Lionsgate used deepfake software on Fall to eliminate the swearing.
The upcoming action thriller starring Grace Caroline Currey and Virginia Gardner was apparently full of F-Bombs… and with Lionsgate desperate for a PG-13 rating, the filmmakers used deepfake to get rid of all those curses.
“We can’t remake it for a movie like this,” director Scott Mann said in a behind-the-scenes video reported by Variety. “We’re not a big tent pole…we don’t have the resources, we don’t have the time, more than anything. What really saved this film and made it accessible to a wider audience was the technology.”
The solution, Mann says, is to turn to London-based AI company Flawless, where he also serves as co-CEO … and probably already had a good idea of what the technology could do.
“When we were shooting the movie, we didn’t know if we were R or PG-13, so I said the F-word so many times that I think Scott wanted to kill me on the post when we were trying to get a.” PG-13 rating,” said co-star Virginia Gardner.
It’s easy to see how those F-bombs ended up there – Fall tells the story of two women who climb an abandoned radio tower to scatter the ashes of one of their husbands, but when parts of the ladder come loose, the two become trapped stranded.
According to Mann, the team excised more than 30 F-Bombs throughout the film, changing the film’s rating from R-Rated to PG-13. Many of the film’s most egregious curses have been changed to adult curses like “freak out”.
“As far as I know, every move my mouth made in this film was made by my mouth,” said Grace Caroline Currey.
The TrueSync software used by Mann was originally developed to improve synchronization when translating films into other languages. It uses similar technology to other deepfake-style software, changing mouth movements to sync with new alternate dialogue.
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Fall was shot on a budget of just $3 million, meaning reshooting crucial scenes to bring down the film’s rating simply wasn’t an option. Plus, the re-recordings would have taken months to complete.
The TrueSync edits were completed in just two weeks during the final stages of post-production.
Whether we see deepfakes being used in other creative ways remains to be seen, but South Park creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker nearly made their own deepfake film starring non-former President Donald Trump .
Ryan Leston is an entertainment journalist and film critic for IGN. you can follow him Twitter.