The strangest part of Matthew Helderman’s
video call came when he bit into an apple.
Or rather, what followed.
“What kind of apple is that?” asked the
23-year-old with blunt bangs and big brown
eyes peering at him through his laptop
screen.
Helderman, chief executive of BondIt
Media Capital, was meeting with the lead-
ing lady of “b,” the $70 million sci-fi film his
company is backing.
Only the actress, Erica, was not a woman
but an android. Though her curious eyes
were trained on Helderman’s face, the give-
away was a faint whirring when she rose
from her chair.
Erica was created by Hiroshi Ishiguro, a
roboticist at Osaka University in Japan, to
be “the most beautiful woman in the world”
— he modeled her after images of Miss Uni-
verse pageant finalists — and the most hu-
manlike robot in existence. But she’s more
than just a pretty face. When Erica makes
her debut — “b” is still in preproduction —
producers believe it will be the first time a
film has relied on a fully autonomous artifi-
cially intelligent actor.
Despite Erica’s flawless features andeasy smile, her pupils are clearly plastic.
Her synthesized British voice has a slight
metallic tone that sounds as if she’s speak-
ing into a pipe. When she walks, the motion
of her air compressor joints makes it look as
though she’s performing a sped-up or
slowed-down version of the robot. For that
reason, most of her scenes will be filmed
while she’s sitting down.
But she does have one advantage over
the Margot Robbies and Brad Pitts of the
world: She’s immune to the coronavirus.‘The Most Beautiful Woman in the World’
Ishiguro has a dream, and in it the world is
filled with Ericas.
The barista who hands you your morning
coffee. The anchor who delivers the nightly
news. The receptionist at the doctor’s office.
He can make artificially intelligent an-
droids that walk and talk. But he would
rather you forget they aren’t human.
He wants to understand what makes hu-
mans, well, human. “Erica does not under-
stand or operate in the same system as hu-
mans,” said Ishiguro, director of the Intelli-
gent Robotics Laboratory at Osaka Univer-
sity, by email. “So she always makes believe
to be human.”
He developed Erica with the goal of creat-
ing an android that people wouldn’t just re-
late to but also confide in and feel affection
for. The more humanlike he could make her
appear, he said, the more people would trust
her.
When he unveiled Erica in 2015, she was
the most advanced of the dozens of an-
droids he had produced over his career that
have performed in plays, sung in malls and
even delivered the news.
So when one of the producers of “b,” Sam
Khoze of LIFE Productions, was looking for
an android to headline a feature film in 2017,
he entertained pitches from several robot-
ics companies. But the moment he met Eri-
ca, Khoze said he knew she was their star.
“She really looks like a human,” Khoze
said. “Even down to such small details as
her tongue and eyelids.”A Compelling Pitch
When Khoze pitched the project to Helder-
man and BondIt Media Capital about two
years ago, the android actor was unques-
tionably the selling point.
Helderman, whose company’s credits in-
clude the 2017 Netflix movie “To the Bone,”
said the film had a dime-a-dozen sci-fi plot
that wouldn’t have made it on his radar if ithadn’t been for the star. (In addition to Bon-
dIt, the Belgium-based Happy Moon Pro-
ductions has also committed to back the
film.) But video calls with Ishiguro and Ko-
hei Ogawa, an assistant professor at Osaka
University who had joined the Erica project
in 2016, convinced Helderman that the
project was more than slush-pile material.
In the story — written by Khoze; Eric
Pham, the visual effects supervisor; and
Tarek Zohdy — Erica plays an artificially in-
telligent woman, b, who can surge into the
body and mind of any human host. The film
follows her creators’ efforts to gain control
of her as she becomes self-aware.
Erica had originally been set to star in a
project directed by Tony Kaye (“American
History X”), but scheduling issues led the
producers to abandon it. No director or hu-
man co-stars are attached to “b” yet (Khoze
said they have interviewed several film-
makers and will make their choice in the
coming few months), but some of Erica’s
scenes were filmed in Japan last year. They
hope to finish the rest in Europe next sum-
mer.
But while she awaits her human counter-
parts, Erica is rehearsing. There’s just one
problem: She has no emotional memories.Acting School for Androids
Helderman said that when he initially met
her, Erica’s acting chops were nonexistent.
“At first, she didn’t understand what acting
was,” Helderman said. “It was like teaching
a child why we respond the ways we do.”
The team taught her how to perform over
more than two years of daily sessions using
what Helderman calls a “Marlon Brando”
method. Some stars might draw on their
own experiences to create a character, but
they instructed Erica to emulate other ac-
tors’ performances. Actors explained out
loud how they were feeling in each scene to
Erica.
“She’d ask questions like, ‘Why am I say-
ing this line more loudly or more softly?’ ”
Helderman said. “Or, ‘Why am I doing this
thing when the camera is there, but not
when it isn’t?’ ”
Their biggest challenge, he said, was
hardly memorization; she immediately
mastered her lines. But it took her months
to grasp the concept of not just reciting a
line, but also speaking it softly or in full
voice depending on the context, and bol-
stering the words with body language.
