Artificial Intelligence is achieving things that amaze, and others that scare, thinking about the future. But in the world of cinema, he has managed to Tom Hanks and Robin Wright look decades younger and older in Here (Here). The film not only marks the reunion between the couple of interpreters of Forrest Gump, but the director is Robert Zemeckis, the screenwriter, Eric Roth, and the composer, Alan Silvestri. The same team that 30 years ago made an exciting and extremely successful film.
Here It is based on the graphic novel of the same name published in 2014, by Richard McGuire, and has a peculiarity: it takes place over a century in a single place. The camera never moves from a fixed position, nor rotates on its axis, pans or appeals to that old thing that was done: Zoom, inside a house during the 104 minutes of duration, while viewers listen to people’s stories. who built a home there.
And yes, the central couple is played by Hanks and Wright.
“The single perspective never changes, but everything around it does,” Zemeckis recently told Vanity Fair“Actually, it had never been done before. There are similar scenes in early silent films, before montage was invented. But it was a risky venture.”
As if it were yesterday. They used a new generative Artificial Intelligence technology, called Metaphysic Live. Photos BF Paris
Hanks plays Richard and Wright, as it turns out, plays his teenage girlfriend and later wife Margaret. Through traditional makeup effects and digital de-aging technology, Hanks appears as young as a teenager and as old as an 80-year-old during the film, which spans decades, from his youth in the 1960s to his old age in the 1980s and beyond.
Tom Hanks won his second Oscar (the first had been for Philadelphiaa year earlier) by Forrest Gump, the same as the film, Zemeckis as director and Eric Roth as screenwriter. Robin Wright, who at that time also used the last name of her husband, Sean Penn, for playing Jenny was not even nominated for the Hollywood Academy Award.
Here marks a new collaboration between Hanks and Zemeckis, as Forrest Gump they followed Castaway (2000), the animated The polar Express (2004) and that mess that was Pinocchio (2022), playing Gepetto.
Director Robert Zemeckis (the “Back to the Future” trilogy, “Castaway”), marks a scene for his actors.
“For some reason, I’ve always been labeled as a visual effects guy. But they were always there to serve as the character’s arc,” insisted the director of Back to the Future, Death suits him well and Who cheated on roger rabbit?. And she upped the ante: “I was always worried about trying it. “I’ve always thought that our job as filmmakers is to show audiences things they don’t see in real life.”
But Hanks and Wright are not the only characters that appear on screen in the living room of that house. Others who do, over the decades, include Richard’s parents Al (Paul Bettany) and Rose (Kelly Reilly), an early 20th-century couple (Michelle Dockery and Gwilym Lee), and an inventor and a model pin-up during the ’20s (David Fynn and Ophelia Lovibond).
But how do Hanks and Wright go from the youth that they do not have today to the old age that they did not reach either? It was thanks to a new generative Artificial Intelligence technology, called Metaphysic Live (Metaphysics Live is its literal translation), which is used to swap faces and reduce the age of actors in real time while they perform in front of the cameras.
Fixed camera. The film lasts 104 minutes, and what changes is what happens in that living room over the decades.
It seems that traditional post-production methods were not used.
Yes, I know, many were not convinced by the rejuvenating effect that Martin Scorsese appealed to in the Irishwith De Niro and Pacino, or last year James Mangold, with Harrison Ford for the last of Indiana Jones.
From what can be seen in the photographs, the effect is, as we said, truly amazing.
Wright and Hanks grow younger as much as they grow old.
Here will be released in the United States on November 15, two weeks before Moana 2and in Argentina the independent distributor BF Paris announced that the film will only arrive in the first days of 2025.
Zemeckis has a new film in the pipeline that will star The Rock, Dwayne Johnson, The King. And Hanks revealed, contrary to what many believed, that yes, he is going to participate in Toy Story 5. But wasn’t it that Woody had separated from the group? It seems not.
