Tom Hanks (Photo by Reuters)
Tom Hanks has lauded the "amazing" application of artificial intelligence (AI) to de-age him "in real time" on the set of the new film Here, even as he acknowledged the technology's significant concern in Hollywood. Here, set to release in UAE theaters on October 31, features Hanks and Robin Wright as a couple navigating their family's life through births, marriages, divorces, and deaths across multiple decades and generations. Hanks embodies his character from an idealistic teenager, through various stages of youth and middle age, to a frail elderly man. Instead of relying solely on makeup, filmmakers collaborated with AI studio Metaphysic on a tool called Metaphysic Live to rejuvenate and "age up" the actors. The technology operated so swiftly that Hanks could immediately view his "deep-faked" performance after each scene.
"The remarkable aspect is that it occurred in real time," Hanks remarked. "We didn't have to wait for eight months of post-production. There were two monitors on set. One displayed the actual feed from the lens, and the other, just a nanosecond slower, showed us 'deep-faked.' So we could see ourselves in real time, right then and there."
The escalating use of AI in films like Here has sparked widespread concern in Hollywood, where actors went on strike last year, partly due to the perceived threat the technology poses to their jobs and the industry. Hanks addressed these fears during a panel discussion with director Robert Zemeckis at last weekend's AFI Fest in Hollywood, noting that "many people" are anxious about its usage.
"They gathered 8 million images of us from the web. They scoured the web for photos of us from every era we've been in—every event we've filmed, every movie still, every family photo that might have existed anywhere," Hanks explained. "And they fed that into the system—what is it, 'deepfake technology,' whatever you want to call it."
The use of AI isn't the only innovative technological element in Here. The film is entirely shot from a single static camera, mostly positioned in the corner of a suburban US home's living room. Viewers occasionally catch glimpses of the same geographic space before the house was built, as the action jumps back and forth to colonial and pre-colonial times—or even earlier. "Here" is adapted from a graphic novel by Richard McGuire, which employs the same concept.
"It had to be faithful to the book's style, which is why it looks the way it does," Zemeckis said. "It worked on levels I didn't anticipate. It has a genuine intimacy to it, and in a wonderful way, it's very cinematic."
However, the film's use of AI has garnered the most attention. AI also played a central role in a very different film at AFI Fest—Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl, the latest film for the beloved British stop-motion characters. When Wallace constructs a "smart gnome" to handle chores, his loyal dog Gromit immediately senses danger. Once Feathers McGraw—the nefarious penguin introduced in the 1993 short film "The Wrong Trousers"—gets involved, the technology takes a sinister turn. AI becomes "the wedge between Wallace and Gromit," explained co-director Merlin Crossingham.
"It's a very light touch, although it's a very serious subject," he said. "If we can spark some more intellectual conversation from our silly adventure with Wallace and Gromit, then that can't be a bad thing." The film itself did not use AI. "We don't and we wouldn't," Crossingham said, receiving hearty applause from the Hollywood crowd. Vengeance Most Fowl will premiere globally on Netflix on January 3.
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