Digital de-ageing: from The Irishman’s Robert De Niro to Samuel L Jackson in Captain Marvel, how the tech is reaching new levels

With Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman up against Once Upon a Time in … Hollywood and 1917 for the best picture Oscar next month, all eyes are on the special effects team that made the sprawling crime epic possible.

The Irishman unfolds over decades, with the 76-year-old Robert De Niro and his co-stars playing their characters from their 30s into retirement age, a feat that’s made the film one of 2019’s most acclaimed movies.

It’s all possible through new digital de-ageing techniques that, in the past year in cinemas, have shaved decades from Samuel L. Jackson’s face and turned the clock back to the 1990s for Will Smith – though neither Captain Marvel nor Gemini Man will be competing with The Irishman for an Oscar in visual effects.

Each film has arrived at its reverse ageing trick through a different technique, leading some to call 2019 a monumental year for de-ageing in film.

To many, The Irishman stands out from the field, thanks to its complete avoidance of “tracking markers” – dots painted onto actors faces that allow computers to mathematically replicate facial movements and manipulate them as the director sees fit.

The youthful transitions of The Irishman are the work of Pablo Helman, visual effects supervisor at Industrial Light and Magic, who has been 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.

“He’s not going to wear a helmet with little cameras in there,” says Helman. “He’s going to want to be in the moment with Joe Pesci and Al Pacino on set, with no markers on him. So, if you’re going to capture the performance, how are you going to do that?”

Enter the “three-headed monster”, a unique camera rig that has a director camera in the centre and two “witness” cameras on either side shooting infrared footage. That allowed Helman to eliminate shadows created by on-set lighting. The shadows could potentially interfere with the geometric facial shapes constructed by de-ageing software.

“You’re not interrupting the director’s thread of thinking,” explains Helman. “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-ageing at Weta Digital (part of director Peter Jackson’s Weta Workshop in New Zealand), 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. “You have that many years of expertise of looking at a human face and knowing what’s wrong. So, to try and get all the different things together and get it to pull off right, that’s been the challenge.”

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To create the character of Junior – a younger clone of Smith’s assassin Henry Brogan – the superstar wore the traditional grey tracksuit, complimented by a head rig with two cameras capturing his facial expressions via tracking markers.

“We decided [on] a ground-up approach to build everything from scratch – from the skull all the way to the skin pores, all the way to the animation and the final kind of oil in the eyes. [It] was really the best approach we could take,” says Stu Adcock, head of facial motion at Weta.

Before filming commenced on both Gemini Man and The Irishman, the teams at ILM and Weta drew up test footage to show the films’ directors that what they were suggesting was possible.

For Gemini Man, it was a clip from the 1995 movie Bad Boys into which they inserted two shots of their new, digital Will Smith and asked Ang Lee to spot the “fake”.

For The Irishman, De Niro also returned to the 1990s, performing the Pink Cadillac scene from Goodfellas before being de-aged in post-production – convincing an initially sceptical Scorsese that he could bring the long-gestating project to life.

Helman and his team then spent two years looking through old movies and cataloguing 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.

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Creating Junior required Smith to spend time in a photogrammetry booth where multiple cameras captured his likeness as numerous lights fired in different sequences, giving a base scan of the actor and analysing the structure of his face from a skin-pore level.

Ironically, considering Scorsese’s vocal criticism of Marvel movies as “not cinema”, a similar system was used to de-age Jackson in Captain Marvel. A young Nick Fury was created by comparing footage from old Jackson movies with the work the actor did on set – again, using tracking markers.

“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.

“That’s more of a 2D-image-based approach where they’re taking the actor’s performance and then they’re painting and tracking certain frames,” he says. “They’re still using some of the actor’s performance directly, but they’re modifying it. It was very believable. It may not have been exactly what the young Samuel Jackson looked like, but it definitely looked de-aged.”

“The de-ageing of Samuel L. Jackson is absolutely fantastic,” agrees Weta’s Guy Williams, adding, “different approaches suit different requirements. It’s not a one-size-fits-all kind of situation.”

That’s a sentiment echoed by Helman, who believes that 2019 was a watershed year for VFX.

“It’s not by chance that we have several movies that have motion capture performance, facial performance, in three or four different ways. That shows that we’re all thinking about digital humans,” he says.

“I mean, we all stand on each other’s shoulders. I can’t wait for somebody to pick this up and do something else with it, you know?”