Digital ‘de-aging’ new wrinkle in movies
Five months ago, director Martin Scorsese appeared on the indie studio A24’s podcast opposite British filmmaker Joanna Hogg and said he was concerned. Although he shot much of his gangster film The Irishman in his preferred 35mm format, there was also “a great deal of CGI” because the decades-spanning plot calls for the “youthification” of stars Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci and Al Pacino.
“We’re so used to watching them as the older faces,” Scorsese said. “When we put them all together, it cuts back and forth … Now, it’s real. Now, I’m seeing it. Now, certain shots need more work on the eyes, need more work on why these exactly-the-same eyes from the plate shot, but the wrinkles and things have changed. Does it change the eyes at all? If that’s the case, what was in the eyes that I liked? Was it intensity? Was it gravitas? Was it threat?”
Hogg responded, “It’s quite complicated.”
And so it is. We finally got a closer look at those complicated eyes in a recent trailer. The Netflix film based on the 2004 book I Heard You Paint Houses jumps through the life of Frank (The Irishman) Sheeran, played by De Niro, as he recounts the hit jobs he says he carried out for the Bufalino crime family.
This means we see him as a 20-something, as an elderly man and as everything in between.
We also encounter characters played by Pesci (Russell Bufalino); Pacino (Jimmy Hoffa, whose assassination Sheeran and Bufalino plot); Ray Romano; Bobby Cannavale; Jesse Plemons; and Anna Paquin.
Other than its remarkable length — after everyone balked at the 210-minute runtime, Scorsese trimmed it to 209 — and cast of Oscar winners, The Irishman (set to hit Netflix at the end of November) has attracted the most attention for the CGI that so worried its director.
On The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, De Niro joked that the de-aging process “took a lot of work,” but that he was happy “because maybe it’ll extend my career for another 30 years.”
We, too, are happy, because if you have even a shred of a reason to de-age some of Hollywood’s most esteemed actors, you should definitely do it.
The world has become a high-speed Tilt-a-whirl and, in certain contexts, it’s best to lean into the chaos.
Scorsese seems to get this, as does Ang Lee, whose upcoming movie Gemini Man has Will Smith playing an assassin who must fight a younger clone of himself. Lee didn’t take the easy route of simply casting Smith’s rapper-actor son Jaden in the role, because, well, when does he ever take the easy route?
There have been less ambitious de-aging efforts, of course, including a scene from Captain America:
Civil War in which Robert Downey Jr. plays a teenage Tony Stark — a notable visual effects job that Fallon referenced in the De Niro interview.
It’s unclear where the de-aging in The Irishman will rank in terms of its believability, as the effects featured in the trailer seem to have improved upon what was in the initial teaser.
The Washington Post