De-Aging AI Didn’t Replace Hanks and Wright’s Faces, It Improved Their Performance

“We just saw what we had to do,” Hanks says. “We were able to correct our mistakes: ‘Oh, I need to square my shoulders more on this hold, because I was walking more like a 27-year-old.’ instead of a 17-year-old you would just perfect the details until everything was perfect. Wright adds: “It’s amazing: we can still play the characters, and not just be a digital avatar.”

Physical prosthetics are also advanced technology, says Director Zemeckis. “When they saw how they looked with this youthful makeup, they immediately realized, ‘I have to perform physically, change my voice, move differently, because I have to look 30 years younger, or 80 or 90.’ ‘That’s what makes the illusion work so perfectly.

They not only had to play Richard and Margaret at different ages, but in different American eras.

Hanks, who played a child trapped in a grown man’s body in 1988. Bigfound it more difficult to play a grown man in Here. “I did it Big in his thirties, and it was a little easier, to add this bounce (to make his character seem childish). But in the middle-aged sections of Herewhen our characters are between 30 and 40 years old, it was much more difficult. In the 1970s, middle-aged people didn’t like gyms as much. “We’ve spent the last 20 years of our lives fighting gravity,” Hanks explains. “I’m in better shape now than I was at 36, so being back in those days of bulging bellies, inactivity and child exhaustion, I found it to be a no-man’s land for an actor .” However, he succeeded – with the help of AI.

Only adults could make this movie

“I couldn’t have made this film as a first-time director,” Zemeckis says. In addition to his ever-increasing mastery of cutting-edge technology, he needed life experience. “The story of the characters of Tom and Robin is the story of my generation.” Zemeckis said. Here conveys the shock of reminders of time. “When someone takes a photo of me, I ask myself, ‘What is my father doing here?’ This is the underlying theme of the film: time passes us by.

And the past influences our present: Hanks’s Richard, who abandons his youthful dreams of being an artist to take a job to support his family, echoes the stubborn disillusionment of his World War II veteran father , and resists Margaret’s demand to adapt to the social changes of the 1960s and 1970s. Scenes of Richard’s father (Paul Bettany, 53, aged AI to appear older) sit alongside scenes of the present of Richard quickly walks away, dramatizing the old saying: “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes.”