By the grace of technology, actor Peter Cushing may perform an on-screen Lazarus act in Star Wars: Rogue One, despite the fact that he has been dead for the last 21 years. A surprising development, but probably not a shocking one. Reanimated celebrities are, of course, nothing new. CGI is often deployed in an effort to fill some of the void when an untimely death puts an on-going production in jeopardy, sometimes mixing with body doubles and deleted scenes. Paul Walker’s performance in Furious 7 is an example of this.
In less technologically advanced times, less tidy and convincing remedies were used. In Wagon’s East, producers seemingly copied and pasted footage of star John Candy from one scene to another in a way that was distractingly obvious. Also obvious? The cardboard cutout that was taped to a mirror in an effort to cover for Bruce Lee’s unfortunate absence during the filming of Game of Death. But, hey, at least these films tried.
Ed Wood asked his wife’s chiropractor to walk around with a cape pulled up to cover his face while filming Bela Lugosi’s scenes from Plan Nine from Outer Space (that’s the one that worked!) and Blake Edwards also went with facial obstruction as a strategy, wrapping an extra in bandages to play Peter Sellers’ Inspector Clouseau on an airplane in Trail of the Pink Panther. The thing is, Sellers died almost two years before production, so the bandaged Sellers impersonator is surrounded by deleted footage and clips from past films to flesh things out. A concoction that didn’t thrill audiences or Sellers’ wife, who wound up getting a million-dollar payout from the studio and Edwards for diminishing Sellers’ reputation and violating their contract with the actor.
While Sellers had a history with the Pink Panther franchise — same as Cushing did with Star Wars — Sir Laurence Olivier died 15 years before the release of 2004’s Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, which used archive footage and motion capture to not only cast the master thespian as Dr. Totenkopf, but to also have him perform a wholly new scene.
Here’s film producer Jon Avnet from a 2004 interview with the New York Times.
“We created a different performance of sorts through motion capture, modeling and computer-generated imagery. Could you create a completely new performance with what we have today? It would be pretty demanding. But clearly, the future is coming fast.”
Is it, though? Technology has improved what can be done — the high point possibly being the CGI-aided re-creation of Bruce Lee in this Johnny Walker ad— and it’s potentially scintillating to some, like Professor Nadia Magnenat Thalmann, who told the Telegraph about a future when costs will be reigned in by using digitally created background actors, saying, “As soon as we can automate the process, there will be a cost-benefit analysis. If it’s cheaper, second-rank actors will be done more and more by computer.” But what about the stars? That’s a more complicated matter.
For one, rights issues are complex and not universal. In California, image rights can be passed on, and those rights exist for 70 years. In Indiana, it’s 100 years, and in New York, publicity rights end at death. In some cases, one’s home base at the time of their death means a great deal. And that’s to say nothing about intellectual property issues. If these CGI creations are constructed with the use of archival footage from various studio properties, is there a cost associated with getting clearance for every bit of the composition, like a music sample? Add that to licensing fees that would need to be paid out to trustees — which would only skyrocket if the use of dead celebrities became more than an occasional stunt in commercials and film — and this whole process seems cost prohibitive.
It probably wouldn’t be especially popular, either. At best, a film co-starring a CG re-creation of an icon would be a curiosity whose artistry was buried under its freak show spectacle. At worst, people would have an uncanny valley reaction and reject it, or they would have a moral objection (because, in essence, these celebrities are being used like post-life puppets).
That’s now, though. Who knows what the future holds? Ads and big-screen exhibitions like the Olivier cameo and this Cushing/Star Wars thing (assuming it comes to fruition) are surely softening the ground a little on the emotional front, and the practice of 3D-scanning actors, and the sure evolution of contracts with an eye on a future where digital performances are a more viable option, make this all seem as though the future may not be now, but soon.
Here’s VFX supervisor Scott Squires from an interview with the Hollywood Reporter:
“If there’s any inkling that you might need a scan, they scan the actor at the start of production. I’ve also heard of certain studios having actors scanned just as an archival thing.”
So, while we’re not that likely to see mid-1960s Paul Newman co-starring with Jennifer Lawrence anytime in the near future, people could conceivably see the 2015 version of Jennifer Lawrence starring in re-rebooted Hunger Games films in 50 years. Ain’t the future grand?
