Keanu Reeves says he has a clause in all his movie contracts banning digital edits to his performances: 'That's scary'
Keanu Reeves told Wired that he finds the digital alteration of scenes in Hollywood "scary."
Reeves said that an editor on one of his movies added a tear to his face in post-production.
Since then, the actor has had a clause banning digital edits without his permission.
Keanu Reeves said that he has a clause in all his movie contracts to prohibit digital alterations to his performance in post-production.
In recent years, there has been discussion about the ethics of so-called deepfakes and digitally altering performances as they become more prevalent in Hollywood in movies such as "The Irishman," "Captain Marvel" and the upcoming blockbuster "Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny."
In a recent interview with Wired, Reeves said he started putting a clause in his contracts banning digital tweaks without his permission after one such edit earlier in his career.
"I don't mind if someone takes a blink out during an edit," Reeves said. "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."
In the last few decades, several actors have made movie appearances posthumously using CGI, including Carrie Fisher, Paul Walker, and Brandon Lee. While discussing reports that a CGI Bruce Willis is being used in Russian commercials, Reeves told Wired that the use of deepfakes takes agency away from actors.
"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," Reeves said. "If you go into deepfake land, it has none of your points of view. That's scary."
He continued: "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 behaviors now. Technologies are finding places in our education, in our medicine, in our entertainment, in our politics, and how we war and how we work."
Reeves also said that he's worried about humanity's trust in artificial intelligence (AI) tools.
"I was trying to explain the plot of 'The Matrix' to this 15-year-old once, and that the character I played was really fighting for what was real. And this young person was just like, 'Who cares if it's real?'" Reeves said. "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. It's cool, like, 'Look what the cute machines can make!'"
He added: "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 nonvalue. And then what's going to be pushed on us? What's going to be presented to us?"
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