In what we can only assume was a joint project with The Council For Bad Sentences to find a string of words that would finally knock us stone-cold fucking dead, Variety reports today that Doug Liman’s Pete Davidson-starring biopic about the creator of Bitcoin will apparently be filmed in an artificial intelligence-painted void, as genAI tech is used to “adjust” actors’ performances rather than bother paying for reshoots.
Everybody still with us? Need a glass of water? Some orange slices? We got orange slices for anyone who needs ’em.
In any case: Liman’s film, Killing Satoshi, has been in the works since last year, when Davidson and Casey Affleck were attached to star. (The film centers around “Satoshi Nakamoto,” an anonymous person or persons foundational to the creation of the cryptocurrency back in the late 2000s—and who purportedly still has control of the “genesis” Bitcoin wallet that now contains what is currently about $75 billion in crypto.) The film caught renewed attention a few days ago, though, when a recent casting notice included some disclaimers that raised numerous red flags, i.e., that anyone who wanted to be in the movie would be giving consent for producers to “change, add to, take from, translate, reformat or reprocess” performances using “generative artificial intelligence (GAI) and/or machine learning technologies.”
(In fact, the original notice also included a disclaimer that participants would “acknowledge they may be sharing scenes with AI-generated performers,” although producers have now stated that this was inaccurate, and that all actors in the film are real people—even if they will be, uh, tweaked.)
Even without the thought of Tilly Norwood suddenly popping up behind you like the ghost in the machine, though, this thing still sounds pretty hellish to film: Variety quotes sources saying that Liman intends to forego such trivialities as backgrounds or scenery, instead using AI tech to paint everything in in post. (The casting notice states that filming will happen on a “markerless performative capture stage and not in any locations, using new Al technologies.”) And if they don’t like anyone’s performance? Well, “They won’t be made to say anything they didn’t say, but let’s say the way they said it in conjunction with the movement doesn’t look perfect, you wouldn’t need to reshoot it. We’d just use AI to make it look better.” Charming!
Ryan Kavanaugh, a veteran Hollywood guy who’s a producer on the film, has fallen back on the old “cost-cutting” excuse for all this, noting that he and Liman are trying to do this bad thing they’re determined to do in a thoughtful, responsible way. “We were very cautious, sensitive, and overly protective of our actors to make sure we only use performance capture AI which means that we will not have any AI-generated actors that do not exist,” Kavanaugh said in a statement. “AI is a tool we’re using to make the filmmaking process more efficient while maintaining all department heads’ jobs, all actor jobs, and hopefully helping to grow the industry in a positive way.”
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