On set, a young director named Victor Velle was rehearsing the train-station scene with the actors playing George and Uncle Jack. Velle, who wore a neck brace (Fourth of July diving accident), was joined by Katya Alexander, who had worked at the Sphere before Saatchi hired her as Fable\u2019s head of production. They would shoot the actors talking face to face, to create emotional depth, but then separate them for the A.I. work, which for some shots required the use of a motion-controlled robotic camera.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s not just putting together this puzzle,\u201d Velle said. \u201cIt\u2019s re-creating the pieces so that the puzzle fits together.\u201d Tiny dramaturgical details had been lost to time. In the train station, Uncle Jack holds an umbrella while accepting cash from George. \u201cIs it going to be weird for him to fumble with an umbrella as he puts the money in his pocket?\u201d Alexander asked. \u201cHow does he pick up the suitcase? We don\u2019t have a shot of him picking it up.\u201d<\/p>\n
Velle added that Welles\u2019s actors often handled props in an \u201caesthetically pleasing\u201d way: \u201cOrson is the king of cool, so how to do it with his flavor?\u201d<\/p>\n
They had put out a call for actors in Backstage, seeking not exact look-alikes but people with what Velle described as a \u201cregal nineteen-forties vibe.\u201d He said, \u201cIn that period, a lot of people would act as if they had tons of Botox\u2014their foreheads don\u2019t move.\u201d The three actors they hired worked with a coach, Kimberly Donovan, to study their 1942 counterparts. \u201cYou\u2019re reverse engineering someone else\u2019s performance,\u201d Donovan told me. Holt, for example, \u201cattacks every word,\u201d whereas Moorehead\u2019s delivery can be \u201csoft and kitten-like.\u201d<\/p>\n
Cody Pressley, an actor with a sonorous Wellesian voice, was playing both George and Eugene in separate scenes. Pressley said that he often gets cast in period pieces. (Previous roles include Gerald Ford\u2019s photographer in \u201cThe First Lady\u201d and a drunk teen in \u201cStranger Things.\u201d) He\u2019d been camping in Colorado when he got the call from Fable and rushed back to L.A. \u201cIt\u2019s so very technical,\u201d he told me. \u201cYou have to match the cadence of an actor from the forties. You have to match the words verbatim. And you basically have to keep your head still.\u201d<\/p>\n
They started shooting the scene. John Fantasia, who was playing Uncle Jack, stumbled over a wordy bit of dialogue. \u201cCut!\u201d Velle yelled. He gave Pressley a note: \u201cGeorge\u2019s voice is a tiny bit higher pitch than what you did.\u201d They rolled again, as the robotic camera whirred. Later, Fantasia told me that he had limited knowledge of A.I. \u201cAs an actor, I thought, I don\u2019t think I\u2019ll ever want to do this, because it\u2019s contributing to the downfall,\u201d he said. \u201cBut then I thought, It\u2019s already seeped into the Hollywood subculture.\u201d Plus, he added, \u201cit\u2019s a paying gig.\u201d<\/p>\n
In the afternoon, Saatchi and Rose took me to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences\u2019s Margaret Herrick Library. The two made an odd couple. Saatchi was in minimalist black-and-white, in the style of a Silicon Valley guru. Rose, who had flown in from Missouri, wore a tucked-in plaid shirt with a tie and had a Nikon camera hanging from his shoulder, like a tourist at Niagara Falls. We sat in a reading room and opened a folder of weathered correspondence. First came a letter dated August\u00a018, 1941, in which the R.K.O. employee Reginald Armour gushed to Welles, \u201cIf the picture turns out to be as good as the script, you already have another smash hit on your hands.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"On set, a young director named Victor Velle was rehearsing the train-station scene with the actors playing George…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":264111,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[16494,365,363,364,35265,9548,4974,111,139,69,9547,9549,145],"class_list":{"0":"post-264110","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-_sensitivecontent","9":"tag-ai","10":"tag-artificial-intelligence","11":"tag-artificialintelligence","12":"tag-brave-new-world-dept","13":"tag-inverted","14":"tag-magazine","15":"tag-new-zealand","16":"tag-newzealand","17":"tag-nz","18":"tag-onecolumnnarrow","19":"tag-splitscreenimagerightfullbleed","20":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/264110","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=264110"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/264110\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/264111"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=264110"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=264110"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=264110"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}