The director Robert Zemeckis has a reputation for experimenting with new technologies and groundbreaking VFX to tell stories on the big screen, from Who Framed Roger Rabbit? to Back to the Future and The Polar Express (see our pick of the best VFX resources). So it should perhaps be no surprise that he’s one of the directors exploring the possibilities of generative AI, and in his next movie, he uses the tech to make the previously impossible possible.
Here uses a range of effects to tell the life story of a couple played by a 67-year-old Tom Hanks and 58-year-old Robin Wright. In some scenes, their appearance is altered using traditional makeup effects, but for the most dramatic flashbacks, AI de-aging is used, and it looks scarily real.
Spanning almost a century, Here will see several actors play the character of Richard, but Hanks will play the character through all of his adult life, from his 20s right through to his 80s. To make the actor look like a 20-year-old, the generative AI tool Metaphysic Live was used to make a real-time hyperreal faceswap. In the case of Wright, real footage of her from when she was 19 has been used as the reference material.
The film is something of a Forrest Gump reunion on both sides of the camera, since Eric Roth was also involved as co-writer. Based on a 2014 graphic novel by Richard McGuire, it takes place entirely in one location, almost like a traditional play.
Getting the aging right and avoiding that uncanny valley feeling can be hard to pull off, and in the case of Hanks, many of us will remember well what the young actor looked like The Money Pit and Big. Martin Scorsese’s use of AI de-aging in The Irishman felt unconvincing at times, so I’ll be interested to see how well it works in Here. Zemeckis has said that one of the ways he tried to make it believable was by focusing a lot on the delivery and the voices of the actors to ensure it fits the characters at different ages.
Here will be released on 15 November. For more AI movie news, see the AI retro movie trailers that are going down a storm online.
