Why Do Directors Fall to the Dark Side?

Discussing digital resurrection and the dignity of the body with Alissa Wilkinson

This month’s reading is Alexi Sargeant’s “The Undeath of Cinema” for The New Atlantis. My guest, Alissa Wilkinson, is a film critic at Vox. I’m excited to talk with her about the digital resurrection of Peter Cushing for Star Wars: Rogue One and Alexi’s critique of the practice as disrespectful to the actor’s art of presence.

Tomorrow, I’ll be speaking as part of a panel on “Illiberal Feminism” co-sponsored by Plough and growing our of my essay on the dignity of dependence as part of Plough’s family issue.

Leah: Alissa, thanks so much for joining me this month. Can you start us off by telling us a little about your own experience with Star Wars? Did you grow up with the movies? 

Alissa: I was born about six months after Return of the Jedi came out, in 1983, and into a family that wasn’t big on movies. (I read a lot!) So I didn’t even see a Star War till I was in college. I went to RPI, surrounded by techies who had grown up with Star Wars as their religion—not really an exaggeration—and slowly realized I probably needed to see these movies. My boyfriend was more well-versed in pop culture than me; when he realized Revenge of the Sith was coming out the week after our graduation, in 2005, he sat me down and made me watch all of the films “in order,” episodes IV through VI and then I and II. And then we saw III in the theater.

I found things about the culmination of the story quite moving, but on the whole I was a little nonplussed by the whole Star Wars thing. They’d been built up so much to me that I was expecting something a little more… epic? Something more complex and grown-up, like the Lord of the Rings movies that had come out just a few years earlier. I didn’t dislike them, though I thought George Lucas wasn’t very good at writing dialogue. But I was surprised to realize that, at least with the original trilogy, the films seemed squarely aimed at the very particular demographic of 13-year-old boys. Which is a great demographic! But it took some adjusting for me to realize how cool and fun and goofy they were, rather than Very Big And Extremely Serious. (I didn’t realize at the time that this was the demographic that would eventually become the target for virtually all blockbuster films, particularly the MCU, or I might have felt differently.)

So I’ve never had much of an emotional attachment to any of the films, even though I enjoyed them. By the time The Force Awakens came out in 2015, though, I had been a working film critic for about a decade, and I actually had some analytical tools to help me evaluate them. I enjoyed the experience of watching that movie (particularly the two elder millennial-type dads behind us who had brought two seven-year-old boys, and it wasn’t clear who was more excited) more than the movie itself, which seemed fine.

I will say—and I know this verges on an unpopular opinion because I still get completely unhinged emails about it all the time—that The Last Jedi totally blew me out of the water. It was the first time I actually understood what all the fuss was about, and why the films were so exciting. And the amount I love that movie is balanced out by how incredibly disappointed I was by Rise of Skywalker.

In a fun twist, just before the release of The Last Jedi, I was invited to give a talk on Star Wars and religion by the Catholic chaplain at RPI, my alma mater. While I was in college I’d been in the Intervarsity group and hadn’t interacted much with the chapel on campus, but I was grateful for the invitation and for the opportunity to dig into not so much the religion in the Star Wars movies as the religion that the Star Wars movies themselves had become for so many people—particularly people who go there. And so it felt like everything had come full circle.

Leah: I saw the original trilogy when I was little, when they were being re-shown in a theater. One thing that’s pretty fun, returning to them, is how unpolished they are in parts—so much so that we round them off a little in our memory. Han is often remembered as suave, perhaps simply because he’s the love interest and shoots Greedo first. But much of the time, he’s a bit out of his depth and touchy about it as he gets embroiled in mystic-heroic-whatnot, instead of honest petty crime.

The films feel set in a large, expansive galaxy because not everything is explained or ties into the main plot. Why does one guy flee Cloud City carrying an ice cream maker? Well, because it was a scrappy film and people were inventive about props. I feel like the magic is lessened a little when they bring back the ice cream maker and reveal it’s a camtono—a container for valuables—on The Mandalorian.

The instinct to make everything too tidy, to pay homage to the original trilogy by expanding these small moments instead of creating messy ephemera of your own is part of what I find frustrating about the newest trilogy. And that instinct to dust off the old toys and not give a new story room to breath seems like part of the reason they reanimated Peter Cushing.

Instead of inventing a new antagonist, the creators of Rogue One seemed anxious to include an old one, and cast an actor to stand in for the deceased Cushing. Rather than allow the new actor to play a younger Grand Moff Tarkin, making their own choices, the poor guy was a living armature for them to project a digitized version of a dead man’s face onto.

One of the things Alexi highlights as disturbing about the resurrected Grand Moff Tarkin is the way it sidelines the work an actor does. They’ve brought back Cushing’s image without any access to the choices he would have made in this new film (including the possible choice to turn down the part). 

Bringing back a dead actor might be the most extreme way a director can override an actor’s acting, but, more and more, directors are tweaking performances in post-production, able to widen a smile or change an expression. 

