|
Presence Examples From The Philadelphia Inquirer For real: The synthetic actors are here By Steven Rea Inquirer Columnist August 25, 2002 Cyber-actors. Synthespians. Whatever you call them, they are among us. From George Lucas' cloying Nabooian creature Jar Jar Binks to the buff intergalactic crew of last summer's Final Fantasy to the titular Great Dane in this summer's Scooby-Doo, computer-rendered screen images that realistically simulate human beings (and giant ghost-hunting dogs) have arrived. And so, the premise of Andrew Niccol's Simone - that a Hollywood director fires his tantrum-throwing leading lady and replaces her with a digital creation, who everybody believes is real and who becomes a huge pop-cult star - makes perfect sense. "The technology has advanced to the point where we don't really know what's real and what's fake anymore," explains Niccol, the writer and director of Simone, which stars Al Pacino and opened in theaters Friday. "Pacino has this line in the film - 'Our ability to manufacture fraud now exceeds our ability to detect it,' and that's really become the case." Niccol, 38, a New Zealander who made commercials in London before heading to Hollywood, where he wrote the Oscar- nominated The Truman Show and scripted and directed the Ethan Hawke-Jude Law sci-fier Gattaca, cites Gladiator as another example: Oliver Reed, the burly British actor who played the film's ruthless slave-trader, died in Malta in 1999, midway through production. Director Ridley Scott finished the actor's scenes by inserting digitized images from earlier in the shoot. "So now we've got actors sort of working from the grave," Niccol says. "Most actors will tell you this is a nightmare - that they could be replaced by digital actors. But it's not really the great ethical dilemma of our time. If you were to go on the streets protesting artificial actors, it would be like protesting Mickey Mouse, because all they are is really just very advanced cartoons. "And the other irony is that it actually takes more actors to make an artificial actor, so more actors work. Because you need a voice, you need motion-capture, and so on." New Line Cinema, which has had Simone in the can for almost a year ("The whole future of the company was in jeopardy, and they had to focus everything on Lord of the Rings"), has been coy about the identity - and makeup - of the film's star. While the conceit is that she's made up of pixels and bits, in reality Niccol's star actress is "basically organic." Indeed, "Simone" bears a striking resemblance to the Canadian fashion model Rachel Roberts. "The studio wants to keep that part of it secret, they don't want to spoil it for the audience," he says. "But it's true to say she's part pixels and part flesh-and-blood. And she's more than one person... . I won't confirm or deny whether there are parts of Rachel Roberts in Simone, but Simone is not one person." Niccol says his films are all set "five minutes into the future." In Gattaca (1997), he tackled genetic engineering and cloning. The Truman Show, released in 1998, anticipated the explosion of reality TV with its protagonist (Jim Carrey) unknowingly living out his life in front of a vast TV audience. "I always felt it was far- fetched myself," he says of his Oscar-nominated screenplay. "But now... people watch The Osbournes, they'll watch [The Anna Nicole Show]. There's an audience of voyeurs out there." Niccol, based in Los Angeles, isn't sure what his next project will be, but it's likely to stay in the same "social science-fiction" realm. "My movies deal with what's real and what's not. What's truth and what's fiction. I like that grayness between black and white. That's where most of my work lies." And where most of his work tells the truth, too.
From... STUDIO BRIEFING Copyright Studio Briefing 2002 [Copied with Permission] 8/23/02 MOVIE REVIEWS: SIMONE Lew Irwin © 2002 Studio Briefing, All Rights Reserved
|