Rise of the Machines: AI Spells Danger for Hollywood Stunt Workers

2nd Unit Director and Stunt Coordinator Freddy Bouciegues explain poses for AFP during a Stunts Master Class students training session at the Tempest Academy, in Chatsworth, California, on August 10, 2023. (AFP)
2nd Unit Director and Stunt Coordinator Freddy Bouciegues explain poses for AFP during a Stunts Master Class students training session at the Tempest Academy, in Chatsworth, California, on August 10, 2023. (AFP)
TT

Rise of the Machines: AI Spells Danger for Hollywood Stunt Workers

2nd Unit Director and Stunt Coordinator Freddy Bouciegues explain poses for AFP during a Stunts Master Class students training session at the Tempest Academy, in Chatsworth, California, on August 10, 2023. (AFP)
2nd Unit Director and Stunt Coordinator Freddy Bouciegues explain poses for AFP during a Stunts Master Class students training session at the Tempest Academy, in Chatsworth, California, on August 10, 2023. (AFP)

Hollywood's striking actors fear that artificial intelligence is coming for their jobs -- but for many stunt performers, that dystopian danger is already a reality.

From "Game of Thrones" to the latest Marvel superhero movies, cost-slashing studios have long used computer-generated background figures to reduce the number of actors needed for battle scenes.

Now, the rise of AI means cheaper and more powerful techniques are being explored to create highly elaborate action sequences such as car chases and shootouts -- without those pesky (and expensive) humans.

Stunt work, a time-honored Hollywood tradition that has spanned from silent epics through to Tom Cruise's latest "Mission Impossible," is at risk of rapidly shrinking.

"The technology is exponentially getting faster and better," said Freddy Bouciegues, stunt coordinator for movies like "Free Guy" and "Terminator: Dark Fate."

"It's really a scary time right now."

Studios are already requiring stunt and background performers to take part in high-tech 3D "body scans" on set, often without explaining how or when the images will be used.

Advancements in AI mean these likenesses could be used to create detailed, eerily realistic "digital replicas," which can perform any action or speak any dialogue its creators wish.

Bouciegues fears producers could use these virtual avatars to replace "nondescript" stunt performers -- such as those playing pedestrians leaping out of the way of a car chase.

"There could be a world where they said, 'No, we don't want to bring these 10 guys in... we'll just add them in later via effects and AI. Now those guys are out of the job."

But according to director Neill Blomkamp, whose new film "Gran Turismo" hits theaters August 25, even that scenario only scratches the surface.

The role AI will soon play in generating images from scratch is "hard to compute," he told AFP.

"Gran Turismo" primarily uses stunt performers driving real cars on actual racetracks, with some computer-generated effects added on top for one particularly complex and dangerous scene.

But Blomkamp predicts that, in as soon as six or 12 months, AI will reach a point where it can generate photo-realistic footage like high-speed crashes based on a director's instructions alone.

At that point, "you take all of your CG (computer graphics) and VFX (visual effects) computers and throw them out the window, and you get rid of stunts, and you get rid of cameras, and you don't go to the racetrack," he told AFP.

"It's that different."

The human element

The lack of guarantees over the future use of AI is one of the major factors at stake in the ongoing strike by the Screen Actors Guild (SAG-AFTRA) and Hollywood's writers, who have been on the picket lines 100 days.

SAG-AFTRA last month warned that studios intend to create realistic digital replicas of performers, to use "for the rest of eternity, in any project they want" -- all for the payment of one day's work.

The studios dispute this, and say they have offered rules including informed consent and compensation.

But as well as the potential implications for thousands of lost jobs, Bouciegues warns that no matter how good the technology has become, "the audience can still tell" when the wool is being pulled over their eyes by computer-generated VFX.

Even if AI can perfectly replicate a battle, explosion or crash, it cannot supplant the human element that is vital to any successful action film, he said, pointing to Cruise's recent "Top Gun" and "Mission Impossible" sequels.

"He uses real stunt people, and he does real stunts, and you can see it on the screen. For me, I feel like it subconsciously affects the viewer," said Bouciegues.

Current AI technology still gives "slightly unpredictable results," agreed Blomkamp, who began his career in VFX, and directed Oscar-nominated "District 9."

"But it's coming... It's going to fundamentally change society, let alone Hollywood. The world is going to be different."

For stunt workers like Bouciegues, the best outcome now is to blend the use of human performers with VFX and AI to pull off sequences that would be too dangerous with old-fashioned techniques alone.

