Hollywood dials back the years

Forty-two years ago, Harrison Ford was battling Nazis as Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark. This summer, the 80-year-old actor will return to the silver screen to fight fascism in Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. But despite the intervening decades, in some scenes he’ll look remarkably similar to his younger self.

De-aging actors with computer-generated imagery (CGI) has become standard practice for movie studios, but with the advent of artificial-intelligence tools and deepfake technologies, the results have become better and cheaper. And no one is sure what impact these tools might have on the industry.

Once upon a time in Hollywood, filmmakers only had so much wiggle room to change an actor’s age. Makeup and latex could add wrinkles and years to an actor—but subtracting years? That was trickier. Changing clothing and hairstyles on relatively young actors could create a modest flashback, but anything more extreme failed to convince audiences.

In the 21st century, CGI allowed studios to push the boundaries of age manipulation. The 2008 film The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, in which Brad Pitt’s character aged backward throughout his life, demonstrated the power of the emerging technology. The film won an Academy Award for best visual effects, but not all attempts at CGI de-aging have been as successful.

Humans are highly attuned to reading faces. When CGI work isn’t flawless, it leaves viewers feeling cold, evoking that sense of the “uncanny valley.” In 2016, the Star Wars spinoff Rogue One attempted to bring back the 1970s version of Princess Leia by superimposing the face of a young Carrie Fisher on a body double. The scene backfired, eliciting mockery from fans. Audiences also didn’t react well to the somewhat creepy de-aging of Samuel L. Jackson in 2019’s Captain Marvel.

Even when the de-aging looks convincing—for example the young Robert De Niro in 2019’s The Irishman—turning back the clock more than 20 years on an actor can be a risky move for a filmmaker, especially when the audience is familiar with what the actor looked like at a younger age. But most visual-effects de-aging is much more subtle.

The VFX process de-aged actors Joe Pesci (left) and Robert De Niro in The Irishman. YouTube screen grab

The majority of such de-aging falls into the category of “cosmetic VFX”—making a star appear only slightly younger by perhaps smoothing the bags under the eyes or lessening the laugh lines. This is how Tom Cruise still looks so young at age 60 in his seventh Mission: Impossible movie; or how Sandra Bullock and Brad Pitt can look like they haven’t aged in the last decade.

In a recent interview on The Town podcast, Matt Panousis, co-founder of visual effects studio Monsters Aliens Robots Zombies, estimated 80 to 85 percent of productions use some level of cosmetic VFX on the actors. Sometimes actors’ contracts even stipulate that a portion of the production budget must be spent on making them look younger. The work isn’t cheap. Merely smoothing a few wrinkles throughout an entire feature film could add as much as $2 million to a budget.

In traditional effects work, an artist works frame by frame, manipulating the various elements. Most feature films have 24 frames per second, which means even small changes can be labor intensive and costly. The demand for cosmetic VFX helps explain the movie industry’s CGI backlog, which has been blamed for the deteriorating quality of special effects in some recent films.

In the last couple of years, AI tools have sped up the de-aging process and offered improved results, allowing an artist to tweak one frame while the AI figures out how to apply the change to the rest.

For the fifth Indiana Jones movie, Lucasfilm’s new AI software combed the studio’s footage of the young Harrison Ford from his appearances in Star Wars and previous Indiana Jones movies. After Ford filmed a sequence, the software generated a younger version of his face for the movie. “This is the first time I’ve seen it where I believe it,” Ford told Empire Magazine. “It’s a little spooky. I don’t think I even want to know how it works, but it works.”

These technologies advance at a rapid pace, and studios will likely employ them more frequently, especially since for the last 20 years, moviegoers have remained pretty consistent about whom they wish to see in the theater. A survey this year from National Research Group asked moviegoers exactly that question: Which actors did they want to see? Old movie stars dominated the top of the list. Tom Cruise, Dwayne Johnson, Tom Hanks, Brad Pitt, and Denzel Washington were the top five. Their average age? 61.5 years. The top 20 doesn’t get much younger: 57.5 years. In fact, moviegoers’ opinions about who qualifies as a film star haven’t budged much since the streaming era shattered the entertainment industry’s monoculture.

Improved de-aging technologies will allow Hollywood to keep returning to aging yet bankable stars for longer. Maybe AI could lengthen the career of an actor indefinitely. Last year at the age of 91, James Earl Jones signed a deal that allows an AI company to recreate his voice for future Star Wars films and TV shows. Many in the effects industry believe it won’t be long before AI technology allows studios to recreate a person’s likeness too. The question is whether audiences will accept a movie star’s eternal youthfulness when the manipulation extends far beyond the cosmetic. Mission: Impossible 47, anyone?