‘Holy Grail’ digital effects rewinding the clock for actors

LONDON — With Martin Scorsese’s “The Irishman” expected to battle “Once Upon a Time in… Hollywood” and “1917” for the best picture Oscar in February, all eyes are on the special effects team that made the sprawling crime epic possible. The youthful transitions of “The Irishman” are the work of Pablo Helman, visual effects supervisor at Industrial Light and Magic, who’s an Oscar nominee for his work on “Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones” and “War of the Worlds.” Helman says the decision to forgo tracking markers came directly from Scorsese and De Niro. “You’re not changing the light on set, but the computer can see in a different spectrum.” While the team at Industrial Light and Magic was working on “The Irishman,” another group of technical wizards were experimenting with de-aging at Weta Digital, creating an entirely digital, 23-year-old version of Smith for the action movie “Gemini Man.” “Since I started visual FX 25 years ago it’s been the Holy Grail,” says Bill Westenhofer, one of the film’s VFX supervisors. Helman and his team then spent two years looking through old movies and cataloging the targeted ages that De Niro, Pacino and Pesci would appear in “The Irishman.” They created a program — similar to that used to create online “deepfake” videos where one actor’s face is swapped for another’s — which would check their work on the movie was heading in the right direction, with the system “spewing out” hundreds of images for cross-referencing. “I looked at that face as, you know, maybe ‘The Negotiator’ face,” says Jackson, referring to his 1998 movie of the same name, “Fortunately for them and for me, I had enough stuff from that period in my life that they could use a bunch of different facial expressions and films to put that face together that made sense to people who knew me from that time.” Darren Hendler, director of the Digital Human Group at Digital Domain and the man responsible for turning Josh Brolin into “Avengers” supervillain Thanos, was impressed by Jackson’s appearance in the movie.