Hollywood’s latest stab at creating non-human humanoid stars aims to be the first to relay on a fully autonomous artificially intelligent actor.
The film, with the working title ‘b’, has a budget of $70 million already has its robot star and some scenes featuring it have already been shot.
LA-based outfit LIFE Productions has signed ‘Erica’ the creation of Osaka University roboticist Hiroshi Ishiguro, to ‘play’ an artificially intelligent woman who can port into the body and mind of any human host. The film follows her creators’ efforts to gain control of her as she becomes self-aware.
Even the film’s chief financier, Matthew Helderman of BondIt Media Capital, admitted to the New York Times that that hackneyed set up “had a dime-a-dozen sci-fi plot that wouldn’t have made it on his radar” if it hadn’t been for the unique selling point of its star.
Erica though gives the film some money can’t buy publicity. First unleashed in 2015, Erica was alarmingly modelled by Ishiguro on images of Miss Universe pageant finalists.
She has reportedly performed in plays, sung in malls and even delivered the news.
Since then, her AI and movements have advanced and for this role the robot has even been trained how to perform via method acting techniques. Given that she has no life experiences to draw on, producer Sam Khoze explained to The Hollywood Reporter that, “She was created from scratch to play the role. We had to simulate her motions and emotions through one-on-one sessions, such as controlling the speed of her movements, talking through her feelings and coaching character development and body language.”
She apparently has a “synthesized British voice” with “a slight metallic tone that sounds like she’s speaking into a pipe”. When she walks, the motion of her air compressor joints makes it look as though she’s performing either a sped-up or slowed-down version of the robot. For that reason, a majority of her scenes will be filmed while she’s sitting down.
Given those limitations it seems unlikely Erica the actor will be convincing enough to bridge the ‘uncanny valley’ where non-human humanoids always seem to fail. Given that, in the film, she is intended to be a robot and not a human perhaps this won’t matter.
Arguably one of the most convincingly empathetic robots on film, albeit one that made little concession to looking humanoid, was Robby from 1957’s Forbidden Planet. Its dry wit was a forerunner of Douglas Adams’ Marvin depressive ‘Paranoid Android’ from 1981’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
Set in 1983, filmed in 1973, Michael Crichton’s dystopian adult theme park Westworld featured a very convincing Yul Brynner as the self-aware gunslinging machine.
Forgotten (though not bad) Al Pacino comedy drama Simone (Sim-One or S1m0ne) couldn’t live up to its pre-release hype about being the first film to feature an entirely synthetic human character as lead. The film gets around this by having Pacino’s failing film director character create a completely CGI actress that becomes a superstar and even wins Academy Awards. Despairing that society could be so shallow as to fall for this smoke and mirrors he attempts to kill her off.
Other examples include Robert Rodriguez’ Manga infused performance-captured lead in Alita: Battle Angel and the more serious holography of K’s artificially intelligent girlfriend in Blade Runner 2049.
In what seems another gimmick, James Dean has been resuscitated to play the part of a new role in Anon Ernst and Tati Golykh’s proposed Vietnam war feature Finding Jack. Production house Magic City Films plans to use photos and videos to recreate Dean, who died in 1955, in CGI.
Erica the Robot is named as star on ‘b’s imdb page but there’s no director attached. You could write the reviews now for actors who are paired opposite Erica if the film doesn’t succeed at least as entertainment.
The film is still in pre-production and the producers are casting around for other robots to fill supporting roles in the film and even for an unnamed crew position. If nothing else, they will be Coronavirus immune.