John Wick star Keanu Reeves reveals his film contracts bar digital changes to his performances following a 90s mishap.
You don’t need us to tell you that the internet likes Keanu Reeves. Whether it’s buying Harley-Davisons for his stunt crews or his erudite takes on life, when Reeves speaks or acts, it’s usually worth paying attention. With a new John Wick film inbound, the actor has offered his thoughts on the increasingly prevalent use of digital manipulation in a film’s post-production.
Reeves revealed that he has was once the unwitting target of such digital tinkering during the technology’s infancy, and as such contractually bars it from happening in any of his films since.
Speaking to Wired, the actor said: “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.”
Reeves would go on to discuss the wider proliferation of the technology in the industry, saying “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.”
We’re seeing problems with deepfake technology emerge at the moment, that were of course horribly predictable. With a couple of popular female Twitch streamers having to fight to get deepfake pornography featuring them taken down from a site selling obscene material featuring digital doubles of them, the way humans use such powerful tools in becoming increasingly problematic on a moral and cultural level.
Reeves acknowledges this too, stating that we should think a little deeper about embracing such technology. It’s a great piece and you should check it out. John Wick: Chapter 4 comes out next month and features an entirely human Keanu Reeves. We wouldn’t want it any other way.
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