He wasn't quite gone, he's not quite back.
A few months after ending his career, Bruce Willis reappeared on a few screens in a project that has very little to do with his latest films.
The actor appeared last year alongside Kazakh comedian Azamat Musagaliev, in a brief pastiche of an action film – and incidentally an advertisement for the Russian mobile operator MegaFon.
Impeccable tuxedos, threatening bombshells and a touch of humor, it's all there.
Everything, except Bruce Willis, who was not present at the filming of the clip.
Little noticed at the time of its broadcast, the video resurfaced a few months later, after the announcement of the actor's early retirement.
His appearance was meticulously reproduced by the Russian company Deepcake, which signed a contract with Bruce Willis, authorizing him to use his face.
“I liked the precision of my character,
said the interested party in 2021, in a press release from MegaFan released when the project was announced.
With the advent of modern technology, I was able to communicate, work and participate in filming, even while being on another continent.
It's a new and interesting experience for me, and I'm grateful to our team."
To read alsoJosé Garcia: "In Dinard, I found that English cinema was less whiny than ours!"
Specializing in the making of ultra-realistic “digital twins”, Deepcake produced this scene using deepfake technology, these computer-generated images produced using artificial intelligence.
For the shoot, Russian actor Konstantin Solovyov lent his silhouette, on which Deepcake engineers then let artificial intelligence apply the model of Bruce Willis's face, from a database of 34,000 images. of the headlamp corresponding to the desired profile and lighting.
“Part of the future of cinema may be based on the use of digital actors, digital replicas,”
Deepcake CEO Maria Chmir told Reuters news agency in September 2021. from the first attempts at “digitized actors” that have flourished in Hollywood over the past ten years, the deepfake makes it possible to achieve similar results in a much shorter time.
"The first video, a test, took us 15-17 days to produce, but we were able to speed up the process afterwards,
" said Maria Chmir.
Today we can generate a face in 4K resolution in 3-5 days.”
Read alsoBruce Willis, the long twilight of an explosive career, ended by illness
Apart from deepfake, digital technologies have already been used on the big screen to give new roles to deceased actors - like Peter Cushing, who died in 1994 but returned as Grand Moff Tarkin, for
Rogue One
, the
Star Wars
film
released in 2016. Another variant, this kind of tool can also be used to rejuvenate an actor, like Robert de Niro in
The Irishman
, in 2019, or Johnny Depp in
Pirates of the Caribbean: Revenge by Salazar
,
in 2017.
An option that would not displease Bruce Willis.
“It's a great opportunity for me to go back in time
, he rejoiced last year.
The neural network was trained on content from
Die Hard
and The
Fifth Element
, so my character is similar to images from that era.”
Suffering from aphasia, a disease characterized in particular by language disorders, Bruce Willis has decided to end his acting career, his family announced in March.
/cloudfront-eu-central-1.images.arcpublishing.com/prisa/7EOEJLZGQRGEZOFTTGHAZNPOQY.jpg)
/cloudfront-eu-central-1.images.arcpublishing.com/prisa/GEVC3SWHFFGE5PUOOMTGWC2JWU.jpg)
