis in the coming years. Because the question is not “whether” another actor will surrender his likeness to a CGI clone. The question is, “Who’s next?”