The late Ian Holm — who played the robot Ash, an antagonist in the 1979 film “Alien” — has generated a lot of interest for his return in Disney and 20th Century Fox’s “Alien: Romulus,” which expanded its box office haul to $91 million domestically and $283.5 million worldwide over the weekend.
Holm's appearance in the latest “Alien” installment underscores the role of the collective bargaining agreement between the Screen Actors Guild and the Television and Radio Actors Guild, which requires the approval of an artist's estate before a digital copy can be created.
A recent Visual Effects Society panel explored the meticulous work that went into Holm’s appearance for “Alien: Romulus,” which featured the late actor as a new robot named Rook. Director Fede Alvarez confirmed that the filmmakers first reached out to Holm’s estate to get his approval (as with “Alien: Romulus”). diverse As I understand it, this includes compensation, as per the SAG-AFTRA contract, prior to the use of Holm's image.
The creative approach was different from that of other late actors brought back to the big screen through digital trickery, including the late Carrie Fisher as Princess Leia and the late Peter Cushing as Grand Moff Tarkin in the Star Wars films. In the case of Alien: Romulus , rather than a fully human, Holm Rook is a crippled robot whose damaged head and upper body are propped up on a table. Like much of the work on the film, the team’s goal was to create Rook by combining traditional techniques with cutting-edge modern technology, and in doing so, the practical and the digital.
The visual effects team was unable to find an original cast of the English actor from the “Alien” archives, but they did find a cast created in the late 1990s when Holm played Bilbo Baggins in Peter Jackson’s “Lord of the Rings” films, said legacy effects supervisor Shane Mahan. Mahan, who led the construction of an animatronic robot for Holm and the aliens, admitted that while the aforementioned cast wasn’t created to be the exact age Holm needed to be, “it gave us the proportions of his ears, his nose and his mouth.”
The production’s visual effects supervisor, Eric Barba, added that the 4K scans of the original film served as a useful guide in creating the performance and gave them training data, with the digital work involving AI-powered techniques from startup Metaphysic. “They were able to retarget the eyes, to fix the eye lines,” Barba explained. “Their tools are great for us to be able to … really drive the performance.”
Actors have been created or enhanced in the digital realm for other reasons, including in the rare and delicate situation of completing a film when an actor died during filming, as was the case with Paul Walker in Furious 7; or to reduce age to meet story requirements, as was the case with Robert De Niro and other actors in The Irishman. The decision to approve the work is made by the actor or the estate on a case-by-case basis.
“Our political work includes ensuring that estates approve the use of digital copies in expressive works, such as films, and the No Fraud Act in the U.S. Senate addresses this issue head-on,” said Duncan Crabtree Ireland, national executive director and lead negotiator for the Screen Actors Guild, Screen Actors Guild, Television Actors Guild, and the Film and Television Actors Guild of America.
In an email to diverse“Basic protection for AI contracts is so important that we are fighting for similar protection for video game players… and that is why it is essential that we get basic protection in law for the protection of sound and image in expressive works,” he added.
