Lionsgate’s new theatrical thriller Fall has received an R rating due to excessive profanity in its scenes. The producer, who had hoped to get a lower PG-13 rating, was disappointed – it would have reduced the box office. Deepfake technology, which masked more than 30 obscene words, helped overcome the problem, reports Variety.

Fall is an indie thriller about two friends who climb an abandoned radio tower over 600 meters high to scatter the ashes of one of the women’s late husband. When parts of the rickety ladder break off from the tower, the heroines are trapped. They must make every effort to get down to earth unscathed.

According to one of the actresses, during filming, they did not know what rating they would get. In the shot, the woman cursed so much that the producer wanted to kill her via e-mail when they were trying to get a PG-13 rating. Reshooting scenes that were set in the mountains in the middle of the Mojave Desert would have been too long and expensive for a movie with a budget of $3 million.

Director and co-author of the script Scott Mann found the solution. He turned to artificial intelligence dubbing technology from the London company Flawless. Using deepfake technology during post-production, the Flawless team managed to replace the swearing with more censorious epithets like “stupid”.

“Now we’re now stuck on this stupid freaking tower in the middle of freaking nowhere,” says one of the characters in one of the edited scenes.

Flawless, founded in 2021, developed TrueSync based on TrueSync artificial intelligence. Initially, the technology was supposed to make the dubbing of films translated into other languages ​​more natural. Using the principles used to create deepfakes, TrueSync changes the actors’ mouth movements to match the alternate dialogue. As it turns out, it can also successfully “clean” the film of unwanted words.

The technology has worked so perfectly that even the actors themselves cannot tell whether a certain scene has changed or not. Fall will hit theaters on August 12, so all thriller fans will soon be able to try to tell the difference.