"I don't think this job will ever just cease to be," said Bouciegues, of stunt work. "It just definitely is going to get smaller and more precise."

But even that is a sobering reality for stunt performers who are currently standing on picket lines outside Hollywood studios.

"Every stunt guy is the alpha male type, and everybody wants to say, 'Oh, we're good,'" said Bouciegues.

"But I personally have spoken to a lot of people that are freaked out and nervous."



‘I’m Still Here’: Joan Chen Plays Thwarted Immigrant Mom in ‘Didi'

Chinese-American actress Joan Chen poses during a photocall for Chinese director Jia Zhang Ke's film '24 City' at the 61st Cannes International Film Festival on May 17, 2008 in Cannes, southern France. (AFP)
Chinese-American actress Joan Chen poses during a photocall for Chinese director Jia Zhang Ke's film '24 City' at the 61st Cannes International Film Festival on May 17, 2008 in Cannes, southern France. (AFP)
TT

‘I’m Still Here’: Joan Chen Plays Thwarted Immigrant Mom in ‘Didi'

Chinese-American actress Joan Chen poses during a photocall for Chinese director Jia Zhang Ke's film '24 City' at the 61st Cannes International Film Festival on May 17, 2008 in Cannes, southern France. (AFP)
Chinese-American actress Joan Chen poses during a photocall for Chinese director Jia Zhang Ke's film '24 City' at the 61st Cannes International Film Festival on May 17, 2008 in Cannes, southern France. (AFP)

Long before Joan Chen charmed Western audiences with seductive turns in "The Last Emperor" and "Twin Peaks" she was a child star in China, hand-picked for her debut movie role by Mao Zedong's wife.

That remarkable personal journey, from Red Army propaganda movies to glamorous Hollywood roles directed by Bernardo Bertolucci and David Lynch, could not appear more different to Chen's character in new coming-of-age film "Didi."

Chen plays Chungsing, a Taiwanese single mom and frustrated artist in California, whose 13-year-old is too busy trying to impress his skater friends and navigate adolescent crushes to be nice to his family.

Yet the role -- which is already earning Oscars buzz -- "poured out of me, because that's the life I've lived," Chen told AFP.

"I am, like Chungsing, an immigrant mother, who raised two American children -- with such an intimate, loving relationship, but also fraught with cultural chasm, misunderstanding, unmet expectations," she said.

It all started for Chen, aged 14, when she was spotted by a film director who worked for Chairman Mao's wife Jiang Qing.

"The director picked me out of school, then sent my dossier and my pictures for her to approve," recalls Chen.

"I was so happy that I happened to be the type that they needed. It wasn't my dream. I never thought about it, when they picked me to be an actress. And then slowly, I learned to love it."

She quickly became a beloved movie star in 1970s China -- a job that spared her from being sent to work in rural provinces during the devastating Cultural Revolution.

Chen moved to the US at age 20, studying film but skeptical about her prospects as an Asian woman in Hollywood.

She landed a lead role in Bertolucci's "The Last Emperor," as the wife of China's final dynastic ruler. The film won nine Oscars, including best picture.

Yet Chen, now 63, recalls: "Back then, there just weren't any Asian filmmakers or scriptwriters who could create a part for me."

"I could have been this ingenue, this breakout new lead (actress)... So that was a shame. Nothing could really follow up."

- 'Still here' -

In "Didi," out in theaters on August 16, Chen's character is a talented artist who had to forsake her ambitions for her family, in their new country.

Chungsing is stoic, quietly bearing her disappointment while devoting herself to her frequently oblivious, Americanized children.

Unlike her character, Chen continued to work prolifically through parenthood, acting and directing in both the US and Asian film industries.

Chen's part as femme fatale Josie Packard in "Twin Peaks" remains popular with fans of the cult TV series to this day.

But her Western roles have failed to match the success of her early career.

And she still reflects on the "night and day" difference between her daughters' experience growing up in the West, and her own arrival in the United States as an immigrant, with "that uncertainty of the ground you're standing on."

"The pains and joys we see in the film is a lived experience for myself as well," said Chen.

With "Didi" winning awards at the Sundance film festival, there are hints of a late-career comeback. Chen and director Sean Wang are earning mentions as dark horses for the next Academy Awards.

"I am so thrilled that young filmmakers like Sean exist... when there are enough scriptwriters, directors, then you create more parts for people who look like them," she said.

"It's wonderful. And I'm so happy that I'm still here."