“Set that completely aside, what work will there be for human beings?” the actress says
Lisa Kudrow condemned Robert Zemeckis’ Here, a film that uses digital aging technology, in a recent episode of the Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard. Kudrow references Zemeckis’ film, which reunites Forrest Gump stars Tom Hanks and Robin Wright, and calls the time-jumping film “an endorsement for AI.”
“They shot it, and they could actually shoot the scene and then look at the playback of them as younger, and it’s ready for them to see,” the actress said on the podcast. “All I got from that was, this is an endorsement for AI. It’s not like, ‘Oh it’s going to ruin everything,’ but what will there be left? Forget actors, what about up-and-coming actors? They’ll just be licensing and recycling.”
Here, which draws inspiration from Richard McGuire’s graphic novel of the same name, films from a single vantage point and follows the film’s co-stars Hanks’ Richard and Wright’s Margaret from high school sweethearts to their 80th birthday. Artificial intelligence protections became a hot button issue during the summer-long actors and writers’ strikes in 2023. And ahead of Here’s release, which de-ages both Hanks and Wright’s characters, it received some backlash from critics.
“Set that completely aside, what work will there be for human beings? Then what?” Kudrow continued. “There’ll be some kind of living stipend for people, you won’t have to work? How can it possibly be enough?”
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Hanks previously told the New York Times that every film he has worked on with Zemeckis featured digital technology, including Forrest Gump, adding, “There’s all kinds of stuff that they say, will movies ever be the same again because of this thing? And the answer is yes, of course, because in the sensibilities and I guess in some ways the morals of the filmmaker, it’s plainly evident what the final product is.”
