Keanu Reeves refrains studios from making digital edits to his performances
Feb 15, 2023
Washington [US], February 16 : Actor Keanu Reeves, who will next be seen in the upcoming action flick 'John Wick: Chapter 4', recently railed against deepfake technology making its way into Hollywood.
According to Variety, an American media company, in the interview with Wired, Reeves even confirmed that he has a clause in every movie contract that prevents studios from digitally manipulating his performances.
"Yeah, digitally. I don't mind if someone takes a blink out during an edit... But early on, in the early 2000s, or it might have been the '90s, I had a performance changed. They added a tear to my face, and I was just like, 'Huh?!' It was like, I don't even have to be here," said the actor.
"What's frustrating about that is you lose your agency... When you give a performance in a film, you know you're going to be edited, but you're participating in that. If you go into deepfake land, it has none of your points of view. That's scary," Reeves continued about deepfakes.
He added, "It's going to be interesting to see how humans deal with these technologies. They're having such cultural, sociological impacts, and the species is being studied. There's so much 'data' on behaviours now."
In a recent conversation about 'The Matrix' with a 15-year-old, Reeves put things into a terrifying perspective. The actor told the teen that his character, Neo, is fighting for what is true. "Who cares if it's real?" scoffed the teenager.
"People are growing up with these tools: We're listening to music already that's made by AI in the style of Nirvana, there's NFT digital art," Reeves said.
As per Variety, he continued, "It's cool, like, Look what the cute machines can make! But there's a corporatocracy behind it that's looking to control those things. Culturally, socially, we're gonna be confronted by the value of real, or the non-value. And then what's going to be pushed on us? What's going to be presented to us? It's this sensorium. It's spectacle. And it's a system of control and manipulation."
