The creators of South Park have opened up about a deep fake film of Donald Trump that is still “on hold”.
Trey Parker and Matt Stone revealed that the film – titled Deep Fake: The Movie – was in the works during lockdown before it was eventually shelved.
The duo told the Los Angeles Times that their short video Sassy Justice, which went viral in 2020, was only the beginning of their foray into deepfake technology.
The term “deepfake” refers to a video where artificial intelligence and deep learning – an algorithmic learning method used to train computers – has been used to make a person appear to say something they have not.
Sassy Justice is a web series created by Parker, Stone, and Peter Serafinowicz that uses this technology to insert celebrities and politicians – including Trump, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jared Kushner – into the fictional world of a TV reporter.
“Not a lot of people know that we were a day away from starting production on the first feature movie we had done since Team America: World Police,” Parker told the publication.
“We were going to start shooting on the day that the pandemic shut everything down. It was months and months of getting ready for that movie, to just being like, ‘Nope, it’s over.’”
Stone continued: “We were working on a ‘deep fake’ movie [with Serafinowicz]. We have a deep fake company [called Deep Voodoo], and we have all these deep fake artists working for us. Even though the script was sort of timely, we ended up keeping the deep fake part of the studio going.”
Parker said: “It was going to be Deep Fake: The Movie. It was about this guy who looked exactly like Trump because we deep fake Trump’s face onto him. And it was this whole funny thing because, of course, it ends up with Trump just naked and getting run through the wringer and everything, and that’s why it was so funny and so timely.”
The film is now “sort of on hold”, said Stone.
Parker said that the movie would require a “major rethink” if they were going to move forward with the project.
“It was very timely and the timeliness of it has passed,” he said.
