“In other methods of acting, actors involve their own life experiences in the role, but Erica has no life experiences,” one of the movie’s writers explained
This soon-to-be movie star may not have a pulse, but she’s ready for her close-up!
Earlier this week, production companies BondIt Capital Media, Happy Moon Productions, Life Entertainment and Ten Ten Global Media announced an upcoming sci-fi movie titled b, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
A robot named Erica has been cast as the face of the movie, which tells the story of a scientist working on a human DNA experiment who helps an A.I. woman (played by Erica) escape a laboratory.
b is written by Sam Khoze, Eric Pham and Tarek Zohdy. A director is not yet attached to the project, nor are any human costars.
IRL, Erica was invented by Hiroshi Ishiguro and Kohei Ogawa, Japanese scientists who study robotics. Khoze told THR about how they pulled off the A.I. actress’ performance, with some scenes already shot last year.
“In other methods of acting, actors involve their own life experiences in the role, but Erica has no life experiences,” said Khoze. “She was created from scratch to play the role. We had to simulate her motions and emotions through one-on-one sessions, such as controlling the speed of her movements, talking through her feelings and coaching character development and body language.”
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Now, Erica even has her own IMDb page, which lists her height as 5’5½” and her character b in b as her first role.
Ishiguro explained how Erica is the “most beautiful and intelligent” robot in the world to The Guardian in 2015.
“The principle of beauty is captured in the average face, so I used images of 30 beautiful women, mixed up their features and used the average for each to design the nose, eyes and so on,” he said at the time. “That means she should appeal to everyone.”
Also in the Guardian interview, Ishiguro said he doesn’t see any “ethical problem” in proliferating androids, explaining: “First we have to accept that robots are a part of our society and then develop a market for them. If we don’t manage to do that, then there will be no point in having a conversation about ethics.”
He added that robots are “a mirror for better understanding ourselves.”
“We see humanlike qualities in robots and start to think about the true nature of the human heart, about desire, consciousness and intention,” Ishiguro said at the time.