Khoze said they taught her the dialogue for
a scene in one session, then worked on the
emotions, character development and bodylanguage in another.
There are limits to her capabilities. She
cannot improvise. Well, she can, to a degree,
Helderman clarifies. It just wouldn’t be
nearly as clean a performance as a prac-
ticed sequence.
And unlike a human actor, she must per-
suade the audience not to reject her as
creepy or repulsive.
Masahiro Mori, a Japanese roboticist,
proposed a theory in 1970 known as the “un-
canny valley.” It states that the more hu-
manlike a robot appears, the more pos-
itively humans will react to it — to a point. If
the resemblance is too strong, the robot can
trigger a sense of revulsion or eeriness.
It’s still unclear exactly what triggers the
uncanny valley, said Karl MacDorman, an
associate professor of human-computer in-
teraction at Indiana University-Purdue
University Indianapolis. Factors may in-
clude facial and body proportions, the pace
and naturalness of speech and the fluidity
or jerkiness of movement.
He said that lack of sympathy in the face
of adversity can be a plus for uncanny com-
puter-animated or robotic villains like Gol-
lum from “The Lord of the Rings,” using
viewers’ unsettledness to their advantage.
“You’re not supposed to relate to or feel em-
pathy for Gollum — though sometimes, we
do,” he said. “But when we can’t relate to a
protagonist we’re supposed to want to suc-
ceed, that’s where the uncanny valley can
become disruptive.”‘What Is a Human Being?’
While Erica awaits co-stars, Helderman
said, she continues to run lines with ama-
teur local actors. “The coronavirus is a dou-
ble-edged sword,” he said. “We don’t know
when production can begin again, but she’ll
be ready when it does.”
The script calls for three supporting hu-
man lead actors, but Khoze said they are
also looking at several other robots for sup-
porting roles and are in negotiations to hire
a robot for a crew position.
But Erica still has a way to go in the quest
to not just masquerade as human, but also
to emulate them. She speaks English and
Japanese, and can talk to a stranger in Japa-
nese for 10 minutes on more than 80 topics.
But Ishiguro said they’re still working to-
ward conversations that are deeper or in-
volve multiple people.
“The machines that humans use become
more human,” he said. “So the most impor-
tant question for us is, ‘What is a human be-
ing?’ ”A Movie Star
With No Ego
A humanlike
android is
rehearsing to star
in a $70 million
sci-fi film.
The android Erica is
preparing for the film
“b.” Producers believe it
will be the first time a
film has relied on a fully
autonomous artificially
intelligent actor.
GABRIEL BOUYS/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY IMAGESBy SARAH BAHRC2 N THE NEW YORK TIMES, MONDAY, AUGUST 3, 2020Raven Leilani has one of this summer’s
most anticipated fiction debuts, but in some
ways, she is already anticipating the day
the buzz dies down.
That is when she plans to take some time
to grieve the loss of her father, Warren, who
died from Covid-19 in April. “There’s an as-
pect of this moment — because of the enor-
mity of it, you see the number of people who
have died — it feels abstract,” she said in an
interview. “But it’s not abstract at all. Every
single number was a person, and one of
those was my dad.”
Because of their complicated relation-
ship, her parents’ separation when Leilani
was in college and the forced isolation of the
coronavirus pandemic, she has had to
process the loss alone. That kind of solitude
is not what she is used to, having grown up
first in the Bronx, then a suburb of Albany,
N.Y., in a family of West Indian artists who
encouraged her creativity.
For years, she juggled jobs and art, doing
her writing at night or during work shifts.
“The going was slow and the going was pri-
vate,” Leilani said. “There was a frenzy to
that grind.”
It’s a frenzy she captures in her novel,
“Luster,” out on Tuesday. It follows Edie, a
Black woman in her 20s scraping by on a
publishing salary while trying to self-actu-
alize as an artist. When Edie meets Eric, an
older, married white man whose wife has
agreed to an open marriage, Edie becomes
entangled with them and their daughter —
an adopted Black 12-year-old named Akila
— in unexpected ways.
“I wanted to write a story about a Black
woman who fails a lot and is sort of grasping
for human connection and making mis-
takes,” Leilani, now 29, said. “I didn’t want
her to be a pristine, neatly moral character.”
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Leilani’s pub-
lisher, has named “Luster” its novel of Au-
gust, part of a campaign this year highlight-
ing reading “for solace, for protection, for
instruction, for survival, for music.” “She is
exactly the kind of writer that we’ve always
published and that we’ve always been dedi-
cated to publishing — someone who is an
artist and a craftsman, but also someone
who is speaking to her moment and our cul-
tural history,” Jenna Johnson, who acquired
the book for the publisher, said.
Ahead of its publication, “Luster” has al-
ready been praised by other writers, includ-
ing Carmen Maria Machado, Brit Bennett
and Angela Flournoy. In an email, Zadie
Smith, who taught Leilani in grad school,
called “Luster” a “daring, perverse, wildly
funny book about how we use each other —
especially how the old use the young, so-
cially, economically and intimately.”
