In a new interview with the Los Angeles Times, South Park creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker opened up about a deepfake Donald Trump film they developed prior to the pandemic.
The movie, which would’ve been Stone and Parker’s first feature since 2004’s Team America: World Police, was a day away from beginning shooting before the world shut down amid the onslaught of COVID-19.
“We were going to start shooting on the day that the pandemic shut everything down,” Parker told the Los Angeles Times. “It was months and months of getting ready for that movie, to just being like, ‘Nope, it’s over.’”
Parker went on to describe the scrapped project, which he and Stone wrote with actor and comedian Peter Serafinowicz, saying it followed the founding of their deepfake company Deep Voodoo.
“It was going to be Deep Fake: The Movie,” Parker, 52, explained. “It was about this guy who looked exactly like Trump because we deep fake Trump’s face onto him. And it was this whole funny thing because, of course, it ends up with Trump just naked and getting run through the wringer and everything, and that’s why it was so funny and so timely.”
Stone, 51, said the film is “on hold,” while admitting they haven’t scrapped the idea for good. “I don’t know, [Trump] could be running again,” he said.
“It was very timely and the timeliness of it has passed,” Parker said. “We’d have to majorly rethink it to do it now.”
