De-aging an actor is essentially giving them a digital face-lift, and Lola's team do the same work with digital composites a skilled plastic surgeon would do with a scalpel. The two professions turn out to have similar ways of talking. "The most obvious thing is that the skin along the jaw in most people tends to get lower and lower and sag a little bit as you get older. Particularly around the throat and the Adam's Apple area, you’ll get a build-up of extra skin down there," Claus told me. "One thing we’ll have to do to de-age someone is restore that elasticity and try to not only to remove the excess skin, but pull it back up to where it once was."
Our cheeks thin out and sink as we get older, so Lola also added a little more fat to the middle of Douglas's cheeks. And since human ears and noses never stop growing, they also had to shrink Douglas's back to their 1980s' sizes, as well as remove some of his ear wrinkles. Then it came time to restore what Claus called Douglas's "youthful glow," adding shine to his skin and hiding the blood vessels in his nose.
The result in the finished film is eerie in its accuracy; it's as if Douglas stepped into the room straight off the cover of Time. There's still a telltale digital sheen, but the de-aging effect has come a long way in the nine years since X3. I asked Claus if this was because technology had gotten better. "It really hasn't changed," he said. "The basic tools have been the same for decades. It's more the experience of the artists that are actually doing the work." In other words, their skills have grown over time — just like their ears.
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