And directors like David Fincher can achieve control without digital trickery, instead having actors do dozens of takes, giving the director the chance to choose from a broad range of work. In a recent feature on Fincher in The New York Times Magazine:

Jake Gyllenhaal, a star of “Zodiac,” told this paper in 2007 that Fincher “paints with people” and called it “tough to be a color.”

As a critic (and a Christian) how do you think about the way that this kind of directorial control interacts with the dignity of an actor’s bodily labor?

Alissa: I think about this absolutely all the time. I wrote about it extensively in October 2019, after the release of Gemini Man, in which Will Smith’s scene partner was frequently a CGI-generated version of his younger self. I had already alluded to it when reviewing the “live-action” (actually fully-animated) Lion King remake in July. And I was so bugged by it that I wrote about a related matter this January, from a slightly different angle, thinking about how algorithms are replacing human decision-making in Hollywood as well. (There are advantages in writing about film to having studied at a tech school!)

As I write several times in these pieces, I’ve been heavily influenced by Ari Folman’s 2013 film The Congress in how I think about this. Everyone should watch that film. It’s a very strange movie, and when I saw it in 2013 I wasn’t sure what to think of it because I hadn’t really ventured into these waters. In the film, set slightly in the future, Robin Wright (playing a fictionalized version of herself) is brought into the studio to discuss what she hopes will be a career break, because as an aging actress in Hollywood she is having trouble getting roles. (To my knowledge, this isn’t Wright’s actual situation—she works quite a bit—but it matches the situation of many actresses with slightly less name recognition than her.)

Instead, she finds out they’ve brought her there to ask her to sell the rights to her image to them for a huge amount of money, enough that she’ll never have to work again and will also have enough money to pay for treatment for her ill son. In return, they can regenerate a digital version of her who can perform in films without her involvement—including a younger version of her, using her image from younger days, most notably her role as Buttercup in The Princess Bride. She is reluctant, but can’t see another option, and so, she agrees. And the computer-generated version of her becomes an action star. (That all happens early on; things get weird from there, and the film is a visual marvel.)

There’s an obvious parallel between what happens to “Robin Wright” in this film and the actual move that happened with Will Smith in making Gemini Man. Obviously, there’s a lot of Fresh Prince footage out there with Will Smith, and the studio was able to make a kind of “mask” out of it for Smith that they could, as they said in a post-screening Q&A, “stretch over his face” as he performed the younger character. In that same Q&A, Smith joked that now that they had a younger version of him, he would never have to work again—as if that was a positive thing.

My brain exploded at that moment, because I wasn’t sure if he realized what he’d just implied. Sure, Will Smith (who for a long while was the most bankable actor in Hollywood) is going to be fine. He’s not going to want for roles or for money. But his willing participation in this system paves the way for a future in which there’s no need to hire extras, or to worry about things like actresses who insist they don’t want to do nude scenes, or just people who the studio find annoying to work with because they have too many demands. Filmmaking is a famously exploitative industry—I don’t even mean sexually exploitative, just in terms of basic labor protections, if you’re not lucky enough to have gotten into a union yet—and now they don’t even have to hire humans to do things.

That isn’t precisely the question you asked, but as someone who writes about the industry, and whose spouse worked in the industry for years, I’m highly aware of the possibility of broken systems. And I have no doubt that the end goal for Disney—which decided to make its Lion King remake practically a shot-for-shot replica of the original, betraying that their goal was actually just to test out some deepfake-style technology with the lions themselves—is to eliminate as many of those pesky humans from the process as possible. Humans want to be paid. They want to work less than 12 hours a day, and they want to eat meals on time. They want a day off sometimes, and they get sick. A pandemic, however temporary, that literally limits the number of people who can be on set is excellent cover for any company that was already trying to figure out how to get rid of the need for humans as much as possible.

I sound incredibly paranoid when I say these things; in fact, after writing about algorithms, I got a call from the CEO of a company that creates algorithmic greenlighting software, who explained at length that they weren’t aiming to cut humans out of any process. I don’t really buy it, though I admire his optimism. The profit motive is just too high, and Hollywood is, after all, just a huge business.

That’s what I’m most worried about, as a critic and as a Christian who believes in things like respect for workers and the dignity of labor. There’s the whole additional issue of art as a site of real presence, a place where we encounter one another; there’s also the issue of losing something that is so valuable—the true image of the human for us to look at, even if we are looking through a screen. There’s the power differential between director and actor, which has always existed, and there are ways that the medium of film has always morphed with tech developments, whether they are the addition of sound, or the move from film to digital. The American film industry is not fundamentally humanist, no matter how much executives like to go on about “stories,” and I worry about how much more devoid of humanity the already shallow blockbuster genre will get as tech like this continues to develop and become affordable.

Next week, Alissa and I will conclude our conversation, and I look forward to reading your own questions and comments.