His Beautiful Lie

Andrew Niccol is squeamish at the prospect of dissecting his work. He thinks it’s pretentious to talk about art. And tiresome. “There is this great quote from Matisse: ‘An artist should cut out his own tongue,’ ” he says. Is that a personal creed? “Obviously not,” he adds cheerfully as he settles in to discuss Simone, an all-too-human virtual actress who is the star and subject of his latest film.

A sermon in Zen koans is what one expects from Niccol, a New Zealand-born filmmaker who has made a name for himself by drawing filmgoers into audacious mind games.

In the dystopian thriller “Gattaca,” which marked his directorial debut, he challenged them to consider life in a genocracy--a brave new world where genes alone determine destiny. Then came the lauded “Truman Show.” In this cautionary fable about the costs of achieving ultimate reality on reality TV, which Niccol wrote and Peter Weir directed, audiences were forced to confront their own voyeuristic impulses.

This is a filmmaker with a headful of thoughts and qualms about topics many successful artists skirt. He is fascinated by people’s fascination with celebrity. He talks a lot about “the strange relationship” between Hollywood and entertainment news that, it seems to him, are locked tighter than ever in an embrace.

He is the type who hastens to point out to a reporter, “I wouldn’t be doing an interview if I didn’t have a movie to sell, and you probably wouldn’t be interviewing me.” From his early days spent making commercials in London, he has retained, he explains, a hyper-awareness of the marketing dynamic involved in his craft. “Yeah, I may be a reformed smoker in some ways--you know what they’re like.”

Above all, Niccol is fixated on the line between truth and falsity. “We’re entering an interesting time where we don’t know what’s fake and what’s real anymore. And for me, that’s an interesting area to explore,” he said.

The result of his explorations is “Simone,” a project Niccol wrote, directed and produced two years ago that is opening in theaters this week. The picture lampoons the celebrity culture with unabashed glee--but most of the time with a completely straight face. It’s spiced with enough barbed wit aimed squarely at the Hollywood myth-making machinery to make a less confident artist anxious about never eating lunch in a certain town again.

“Simone” features Al Pacino as Viktor Taransky, a washed-up filmmaker who makes a spectacular comeback when he plays Pygmalion to a blond, lusty ingenue. Simone becomes the most promising new talent to grace the screen.

Audiences and media alike are instantly charmed. Who would not succumb to this most attractive, gracious star? She is statuesque, with a fair brow and silky, straight hair--”almost an American ideal,” Niccol described her. On film, she emotes with Sophia Loren’s wounded sensuality. Her cheekbones are as exquisitely chiseled as Audrey Hepburn’s. She may be a bit of a recluse, but that idiosyncrasy only enhances her aura. “It is precisely because she doesn’t crave the limelight that people love her,” explains Taransky--Simone’s Svengali, mentor and closest collaborator.

Make that the only collaborator--because Simone is entirely Taransky’s creation. She is a virtual simulation of a real actress, which makes her the world’s first “synthetic thespian.” Her mesmerizing appearance is an amalgamation of features borrowed from famous screen sirens. Every day, Taransky assembles Simone on his computer, and inserts her digitally into material shot with live performers, or beams her via satellite to talk shows.

No matter that she doesn’t exist. The public is smitten, and through movies, TV exposure and magazine articles, Simone explodes into the era’s biggest media sensation.

She is a lie that becomes self-perpetuating: an achievement possible only because of the insatiable appetite of the public to mythologize movie stars. “We live vicariously through celebrities. People used to say that celebrities are America’s royalty; now I think celebrities are the world’s royalty,” said Niccol--Simone’s creator in earnest--during a recent interview at the Hollywood loft he calls his office.

The work space, which he designed, is a converted warehouse with plastic screens, skylights and a 50-foot-long table meant to accommodate storyboards and assembled from doors purchased for $30 apiece from Home Depot. (Things masquerading as something they are not is clearly a concept of infinite fascination for this filmmaker.)

He ruffled a big stack of collages he put together in preparation for “Simone,” made with cutouts from fashion magazines and advertisements. “Can you tell which ones are real and which are retouched?” he taunted, pointing to a series of photographs depicting beautiful women--actresses, models, ordinary people.

Well--no, and that is the point of “Simone”: In the digital age, the distinction between reality and fantasy blurs to the point where it ceases to matter.

Nowadays, actors have their zits and wrinkles air-brushed in post-production, have their jaws stretched to make for more attractive visuals, feign contact and dialogue with things and people who are only later spliced in or created digitally. “We manipulate things all the time,” Niccol said. “Simone is only the next step.”

“When you tell such a beautiful lie, people can’t believe she doesn’t exist,” Niccol said about the film’s premise that the public is above all keen to worship. The hunger to latch on to a celebrity, even a fabricated one, “seems too prevalent to just ignore. You may as well have at least one film that [questions], ‘Should we be going to films?’ ” Catching himself, he chuckled, “I’m sure that would sell tickets!”

