Harvey Keitel Shooting Film Written by Wife Daphna Kastner, Calls Out ‘Danger’ of AI When Mentioning Michael Caine AI-Narrated ‘The Odyssey’ Audiobook

Harvey Keitel, who is at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival for the third time to present a screening of Martin Scorsese’s “Mean Streets,” has revealed he is shooting a new film written by his wife, actor Daphna Kastner. Speaking with Variety at the festival, the actor said he is working on something that “really excites me.”

“My wife wrote a script; she’s a writer, director, actress… We’re working on it,” he added. “It’s sort of guerrilla warfare. It’s not a Hollywood film, but it’s being done in Hollywood because we live there. We have a lot of college students on the crew, and we’ll see where we go.” The actor did not go into further details regarding the project. 

Keitel, who was co-president of the Actors Studio from 1995 to 2017 and has been a great champion of acting as an art form throughout his career, expressed concerns over the rise of artificial intelligence. “Danger is in front of us,” he said.

Keitel mentioned he recently read an article about an audiobook of Homer’s “The Odyssey” narrated by an AI-generated replica of Michael Caine’s voice. Caine recently licensed his voice to AI audio technology company ElevenLabs, becoming part of the company’s Iconic Voice Marketplace. The British actor’s approved digital clone is now available for a vast array of projects, the first one being an audiobook of Homer’s classic. 

Calling Caine “one of the greatest artists in the world,” Keitel said he read ElevenLabs ran into a “problem” with the upcoming audiobook. “They used his voice, but there was no emotion in it. They couldn’t reproduce Michael Caine’s beauty.” “[It’s] this new industry that’s developing where actors are selling their image and their voices, but they can’t reproduce their emotional life. In that way, the AI thing failed. I know it could be used for good purposes also, but we’re going to have to find good people.”

The veteran actor, who has starred in major films such as Jane Campion’s “The Piano” and Ridley Scott’s “Thelma & Louise,” as well as several projects with frequent collaborators Martin Scorsese (“Mean Streets,” “Taxi Driver,” “The Irishman”), Wes Anderson (“The Budapest Hotel,” “Moonrise Kingdom,” “Isle of Dogs”) and Quentin Tarantino (“Reservoir Dogs,” “Pulp Fiction”), is still very much active and thrilled to be working. Asked what he would still like to try in his career, Keitel takes a deep breath and says: “There’s so much…”

“There are so many things to deal with as a human being,” he went on. “My fears, my loves, my desires, my errors, my successes, my having to face death… And you can do that very well through the arts. That’s one good way to do it.”

One thing Keitel is still keen to do is continue to attend film festivals, with Karlovy Vary being one of his very favorites. At the festival’s 39th edition in 2004, Keitel was awarded a Crystal Globe for Outstanding Artistic Contribution to World Cinema. Eleven years later, he returned to Karlovy Vary in order to introduce Paolo Sorrentino’s “Youth,” which won the Právo Audience Award. “Festivals are more important today than ever before in my lifetime because of the social situation around the world now,” he said. “Politics is a disaster. Religions are in conflict with each other. I mean… Judging somebody by the religion or the color of their skin, I can’t think of anything more fucking ridiculous, and yet, we are still doing it.”

“There are plenty of new talents who are out of work,” he continued in his assessment of the film industry and the world today. “Let’s face it, the arts are a very different field to get involved in, and that’s when we need it the most. Politics is not doing it for us. Religion, and I hope [you] understand what I mean, is not doing it for us. Religions are in conflict. Everybody’s killing each other.”

He finished his musing on the dire state of geopolitics by quoting his “hero,” Greek philosopher Aristotle. “It takes more than words to change a culture. To change a person, it takes aesthetic force. The force of the arts.”