Should cinema be bringing its stars back from the dead?
With James Dean joining the cast of a new film, Robbie Collin asks if the vogue for cinematic resurrection has gone too far
In the pre-release fizz around Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman, much has rightly been made of the “de-ageing” visual effects used to rewind Robert De Niro, Al Pacino and Joe Pesci from their seventies to their thirties and forties. For the most part, the results are incredibly persuasive – yet there are more dramatic cases of cinematic rejuvenation. Few Hollywood icons are more famously dead than James Dean, who died in a car crash at the age of 24 with just three films under his belt. Yet next year – the 65th anniversary of his death – he’ll be back in a fourth.
The Vietnam War drama Finding
Jack will co-star a computergenerated version of Dean, after a deal was brokered between his estate and the production company Magic House Films. His “performance” will be built from old footage and photos digitally mapped onto a CGI avatar, while another actor will supply his voice.
“This opens up a whole new opportunity for many of our clients who are no longer with us,” said Mark Roesler, CEO of CMG Worldwide, a management company that controls the rights to a number of late actors’ images, including Dean’s. The estates of Burt Reynolds, Ingrid Bergman, Jane Russell and Christopher Reeve are also on their books.
It all sounds very futuristic, bordering on dystopian. But in fact the age of cinematic resurrection is already upon us. The other week at the Tokyo Film Festival, for instance, I saw a new Japanese production whose star has been dead since 1996.
Tora-san, Wish You Were Here is the by-all-accounts unexpected new entry in the venerable Tora-san series of comedies, which began in 1969 and ran until its beloved leading man Kiyoshi Atsumi died of lung cancer at the age of 68. At the peak of its popularity, Atsumi was churning out two Tora-san films a year, all of which stuck to a tried-and-true formula.
His wandering salesman character – a self-styled “free-spirited fool” with a trademark checked jacket and battered suitcase – would fall in love with a beautiful woman on his travels, then bring her back to his family’s sweet shop in Tokyo, where gentle domestic farce would ensue. The film follows Tora-san’s nephew, Mitsuo, who returns to his now-deceased uncle’s old home town for a romantic misadventure of his own. Throughout, the spirit of his uncle playfully watches over him – in flashbacks to classic moments from the series and the occasional ghostly visitation.
Having an entire career’s worth of raw material to work with was not a luxury enjoyed by the makers of Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. When Carrie Fisher died aged 60 in December 2016, filming had yet to start on the ninth and final episode of the Star Wars franchise’s so-called Skywalker Saga, in which her character, the princess-turnedresistance general Leia Organa, has a key part. Yet rather than writing her out, director JJ Abrams has repurposed unused shots of Fisher from the seventh and eighth episodes, digitally grafting her performances into scenes with the rest of the cast.
Both Star Wars and Tora-san pose a potentially thorny ethical question: how should we feel about actors appearing in films they didn’t realise they were making? To do right by the departed involves a lot of second-guessing – though it seems more defensible when the actors being reincarnated are appearing “in character” rather than being used for an advert, such as the 2013 ad with Audrey Hepburn tucking into a bar of Galaxy chocolate on a bus, or the Johnnie Walker ad starring Bruce Lee, a famous teetotaller. Fisher’s family, at least, have deemed Abrams’s solution a respectful one. “Carrie’s Princess Leia is forever entrenched in the franchise, and her indelible presence is fundamental to the film,” her brother Todd said after Lucasfilm announced its intention to use the leftover material last year. “JJ Abrams masterfully re-crafted this final entry to include this unused and last footage of Carrie taken, without resorting to CGI or animatronics.”
Digital resurrection can be tasteful, as the Tora-san and Fisher cases attest. It can frequently also be lucrative. An estimated £2.3billion is paid in dead celebrities’ appearance fees every year: most goes to the star’s estate, but the rights holders of any source footage will also take a cut.
Archival clips and unused takes have long been vital components of the cinematic resurrection ritual. After Oliver Reed died of a heart attack three weeks before filming wrapped on Ridley Scott’s Gladiator in 1999, his remaining scenes were pared back, then completed with a body double whose face was later overlaid with a CG version of Reed’s own, and his voice replaced with audio from rehearsal tapes. After the Fast & Furious star Paul Walker perished in a car crash during production of the franchise’s seventh segment in 2013, his remaining scenes were completed by his brothers, Cody and Caleb, again with facial replacement deployed where required.
The results were impressive – yet perhaps more impressive still was director Francis Lawrence’s decision
not to use a synthetic Philip Seymour Hoffman in the final part of the Hunger Games pentalogy, which was mid-production when the actor died of a drug overdose in 2014. One pivotal scene, a consolatory speech, had yet to be shot – so Lawrence rewrote it
as a letter from Hoffman’s character read aloud by Woody Harrelson’s instead. In choosing not to resurrect, Lawrence made audiences feel Hoffman’s absence instead.
Such technology was a long way off during the making of 1982’s Trail
of the Pink Panther, which went into production more than a year after Peter Sellers’s death. But it wasn’t needed: the actor’s entire performance as Inspector Clouseau in that film came from offcuts of 1976’s The
Pink Panther Strikes Again, tracts of which had ended up on the editing suite floor in a feud over its length. A similar technique was used for Marlon Brando’s posthumous cameo in 2006’s
Superman Returns, assembled from discarded parts of his performance in
Superman II, released 26 years before. Of course, filmmakers who plan ahead can simply shoot their timedefying footage in advance. That’s the idea behind Richard Linklater’s forthcoming screen adaptation of the Stephen Sondheim musical Merrily
We Roll Along, which started shooting this year ahead of its planned release in 2040. The original Sondheim show tracks three friends over 23 years, but tells their story backwards, moving from a place of burnt-out midlife cynicism to retrospectively ironic youthful buoyancy and hope.
Merrily was a notorious stage flop. But Linklater is a seasoned cinematic time traveller: his 2014 drama Boyhood was shot over 12 years and his Before trilogy with two nine-year intervals to best capture the flow of their characters’ lives. Will pulling the same trick in reverse be the pin that finally unpicks Merrily’s complex existential ideas? We’ve just two decades to wait to find out.
To do right by the departed involves a lot of second guessing – though it seems more defensible when they are appearing ‘in character’