Recently, a minor miracle was achieved in the world of film preservation. A long-lost version of “A Better Tomorrow II” (1987), John Woo’s sequel to his heroic bloodshed classic “A Better Tomorrow” (1986), was discovered and is now slated to be released to the public.
For nearly 40 years, Woo’s preferred cut of the Hong Kong action movie had been considered destroyed. When it was being made, the studio demanded that Woo’s workprint, which ran nearly three hours, be pared down to less than two, and he only had a week to deliver. Woo begrudgingly went to work on editing down one half, and his producer Tsui Hark — himself a director of numerous Hong Kong classics — the other. Woo never even saw the theatrical cut until opening night, and he’s since disowned the movie except for its explosive final gunfight.
It’s still a stunning picture, but it’s clearly the work of two clashing creative forces cobbling something together under an absurd deadline. Action junkies have had to live with the fact that they’d never get to see it as Woo intended it — until, that is, film restorers dug deeper and discovered that the workprint was languishing in an archive this whole time, overlooked because it was mislabeled as an English release of the movie. Now, a seminal piece in action cinema history will finally see the light of day, lovingly restored.
Soon, a lost classic of American cinema may soon see release, too: the original version of Orson Welles’ “The Magnificent Ambersons” (1942), the director’s follow-up to “Citizen Kane” (1941), probably one of the best movies ever made.
Except, instead of actually showing audiences lost footage, the Amazon-backed startup Showrunner and app says it’ll recreate the footage with the help of AI, according to the Hollywood Reporter.
“The goal isn’t to commercialize the 43 minutes,” said CEO Edward Saatchi, whose app was behind those AI-generated imitations of “South Park,” but “to see them exist in the world after 80 years of people asking ‘might this have been the best film ever made in its original form?'”
Like Woo, Welles wasn’t allowed to release his own version of “Ambersons.” Behind his back, the studio slashed forty-plus minutes from the film and savagely burned all the remaining reels. To add insult to injury, it slapped on a happy ending, tapping Welles’ assistant director to whip it up while he was out of the country. It’s still considered a masterpiece despite that drama, but the experience was harrowing for Welles. “They destroyed ‘Ambersons,'” he once said, “and it destroyed me.”
So, to be clear, the missing footage has been obliterated (although one man is hunting for a mythical extant copy in Brazil.) As far as we know, there’s nothing to restore. But Brian Rose, a filmmaker working with Showrunner, is reconstructing the lost scenes based off the script and whatever remains in the movie. And luckily, Welles was extremely particular in how he wanted to set up his scenes and kept meticulous notes, which are still surviving. Much of Rose’s reconstruction involves actually shooting scenes in physical sets that have been physically recreated, and trying to emulate Welles iconic camera movements.
“There was, for example, a four-minute-long, unbroken moving camera shot whose loss is a tragedy,” Rose said in a statement, per the Hollywood Reporter.
But in what sounds like a recipe for an onscreen nightmare, Rose says he’s using AI to transfer the faces and poses of the original cast onto the new actors. Now AI in this context is pretty nebulous — is it generative AI, or is it more like an algorithm that helps map the faces? Perhaps this gives us a clue: the VFX artist Tom Clive, an “expert on face-swapping and de-aging,” according to THR, is joining Showrunner.
Regardless, it doesn’t bode well. The recent “Alien” sequel “Alien: Romulus” used generative AI to recreate the voice of the late British actor Ian Holm, who portrayed the android Ash in the original film, alongside animatronics and heaps of CGI to recreate his face. The end result was a ghoulish and uncanny caricature that sparked loads of backlash.
What would Welles himself think of all this? It’s impossible to say, because he’s been dead for 40 years (though his estate signed a deal this year allowing a storytelling app to recreate his voice with AI.) But as evidenced by his iconic 1973 docudrama “F for Fake,” he was fascinated by the relationship between authenticity and forgery, so he probably would have had expansive thoughts on the whole thing.
Showrunner won’t be able to commercialize the AI-assisted Welles restoration/recreation, since it doesn’t own the rights. But this will only be the beginning of its AI efforts in film, with its CEO Saatchi envisioning it as one day being the “Netflix of AI,” he told THR, where users — yes, users, not filmgoers or audience members — can interact with and make their own fan fiction-esque versions of what they’re watching.
“Year by year, the technology is getting closer to prompting entire films with AI,” Saatchi told THR. “Today, AI can’t sustain a story beyond one short episode,” he admitted, but said his company is a “step toward a scary, strange future of generative storytelling.”
More on AI: Netflix Says It Used Video-Generating AI for Special Effects in a New Show
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