Andrew Niccol has a knack for anticipating trends. He wrote the screenplay for the 1998 Oscar-nominated hit The Truman Show back in 1995, when the closest thing we had to reality TV was 60 Minutes. And he wrote and directed the spiffy futuristic nightmare Gattaca in 1997, well before the ongoing debate about genetic engineering, cloning, and stem cells became nightly-news fodder.

With Simone, however, he feels he may have missed the boat. The whimsical satire about a washed-up director named Viktor (Al Pacino) who revives his career with the computer-generated starlet of the title was supposed to have been released a year ago. But according to Niccol, the studio, New Line, was too tied up with a film from fellow New Zealander Peter Jackson: The Lord of the Rings.

"It could’ve been out last fall," he acknowledges ruefully. "It was the year of the digital actor. It was the year of Final Fantasy. But anyway, it doesn’t matter. If your film could only last a year, then it wasn’t much of a film. But it would have gotten a lot of free publicity."

Timelessness counts as much as timeliness, perhaps, and Simone’s theme of artifice and reality is as ancient as the myth of Pygmalion to which the film coyly alludes (on, of course, a computer screen). Viktor has created a composite pixelized beauty who is so perfect that the whole world falls in love with her. His problem is that he must keep from Simone’s worshippers the knowledge that their idol doesn’t exist.

"She is just this media creation," says Niccol. "So Simone is about how untrustworthy the image has become. Because we can’t attain the level of beauty that we see, because it doesn’t actually exist. Because every magazine cover that you see is retouched. And every moving image is now being retouched also. I won’t name any performer, but there’s a well-known singer who supervises the electronic retouching of her videos so that she has the most perfectly sculpted body. She sits over the shoulder of one of the digital artists — who worked on Simone, actually. And the line has crossed into journalism. People look at the Osama bin Laden footage recently and they say, ‘No, no, he’s dead. That’s been doctored.’ And that wouldn’t have even occurred to us five years ago. The fact that the visual image is now so unreliable is interesting."

So interesting, in fact, that Niccol has agreed to perpetuate that unreliability in his promotion of the movie. The character of Simone, according to the studio, is played by "herself," even though earlier credits ascribe the role to Canadian model Rachel Roberts. So Niccol is in a position opposite that of Pacino’s character: instead of pretending that his actress is real, he must pretend that she doesn’t exist.

"Well, the studio likes to say we’re going to have life imitate art and we’re going to keep this organically going, so the process of marketing the film is almost the same as the film, in a strange way. Is she a real fake or is she a fake fake? It’s like The Blair Witch Project. Even though that was bogus, people still, some to this day, log on to the Internet, convinced that it’s real. And in fact Simone is part pixel, part flesh-and-blood. And she is more than one person."

In the future, will computers eliminate the human element altogether, so that the only actors we have are digitized? "God, I hope so. Just kidding. No, I think the marketplace is going to decide if it wants artificial actors. If people want it, studios are going to give it to them. What does Pacino’s character say? ‘If the performance is genuine, what does it matter if the actor’s real?’ And for me that’s the whole point. If you can be moved or touched by an artificial actor, God love them."

Simone opens this Friday, August 23; Peter’s review is on page 4 of the Arts section, and you’ll find show times in "Film Listings," on page 25.