Machado, the author of “In the Dream
House” and “Her Body and Other Parties,”
said “Luster” “took me by the throat and
didn’t really let me go,” particularly when it
came to the way Leilani writes about sex.
“They were hot and real and also did all the
things I want sex scenes to do, which is feel
realistic, sometimes be sexy, sometimes be
unpleasant or stressful, but allowing for
both, allowing for real bodies,” Machado
said.
For Leilani, those scenes were her way to
capture “a free Black girl” and the “perver-
sity” of sexual thoughts when allowed to
roam free. She also wanted to highlight a
nonlinear artistic path, one that came in
contact with the real world. “You talk to
other writers and they’re sort of dogged by
this specter of ‘I’m not making anything,’ ”
she said, “but for most of us, that’s the reali-
ty of making art, is not making it.”
That Edie is a painter is no coincidence.
As a teenager, Leilani expected that she
would be a visual artist as well. She at-
tended a high school with a strong art pro-
gram, where she said she and her class-
mates engaged in serious critiques of their
work. But when it came time to apply for
college, she realized that she wasn’t quite
good enough to make a career out of paint-
ing.
“I still loved it a lot, and I think you can
see that in a lot of my writing, but with grap-
pling with those artistic limits, I found that
it took the love out of it a little bit,” she said.
“With writing, that’s not the case. Even
when it’s hard, I still love it.”
After graduating college in 2012, Leilani
took the first job she could find, as an imag-
ing specialist at Ancestry.com. She went on
to work at a scientific journal, on a top-se-
cret project for the Department of Defense
and as a Postmates delivery person. When
she moved from Washington to New York to
pursue her M.F.A. at New York University
in 2017, she joined Macmillan as a produc-
tion associate.
“I’d write inside the HTML of the e-books,
so it looked like I was making corrections,”
she said, “but I was writing ‘Luster.’ ” At
other jobs, she wrote on the backs of re-
ceipts or in email drafts. Leilani started
writing under her first and middle name —
her surname is Baptiste — as a way to sepa-
rate her literary work from her employ-
ment.
Those years are present in much of her
work. The job at the Department of Defense
inspired the short story “Hard Water.” In
2016, she found herself having trouble
breathing for half a year and turned the ex-
perience into the story “Breathing Exer-
cise,” published in The Yale Review. And she
was adamant that work play a big role in the
lives of the characters in “Luster.”
“It was important to me,” Leilani said, “to
have a book where characters have work,
where characters have something they do
and care about.”
Her early writing years involved a lot of
trial and error, including a “sexy science fic-
tion” novel and another that drew on her
love of comic books and music. “I felt pre-
occupied with the idea of an original prod-uct. I wanted it to be weird and I wanted it to
be strange and I wanted it to feel new,” she
said. “But when I was working on those
projects, they felt very opaque and without
purpose.”
So when she got to grad school, she dis-
carded them and thought: “I can do better.
And not just do better, but write something
that I really mean.” “Luster,” Leilani said,
“was an experiment in speaking honestly
and in committing to a distinct point of
view.”
Her goal in developing the character of
Edie was to melt away the “studiedness”
that people — especially Black people —
learn as a survival mechanism in a world
where they are constantly surveilled. “I
wanted Edie to take up space,” she said. “I
wanted her to always be articulating to us,
even though she’s not articulating to the
people in her environment, what she
wanted.”
In a review of the book in the Virginia
Quarterly Review, the writer Kaitlyn
Greenidge described Edie as a Black
flâneur, one who walks through the city cat-
aloging her surroundings, blending in as
best she can with the crowd.
“She is playing with language in such an
invigorating way,” Greenidge said in an in-terview. “People say that about literary
novels all the time: ‘oh, the language, the
language, the language.’ But oftentimes
that ends up in inscrutable or not very excit-
ing sentences. That is not the case with
Raven. Her use of language is truly surpris-
ing.”
Leilani, who often clears her head with
long walks around New York City, was
struck by the flâneur comparison. She cred-
its poetry as formative to her writing.
“There’s something beautiful about
rhythm, about style, about pattern,” she
said. “I think because I started with a love of
poetry, the way I sort of transitioned into
writing prose and novel-length stuff and
short fiction is that I still felt obsessed by
the part of writing that is about language.”
She often obsesses over sentence-level
changes and won’t move on until she gets it
just right.
Now she writes full-time, spending most
of her days seated on her bed, slowly mak-
ing a dent in it while she writes until “the
sun is gone.”
“Because so much of my life has been
work, has been a deferral of my dream to
make anything in terms of my art,” Leilani
said, “it feels incredible that my days right
now can be about that. It feels magical.”Raven Leilani’s debut novel
tells the story of a woman
trying to make it as a painter.
By CONCEPCIÓN DE LEÓNAn Expert in Juggling
Day Jobs and Real Art
MIRANDA BARNES FOR THE NEW YORK TIMESRaven Leilani in Brooklyn. For
the protagonist of her book,
“Luster,” she said, “I didn’t
want her to be a pristine,
neatly moral character.”