Glenn Close on Threat of AI in Hollywood: “I Don’t Want My Image or Voice to Be Reconstructed”
Glenn Close is grateful she made it to Park City this weekend.
The actress — in production on Hulu’s Ryan Murphy series All’s Fair — got her schedule sorted out in order to touch down at the Sundance Film Festival for good reason. Close was among the presenters who got a chance to salute Sundance Institute icon Michelle Satter during Friday night’s gala fundraiser at the Grand Hyatt Deer Valley.
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“She really takes my breath away,” Close told The Hollywood Reporter on the red carpet ahead of the event. “She’s just such a beautiful human being and she’s given so much to so many, and it’s unparalleled what she’s done for film, certainly for independent film, but for film at large.”
Close, too, has had her own undeniable impact on the big screen. Asked to single out the indie film that changed her life, she cited the 2011 film Albert Nobbs. “I knew what it was like to try to raise the money. You go to every single head of every single independent film company, then they change, and then you go to all the new heads of every single independent film company,” she recalled. “You have a passion. They have the money. And so many times they say, we don’t share your passion. I’d say, well, you don’t have to share my passion. I have enough passion for both of us. Because for me, an independent film is a film that almost doesn’t get made. It’s that hard.”
Speaking of hard, Close said she’s been “trying to keep my equilibrium” these past few weeks as the start of a new year has delivered a new administration and devastating L.A. wildfires.
“I’m very lucky to have a job. There were so many people impacted in L.A. already, and then now with the fires. I was astounded at how few jobs there are in our profession. I’m a big reader of history and unfortunately, I think not enough people in this country understand the history and what we’ve just gotten ourselves into. That’s very dangerous,” Close explained. “On top of that is [artificial intelligence]. What is going to be truth? What is true is going to be a big question.”
Close said she’s just finished reading Yuval Noah Harari’s book Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks From the Stone Age to AI, which she found “incredible” and “more terrifying than anything I’ve read.” AI has also become something of a hot-button issue in Hollywood, and THR asked Close for her take.
“Depends on how it’s handled,” she said. “I don’t want my image or my voice to be reconstructed. I mean, people need jobs. It’s a sad dilemma. Is it progress that less people will work because of it? I don’t know. I think we’re losing one thing that a place like Sundance and what Michelle has done is so important — stories about what it means to be a human being. We have to cling to that. We have to keep coming back and be inspired by things that teach us, that help us with our emotions to know what it means to be human and [to always] to look into somebody else’s eyes — not a screen — but another human being’s eyes. If we lose that, it’ll be a very slippery slope, I’m afraid.”
Asked how she keeps up the momentum or fixes her focus back on positivity, Close looked up. “The sun comes up every day. We’re very lucky about that,” she said. “I also am learning. I wean myself off spending a lot of time on the phone. You can fall into that Instagram hole and all of a sudden two hours, three hours have gone by and you think, what have I done with my life? It’s also really bad for your brain.”
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