How Robert De Niro accidentally helped usher in the death of cinema
In discussions about the best actors of all time, Robert De Niro is a name that comes up time and time again.
From his role as a young Vito Corleone in The Godfather Part II to his heart-stopping turn in The Deer Hunter to everything he’s ever done with Martin Scorsese, the Italian-American icon has a list of accomplishments five miles long.
He has helped push cinema forward in so many ways, particularly with his groundbreaking performance in Raging Bull, and is undoubtedly a hero of the genre. Sometimes, however, the biggest heroes turn out to be the worst villains.
For all the great stuff De Niro has done in his career, his rap sheet is far from clean. For some godforsaken reason, he decided to try his hand at comedy in the 2000s. This resulted in a slew of horrible movies, from The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle to Dirty Grandpa to Little Fockers. For a period in the 21st Century, De Niro forgot who he was. On a completely different note, he also accidentally led to an AI nightmare.
In 2015, possibly in an attempt to revamp his image after a decade of poor choices, De Niro starred in an action thriller called Heist. He plays a character called Francis ‘The Pope’ Silva, the boss of a casino targeted for a robbery by a debt-stricken employee. It’s a pretty humdrum affair, nothing you can’t find anywhere else in the bargain bin of identikit crime movies, but there is one crucial detail about Heist that makes it noteworthy.
The movie was directed by Scott Mann, who would go on to direct the well-received climbing thriller Fall and a bizarre football-themed action flick called Final Score. Mann was unhappy with the way Heist had been dubbed for overseas markets. “What I realized as a filmmaker is that for all the character and delicacy you can do with a given film… can be quickly ruined through the current way that we’ve been dubbing and subbing films,” he told Syfy. So, he and his associate Nick Lynes decided to take matters into their own hands.
The pair set up a company called Flawless AI. The company uses patented artificial intelligence software to subtly change actors’ performances in post-production, syncing them up with a different language without the need for reshoots. To trial this new technology, Mann decided to borrow a scene from Heist.
“I re-recorded the dialogue as it should be and then we used this technology to re-render the visuals of it to sync up,” he explained. “It’s as if De Niro is performing the same scene in German like he did it on set.”
This was long before De Niro’s most famous brush with image-altering software in The Irishman. De-ageing someone on screen is one thing, but changing the way they speak after they’ve already filmed the scene? That feels a lot more invasive.
A quick glance at the Flawless website reveals that they haven’t worked on that many major movies since their big breakthrough, but AI in movies is still a central talking point. Its use on The Brutalist forced the Oscars to consider changing its rules and there are still major questions that need answering over the future of an actor’s voice and likeness with regards to artificial intelligence. He may not have meant it, but De Niro has given Hollywood quite the headache.
