Hay actors that they don’t mind being digitally touched up, and even demand it. But others see it as a lack of respect for your work. It is the case of Keanu Reeveswhich is ensured by contract about what don’t digitally touch it up in his movies.
The popular actorknown for films such as the Matrix saga, John Wick, Constantine, Speed, and many others, is currently promoting the film John Wick: Chapter 4. In an interview in Wired that reaches us via Variety, Keanu Reeves think about the deepfakes.
This new technology, which uses the artificial intelligence for replace one face with anotherIt is already being used in the cinema. We have seen it several times in the Star Wars saga, both in the movies and in the series.
Even more common is to use a digitizing layer to lower the age of the actors. It will be very noticeable in the new Indiana Jones movie, which opens this summer. You can see it in this trailer, where the body of another young actor and Harry Ford’s rejuvenated face are used in the scenes where Indy remembers stories from years ago:
The controversy of deepfakes in the cinema
For an actor it is conflictive, because your job is your performanceand if they change or modify their face, they are no longer them.
One of the actors who odia los deepfakesand even the digital retouchingIt’s Keanu Reeves. In Wired magazine he tells an anecdote from the 90s, when in a performance they added a tear digitally. It bothered her a lot, because a tear changes the meaning of the scene. And above all, because nobody consulted him.
“The frustrating thing is that you lose the ability to act,” he says. “If you go into the deepfake arena, you don’t have any of your views. That’s scary. It’s going to be interesting to see how humans deal with these technologies. They’re having so many cultural, sociological impacts, and the species is being studied. Now there’s so much ‘data’ about behaviors.”
Reeves cites a conversation he had with a 15-year-old teenager. He explained to her that MatrixNeo fights to defend the real world, and the boy replied: “Who cares if it’s real?”.
The protagonist of John Wick believes that AI is going to pose many challenges: “People are growing up with these tools: We’re already listening to AI-made music in the style of Nirvana, there’s NFT digital art.”
And he continues: “It’s great, like, look what these cute machines can do! But behind it there is a corporatocracy that wants to control these things. Culturally and socially, we are going to face the value of the real, or the non-value. And then what is going to be imposed on us? What is going to be presented to us?”
To avoid this problem, Keanu Reeves has a clause in each of its film contracts that prevents studios from digitally manipulating your performances.
The artificial intelligence evolves faster than we can assimilate, and it is a concern that not only affects Keanu Reeves and the deepfakes. Interesting times await us…