In a movie in which the many facets of truth crash into slick walls of illusion, there is always more than meets the eye. The name Simone itself is shorthand for the computer program that fathers the “synthespian.”

In a vein mined by Niccol in his previous work, “Simone” also investigates the measure of responsibility the public, the mass media and the filmmakers bear in mythologizing characters who are often lacking in intrinsic value.

The picture poses uncomfortable questions: Who are the culprits? What begets what?

“I’m just holding up a mirror, I have no answers at all,” Niccol said, feigning innocence. But later he noted that as in “The Truman Show,” the public is at least partly to blame for Simone’s ascent. “They don’t have to watch. They can take a walk or read a book.”

And if they choose not to? “I was simply interested in investigating a possibility,” Niccol said. Indeed, the most disquieting aspect of the film is its ominous insight: When Simone finds herself in the eye of a publicity maelstrom, the surreal aspects of her personality--the fact that she does not exist except as a series of zeroes and ones stored in computer memory--seem to drop away and her very presence on screen acquires a nagging sense of realism.

“I used to think with ‘The Truman Show,’ ‘Oh, that’s so farfetched,’ ” Niccol said, as two silhouettes in dark suits peered ominously over his shoulder from a giant “Men in Black II” ad plastered on the side of a neighboring building. The image, reminiscent of “Big Brother is watching you” posters, provided a fitting backdrop for a discussion of Niccol’s 1998 film about the most real kind of reality TV, starring a character who had no clue that his life was scripted and watched on television all over the world.

“Now the events have caught up with that idea,” he continued. “If you took a child from a Third World country today and said, ‘You know what? To save this child from the worst fate, we’re going to record him in the most idyllic setting, we’re gonna give the child the best of everything,’--I think most people would go for it,” Niccol said. That, of course, is the premise of “The Truman Show,” which Niccol wrote in the early 1990s, when “Big Brother,” “Survivor,” and “The Real World” had yet to achieve a feverish grip on viewers’ psyches around the globe.

In fact, we are only three to four years away from a real Simone, said William Robbins, a special effects supervisor who coordinated work on the movie.

“We can generate realistic-looking people, but we have yet to fully capture the mannerisms, the flaws” that subtly enhance a human performance.

As for Simone, the protagonist moviegoers will see on screen is in fact a half-human, half-digital concoction. A team of 10 to 15 special effects technicians took about six months in a tedious post-production process to assemble her--or rather, it.

Should anybody claim that Simone is all image and no substance, it helps to know that her various body parts in digitized format, took up 1.5 terabytes, which is the storage capacity of 150 regular PCs. “The overall amount of work was gargantuan,” Robbins said. The virtual performer appears in 210 shots, or just about every scene. There were some real performers, photographed and melded together into Simone--”less than 50,” Niccol said coyly, explaining that he was simply obeying studio directives not to spill the beans as to the exact specifications of his lead hybrid. “She’s part pixels and part flesh and blood, but we don’t tell you which part is which,” he added.

But isn’t this kind of secrecy what the film itself lampoons?

“Exactly!” he said, relishing the irony. “It’s life imitating art.”

“Simone” the movie is like a Chinese box, out of which pops Simone the synthespian, itself a shell for Simone, the creation of special effects wizards. “I’m simulating simulation,” Niccol noted with much amusement. “I’m making a fake fake to make a point about fakes.”

Besides a slew of self-reflective, intellectual pleasures, “Simone” has some burlesque moments meant to reflect some of the surreally absurd moments that are bound to occur when you stick around the movie-making enterprise long enough.

Taransky puts on lipstick and leaves kiss marks on glossy photos of Simone, intended for her rabid fans. A starlet complains bitterly about the size of her trailer. (“I know there are actors who do,” Niccol said. “They are like two-story buildings, some of these trailers.”)

There are other gibes: only black Land Rovers, BMWs and Mercedes-Benzes--the status symbols of Hollywood--are on the freeway. The titles of Simone’s movies are cheekily asinine: “Sunset Sunrise,” “Eternity Forever.”

Niccol insisted that what he put in the movie was only the tip of the iceberg. “I couldn’t actually use some of the more ridiculous things that go on in Hollywood, because people would not believe it,” he said.

And the film is chock-full of quotable lines.

Simone, explaining her reluctance to meet anybody face-to-face: “I relate better to people when they’re not actually there.”

Taransky’s daughter comforts him after his studio executive wife, played by Catherine Keener, fires him from a project. “Daddy, sorry Mom canned you.”

“I have not read ‘Eternity Forever,’ but it is really good,” uttered by an actor who slavishly tries to ingratiate himself to Taransky.

The picture may be subversive, but Niccol said it was also “an affectionate look at our industry....I think it’s easier to slip an idea in when people are laughing--it’s like a Trojan horse.”

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Sorina Diaconescu is a Times staff writer.