According to Variety, recently, photorealistic moving images of legendary movie star Val Kilmer are being used to make it look as if he is starring in an upcoming film about a Native American Catholic priest named Tuberculosis. As deep as a grave.
Per variety:
“Even though he didn’t shoot a single scene, [director Coerte] Voorhees is able to realize his vision of incorporating Kilmer into the group by using state-of-the-art generative AI. And they’ve done it with the support of the late actor’s estate and his daughter Mercedes (Voorhees says Kilmer’s son Jack also supports him).”
Vorhies claimed to Variety, “Despite the fact that some people might call it controversial, this is what Val wanted.” Before his death, the ill Kilmer was admitted as deep as the graveAnd Vorhees claims he felt it was an “important story that he wanted his name on.”
Variety says that Sonnet worked with Kilmer on replicating his voice after a medical procedure damaged his vocal cords, but it’s unclear what video-generating technology Vorhees plans to use to essentially deepfake Kilmer in his film. However, depending on what Vorhees’s standards are, this question may be purely academic at this point. Variety says they have several images of Kilmer “provided by his family”, as well as “footage from his final years.”
Since he has photos he’s legally allowed to put into an AI still image generator, even a small movie budget should provide enough tokens for Voorhees to churn out spectacular text-to-video output featuring Val Kilmer via a video generating tool along the lines of Cling 3.0. Workarounds for consumer AI applications already enable influencers to create fairly convincing deepfake videos of celebrities, which social media sites like Instagram tolerate as long as they are labeled as AI-generated.
But whether such a workflow can produce something that will satisfy paying moviegoers hoping for a digital resurrection of Val Kilmer remains to be seen.
It’s doubtful we’ll ever be able to get any certainty about whether Kilmer actually thought this was okay or not. But it is documented that he thought so highly of the acting profession that he believed that actors understand the experiences on a deeper level than they experience in real life. He made this point clearly in a 2005 interview, even saying that if Jude Law had starred in a movie about a young Val Kilmer, Jude Law would have done it. Learn more about what it’s like to be Val Kilmer in comparison to Val Kilmer.
This is certainly an unorthodox belief, but Kilmer was a man with a lot of unorthodox beliefs, and this could easily be interpreted as a sign that he, of all people, would prefer someone like Jude Law to be cast in the role. as deep as the graveBut, then again, we’ll probably never know.
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