Andrew Niccol’s S1m0ne, like The Congress, predicts the rise of the use of AI actors in cinema, and once again forces viewers to confront the uses of such technology.
In a previous Skiffy and Fanty piece, I looked at The Congress, a 2013 Ari Folman movie starring Robin Wright, whose first and part of its second act are all about the digitization of actors into movies, obviating actors as independent and creative beings altogether. [https://skiffyandfanty.com/blog/movie-review-the-congress/]
Twelve years earlier, director Andrew Niccol also explored this territory, in his movie S1m0ne, starring Al Pacino. The movie was a flop, on all levels, but with recent developments in LLM and the recent strikes in Hollywood, let’s look at what the movie brings to the table for this moment.
Al Pacino plays director Viktor Taransky. He is on a steep downward slope in a career that honestly, seemed to have peaked at the beginning. The star of his latest work in progress (and possibly his last, should it fail), Nicola Anders, has just walked out mid-shoot. Even given that she is a diva with a capital D, this is a disastrous turn of events for him. He contractually cannot use footage of her and so would have to replace her entirely, and quickly, for the movie to be made. And the clock is ticking. Enter Hank Aleno, an old acquaintance of Victor’s. Hank’s life work has been to create a program to computer-simulate an actor or actress. This obsession (which, on the nose, has given him a deadly cancer) is his life’s work and with no other options, Taransky elects to use it. He creates “Simone”, a mysterious ingenue of an actress to complete the film. The film becomes an overwhelming success, and suddenly the world wants to meet “Simone.”
The movie’s path goes from there with Taransky trying to manage a digital creation that has no autonomy, but the reactions to her get away from him. Investigative reporters are obsessed with finding her. Taransky’s ex-wife, studio executive Elaine (Catherine Keener) is understandably very curious about this actress from nowhere. Taransky makes more movies with Simone, to ever greater success, financially as well as awards.
The success of Simone becomes an all-consuming monster for Taransky to try and control. He ups the stakes again and again with chroma key (green screen) fakery, including “remote location interviews” with Simone. The showstopper of all of this, with heavy use of fog, holographics and a lot of misdirection, is Simone’s concert debut, where Taransky uses the technology to make it seem she is singing to the packed stadium she is “performing in”. This leads to even greater success. The movie explores what happens when a success story overshadows the person responsible for that success, even if the success story is in itself a fake person.
The green-eyed monster of jealousy inevitably enters the picture and Taransky feels that he needs to bring his own creation to heel, even if every single thing she has done has been at his direction. Taransky tries to sabotage Simone’s career with questionable film choices, and bad behavior in interviews, to no success. Desperate to end the Simone phenomenon he even tries to digitally destroy his own creation. It will be no surprise to the reader that the police immediately think that the disappearance of Simone is a real death caused by the obvious main suspect, the director.
The movie is pulling in two directions, although at the time of its release and when I first saw it, it was only the pull to the past. In a conversation between Elaine and Victor, about Elaine accusing Victor of being nostalgic for an “era he wasn’t even born in”, cinematically, what Victor is nostalgic for, it is now clear, is the era of the 1950s so expertly captured in the movie Hail, Caesar! That movie is all about the era of the studio system and the dominance of studios over directors, and both over actors. That is a movie which shows the time where actors were treated much like cogs in the machine, even if they were most inexpertly fitted cogs. The epitome of this in the movie is when the studio commands director Laurence Laurentz to put horse-opera actor Burt Gurney into his new drawing-room movie, despite the absurdity of such an idea. Taransky wishes he was directing and working in such an era, S1m0ne makes clear. He doesn’t want to have to deal with actresses who have over-the-top contractual demands.
But what Niccol hints at for the future, and what we see now, is the “Studio System” coming back again, but without the need of actual flesh-and-blood actors. Even a step beyond the digitization of actors that the studios so fervently desire, S1m0ne shows the next and frighteningly logical step beyond that. Once you can digitize actors and use them in movies, what is to stop a studio from just simply creating actors at the drop of a hat? Need an actor who perfectly fits the image of Arrhae, the Federation spy in a Rihannsu household in an adaptation of Diane Duane’s The Romulan Way? The technology in S1m0ne , if developed in the real world and deployed, would allow for the entire cast, the entire production to be done without a single flesh-and-blood actor. Two decades ago, Niccol hinted at the possibility of a “studio system” where the studios could rely on AI technology to replace real actors entirely. This possibility was a gleam in the eye in 2002, but now we are faced with that very real possibility, now.
Niccol’s films, almost universally, are obsessed with the idea of artificial realities. This can be a mundane sort of affair, such as in Lord of War, where the titular protagonist tries to create his own reality of a lifestyle in order to find success, and the woman of his dreams, through arms-dealing. It can be The Truman Show, where Truman Burbank lives, unknowingly, on the largest studio set ever constructed, his whole life an artificial and fake experience. Or it can be something like S1m0ne, where an actress and her whole career and presence, are digital creations. It is notable that Niccol is a cautionary tale sort of director. In each of these, the artificial realities break or are broken, showing the cogs and the gears of what is behind them.
I want to go back to The Congress and parallel this movie with it one more time. That movie takes its premise and the problems and dangers of such technology quite seriously. There are moments of humor, and certainly poetic beauty, in The Congress, but it is a Serious Film. S1m0ne, by contrast is a much lighter piece. For all that Niccol is poking at some very serious ideas here, and implications of the same, like much of his work, there is an undercut of humor and a relaxed feel to the movie that makes it much more of a popcorn film, even as it slides in its very serious idea. (See his aforementioned The Truman Show, especially, for a humorous look at the panopticon, or In Time, which again has very biting class and social commentary wrapped in a lot of softening humor). Yes, there is a serious look at the artificial realities, but the humor is always a layer in that reality’s depiction. It lessens the impact of the message and dilutes it, but for all the gonzo visuals of the second two-thirds of The Congress, S1m0ne is an absurdly more fun movie. But in this age of 2023, both movies, unexpectedly now, hold a message that has suddenly become very relevant to creatives of all stripes.
