Hollywood is infamous for celebrity excess, but Tinseltown strictly controls one scandalous indulgence: swearing.
Director Scott Mann encountered these constraints after shooting the thriller Fall. Movie giant Lionsgate — best-known for the John Wick, Saw, and Hunger Games franchises — wanted to release the film in the US. But the studio had big problems. Thirty-six of them, to be precise.
“They said it had too many f*cks,” Mann tells TNW on a video call from LA.
All those f-bombs were pushing Fall towards an R rating, which would slash the potential audience. To secure the PG-13 needed to extend the reach, those profanities had to go.
Easier said than done. Reshoots would cost a bomb and post-production magic couldn’t scrub the dirty words. Thankfully, Mann had another trick up his sleeve. Quietly, the British filmmaker had been building a startup — called Flawless — that develops AI video editing tools. Fall provided a new field test: swapping f-bombs for gentler epithets.
Mann asked the cast to record cleaner verbiage. Once the audio was ready, the Flawless system went to work. The software first converted the actors’ faces into 3D models. Neural networks then analysed and reconstructed the performances. Facial expressions and lip movements were synchronised with the new dialogue.
The experiment proved successful. All 36 f-bombs were replaced without a trace. Well, nearly all of them. “I did one f*ck in the end,” Mann says. “I’m allowed one f*ck, apparently.”
Satisfied by his restraint, the ratings board gave Fall the coveted PG-13. The film became a sleeper hit, grossing a reported $21 million against a budget of just $3 million. A sequel is now shooting in Thailand.
Buoyed by his success, Mann began commercialising the software. The latest iteration is DeepEditor, an AI tool that refines dialogue and performances.