The celluloid dead are always among us. They have been creeping around in our homes since television networks 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 attempted 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, Blonde (2022), asked for Monroe’s permission to make the film, leaving a card full of heartfelt letters on her grave. Not only did the film’s director Andrew Dominik line up 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.
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Audiences appear to love it when Hollywood brings its dead back to life, with modern biopics like Bohemian Rhapsody (2018) grossing nearly a billion dollars and Elvis (2022) taking in almost $300 million in the middle of a global pandemic. Stars Rami Malek and Austin Butler, respectively, garnered considerable praise for bringing their deceased pop culture icons back to life. While each actor had a leg up 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 created 20 sets of Freddy Mercury teeth for Malek.
But what would have happened if the filmmakers behind Bohemian Rhapsody, Elvis, and Blonde elected to not merely enhance their lead actor’s physical resemblance to their real-life character with practical makeup but to instead digitally replace their faces with the likenesses of Mercury, Presley, and Monroe?
Bruce Willis Is the Highest-Profile Hollywood Star to Dabble With CGI Cloning
20th Century Fox
This question might sound hypothetical. But it is becoming more practical than ever after news broke that Bruce Willis recently collaborated in the creation of a “digital twin” or CGI clone of himself to appear in a series of Russian advertisements. Willis called the experience of cloning himself with CGI “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 that he partnered with on the advertisements, as was originally reported by The Telegraph, the headline took on a life of its own.
This is because Willis is the highest-profile Hollywood star so far to grant CGI cloning his blessing. But there are other filmmakers interested in its 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 resurrections of late actors Paul Walker in Furious 7 (2015) and Peter Cushing in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016).
Chris Evans Decried a Film that Would Resurrect James Dean with CGI
Warner Bros. Pictures
In 2019, Anton Ernst and Tati Golykh announced their plans to direct an adaptation of a 2011 novel by Gareth Crocker, Finding Jack. To play the lead role of a soldier who refuses to leave his dog behind at the end of the Vietnam War, Ernst and Golykh obtained the likeness rights of an actor contemporary of Marilyn Monroe, James Dean. This was after Paul Newman’s estate passed on the opportunity to resurrect their handsome blue-eyed patriarch on the big screen, where he spent most of his life.
Though the shadow of Dean’s career has loomed large across Hollywood history, the late actor only starred in three films before his untimely death in a car crash in 1955; Rebel Without a Cause and East of Eden was released in 1955 with Giant posthumously in 1956. So if Ernst and Golykh succeed, Finding Jack would (sort of) become the fourth James Dean movie. Even though Dean’s estate signed off on the film, not everyone is happy about it. In 2019, Chris Evans took to Twitter to voice his opinion after the announcement of the CGI resurrection of James Dean.
While Chris Evans and many others have criticized its ethical gray area, seen 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 it is still in its infancy, this special effect will soon provide current and future filmmakers with a classic movie star dollhouse.
At its worst, Hollywood stands to tarnish the legacies of its greatest actors, as Chris Evans suggests. At its best, these CGI resurrections, coupled with other modern filmmaking techniques, could bring audiences immersive revisionist works in the vein of the old masters of cinema.
CGI Resurrections Would Be Safest in the Hands of Filmmakers Like Martin Scorsese
Universal Pictures
Picture an Alfred Hitchcock film with higher levels of suspense than the “master of suspense” was capable of building under a glass ceiling of dated filmmaking techniques. Maybe this calls to mind neo-classic Hitchcockian thrillers of the 1980s like Dressed to Kill (1980) and Body Double (1984), directed by Brian De Palma, a self-professed Hitchcock disciple. Or maybe Martin Scorsese’s 1991 remake of Cape Fear with Robert De Niro. After Scorsese already toyed with the sister effect of de-aging from ILM (LucasFilm’s Industrial Light & Magic) in his 2019 film, The Irishman, what’s to stop him from grabbing all the dolls in the classic film dollhouse?
Instead of two hours of Nick Nolte’s dread-stricken face as the protagonist of Cape Fear, Sam Bowden, picture Gregory Peck’s. Not with all the wrinkles and white hair he had in his sidelined cameo role 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 is 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 you a storyboard, you shoot the storyboard. Thompson shot the storyboard. Apart from notable script rewrites, Scorsese shot the storyboard too. Scorsese’s loyalty to Hitchcock’s original Cape Fear storyboard, along with the music in the film, made for a spellbinding, neo-classic film reimagining. For his remake, the Wolf of Wall Street director dusted off the unused score for Torn Curtain (1966) by Hitchcock’s frequent composer Bernard Herrmann.
But Scorsese cranked the suspense up to eleven with modern filmmaking techniques like the zoom lens. In his Cape Fear, Scorsese frequently zooms into the actors’ faces to squeeze the narrative’s paranoid tension, effectively bottling it up inside the characters until reaching a boiling point where it bounces back out into the audience. The result is a relentless paranoia trip of the sort which Hitchcock devoted his life and filmography to gift to audiences. If Scorsese, who is as pious to filmmakers past as he is sensitive to film history, could accomplish an homage on this scale with the live-action actors available to him in the 1990s, imagine what Hitchcockian nightmares he could create with the CGI resurrection of James Stewart. Or Cary Grant.
Admittedly, for every Scorsese who could honor deceased actors with this technology, there are countless other filmmakers who would fumble the opportunity. Who is to stop them from tarnishing the good names of old Hollywood legends? In short, their estates.
The future use of this technology will likely provoke a larger discourse on the ethics of estates themselves, with celebrity families shining a light on the otherwise-boring world of inheritance laws. The CGI resurrection of Hollywood stars hits squarely on the sorts of complex philosophical questions on death and individual rights in the face of emerging technologies that humans of the twenty-first century will increasingly be forced to answer.
