I see. So if they want to put a giant phallic object behind the actor, that's covered.
Not a fan some of Cage's acting (Con Air was terrible, Lord of War was good) but I admire him for doing this and being cool and open about it.
I liked when he was a normal guy being chased through an out-of-control situation.
But I think this happens with a lot of actors when they get really popular. The studios hire popular actors for super-alpha-male-top-dog roles.
Maybe he wants the roles that chuck norris/schwarzenegger would normally get, but in my mind he doesn't fit those roles.
Amusingly it goes the other way quite easily - schwarzenegger can actually do well in a kindergarten classroom.
- Adaptation
- The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent
- Dream Scenario
- Mandy
They could do that with green screen, so that's not relevant. Of course, now they can put the phallus anywhere else, and that's more of a problem.
- Whatever Matthew McConaughey did to protect himself legally against AI-generated use of his likeness
- Whatever Michael Jackson's and Tupac's estates did to handle postmortem work. (Namely, MJ's album Xscape and Tupac's 2012 Coachella hologram).
- Whatever legal and economic shackles were placed on Britney Spears during her conservatorship.
- Terms of "360 deals" in the record industry.
- How SAG-AFTRA handled the introduction of CGI. Tl;dr: there's a distinction between "active performance capture" (e.g. live motion capture) vs. "passive capture" (e.g. photogrammetry scan of a face + CGI to animate it).
On another note: I remember watching BTS for National Treasure (where the treasure room scene in particular was somewhat new technology to be able to render that many reflective objects in one scene through CG alone). I know that Nicolas Cage has also done several CG-heavy films since then. Also, Nicolas Cage is a Coppola.
Overall, I imagine that the man has had enough exposure to the fiddly details of film contracts to know the difference between "the introduction of a new technology" vs. "somebody trying to screw him over".
And my 2c is that it sounds like the studio tried to screw him over.
The current rules that SAG-AFTRA negotiated with the studios already allow the studios to use AI for "fix it in post" type stuff that doesn't alter an actor's performance, such as extending a scene or modifying the environment around an actor.
If they want to use AI to modify an actor's performance or generate new footage of an actor (the so-called "digital replica") they need to get the actor's consent in advance and compensate them based on the number of days the actor would have worked to produce the generated footage.
Unfortunately I couldn't find anything to confirm this, but it seems likely that Amazon is asking actors for a blanket waiver so they can use AI however they want. If that is the case it is understandable why Cage wouldn't want to work with them.