At CinemaCon in Las Vegas on Wednesday, viewers were treated to a glimpse of As Deep as the Grave, a movie that made headlines last month when its creators announced that they would be adding AI-generated images of Val Kilmer to it.
Reportedly, Kilmer’s estate, his daughter, and possibly his son all signed off on this use of his likeness.
Kilmer really did agree to be in the movie when he was alive, and production started all the way back in 2020, but filming was delayed by Covid and other issues.
Then, Val Kilmer was taken from movie lovers too soon at the relatively young age of 65 after a prolonged, public cancer battle. It’s hard not to think about that fact when AI Kilmer looks into the eyes of another character and says, “Don’t fear the dead and don’t fear me,” the only line of clear, English-language dialogue spoken in the trailer.
The movie is about Ann Axtell Morris, a real archeologist who made discoveries important to humanity’s understanding of Native American history. The slogan in the tagline is “Some stories were too hidden to be found.”
Kilmer plays a priest named Father Fintan, who is also a Native American spiritualist. In the trailer, we first see a man who appears to be in his seventies. Whether or not this man is supposed to be aged-up, AI-generated Kilmer is ambiguous. Other characters in this nighttime scene also look like AI renderings. Later images of Kilmer make him look young, like Top Gun young. His voice, when he finally speaks, is a soft, slightly whispered approximation of young Kilmer’s, but it doesn’t sound distinctly like Val Kilmer.
Kilmer’s voice was as important to his movie stardom as his physicality. His speech was simultaneously soft and booming, effortlessly enunciated and audiobook-ready, but always with a note of slightly submerged mania ready to bubble up. Capturing all that with AI sounds like a big undertaking.
Director Coerte Voorhees told the Washington Post the movie will be long and that the AI-generated Kilmer character will be onscreen for 1 hour and 17 minutes of its runtime.
