Twenty-three years ago, we ran a story about Ermenegildo Zegna supplying the dinner suits for Andrew Niccol’s film Simone, as well as a review of the film itself, released on a single day only in Niccol’s native New Zealand. So much for the mainstream hype about supporting your own—while The Lord of the Rings and Die Another Day were locally lauded because of their Kiwi directors, distributors released whatever their foreign counterparts wanted them do. Simone wasn’t on the American list, even if it would have done well here.
Between the three, Simone remained the one that intrigued me the most. Indeed, I knew enough about it to have bought the (NZ$80!) DVD the day after the charity screening in Paraparaumu, having experienced it for the first time at the cinema, introduced live by Niccol’s father Don.
Since then I’ve enjoyed that DVD numerous times because it asks the question of how the world might react to a believable ‘synthespian’ or ‘vactor’: a virtual, lifelike, attractive actor.
In Niccol’s world, Simulation One—Simone—becomes a global hit, with only Al Pacino’s director character Victor Taransky knowing that she is composed of ones and zeroes.
It seems with “AI” in the news regularly, as well as deepfakes, we may actually be living in the times Niccol penned over two decades ago. (In fact, Don Niccol told me that Andrew penned Simone before his better known film, The Truman Show. We may well be approaching three decades since the first Simone script.) Instagram is filled with “AI”-generated young women, with some followers either fooled, or not caring that they have been fooled.
We’ve yet to see films where a virtual person is the lead, though we have seen advertisements, as well as actors with digital work done to them (e.g. Tom Hanks and Robin Wright “de-aged” in Robert Zemeckis’s Here). We’ve seen faces of other actors placed on to body doubles (everything from Steve McQueen in a 1990s Ford Puma ad to Arnold Schwarzenegger’s face superimposed on Roland Kickinger’s in Terminator Salvation).
But we might not be quite there yet with a digital lead. Even in the fictional world, Simone’s creator, Hank Aleno (Elias Koteas) says he would not entrust his creation to anyone but Taransky because of his eye for a good performance. Yet in the brief clips of the films that star Simone within the movie, actress Rachel Roberts plays her digital avatar well, in that she isn’t perfectly lifelike. There’s something stiff about her, lacking the spark of the real Ms Roberts in behind-the-scenes interviews and in subsequent roles.
The technology may well be with us now, 30 years after Niccol conceived of this world, but, like the articles that programs concoct, a gap remains between the human-generated output and the computer one. Admittedly, that gap is ever decreasing.
One should never give time-frames on when that gap vanishes, but given the irresponsible use to date of this technology, I hope it is further down the line than nearer, by which time we have developed some ethical guidelines around them. Yet the odds of ethics even getting a nod is slim, as Big Tech has sacked those who work in ethics and have warned us of the implications.
Those friends who invested in decades-old print encyclopædias—because they foresee a future where the digital word cannot be trusted—now seem very sensible.
Equally, our decision to launch into print for 2004 also seems sensible. If one is willing to commit something to print, odds are we see our words as a matter of record, not something ephemeral. There is a more permanent record—especially as issues are deposited with the National Library of New Zealand—that says, ‘We were here.’ Of course, anyone can publish anything—just look at the tabloid press—but it still takes more commitment to do that than rattling off some words into cyberspace (yes, I see the irony).
We could look at a starry-eyed future driven by technology, but at this point in 2025, it looks more Black Mirror than Simone.
Jack Yan is founder and publisher of Lucire.
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