One year after Val Kilmer died from throat cancer, his face is on screen again — not in archival footage, not in a cameo spliced from an old film, but in an entirely new role, for 77 minutes, generated by artificial intelligence from photographs and home movies that his children provided to the filmmakers.
"As Deep as the Grave," directed by writer-director Coerte Voorhees, is the story of Southwestern archaeologists Ann and Earl Morris, who spent decades excavating sites in Canyon de Chelly, Arizona in the early twentieth century, attempting to trace the history of the Navajo people. Kilmer had been cast as Father Fintan, a Catholic priest and Native American spiritualist, before his death in April 2025. He was too ill to shoot. So Voorhees and his production team built his performance using AI reconstruction rather than recast the role.
Continue reading to see the full article
