When Paul Walker died in after a car accident in November 2013, the producers of Fast and Furious 7 had two options. First, they could abruptly cut out Walker’s character from the film (which was already under production) by tweaking the script. Second, they could painfully recreate Walker using complex CGI and VFX techniques and bring him back to life on screen. Universal Pictures went with the second option, even though it meant that the project would go over budget by a few millions and delay the film’s release by a year.
Animationxpress.com reports that Peter Jackson’s WETA Digital used Paul’s brothers Caleb and Cody as stand-ins for the close-up shots. The late actor’s CG face was then match-moved on the live shot footage of his brothers’ bodies using motion-capture technology. Besides resurrecting Paul using CGI, the studio also incorporated the actor’s unused real footage from previous installments of the film.
Carolyn Giardina writes in The Hollywood Reporter, that the resurrection of Paul Walker through CGI for Furious 7 shows how no actor is indispensable. It has also now become a norm for actors to be 3D scanned at the start of the production of a movie to make CG doubles for complicated stunt scenes. This 3D scan process is being done by studios for their archives too. So decades from now, filmmakers will be able recreate the star on screen, even if the actor is dead or alive.
Ironically, the death of an actor is pushing Hollywood to develop technology that might evolve to a point, which will eventually result in the death of the actor.
Though this is the first time that Hollywood has brought back an actor from the dead so extensively, it’s not the first time that CGI has come to Hollywood’s rescue. Last year, Philip Seymore Hoffman was digitally recreated to complete The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1 and 2. Ridley Scott recreated actor Oliver Reed during the production of Gladiator.
You can see how the legendary Bruce Lee was digitally resurrected in a TV commercial 40 years after his death. Watch the video here:
(At The Quint, we are answerable only to our audience. Play an active role in shaping our journalism by becoming a member. Because the truth is worth it.)