We’re neck deep in awards season, and Brady Corbet’s “The Brutalist” has already raked in three Golden Globes. The film is receiving criticism after an editor admitted the filmmakers used AI to tweak stars Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones’ Hungarian dialogue. As well as to help create a sequence towards the end.
A few hours after this news broke, the director responded backing up certain claims while dismissing others.
AI In Dialogue
“The Brutalist” centers around Hungarian refugees who emigrate to the U.S. after World War II. As you can imagine this means that most of the dialogue is Hungarian. Editor Dávid Jancsó revealed during an interview that filmmakers used AI tools from Ukrainian specialist Respeecher. They claim this was done to tweak Brody’s and Jones’ dialogue to make it sound more authentic.
“I am a native Hungarian speaker and I know that it is one of the most difficult languages to learn to pronounce,” Jancsó told Red Shark News. “If you’re coming from the Anglo-Saxon world certain sounds can be particularly hard to grasp.”
Jancsó praises the star’s performance but the final product was still missing the mark on some specific Hungarian vocal sounds. Even after the use of automated dialogue replacement (ADR) was implemented. “We first tried to ADR these harder elements with the actors,” he explains. “Then we tried to ADR them completely with other actors but that just didn’t work. So we looked for other options of how to enhance it.”
This is where “The Brutalist” started coming up against the almighty dollar, given its budget of less than $10 million. The filmmakers decided to have Brady and Jones record their own voices for the AI. “We were very careful about keeping their performances. It’s mainly just replacing letters here and there,” said Jancsó. “You can do this in ProTools yourself, but we had so much dialogue in Hungarian that we really needed to speed up the process otherwise we’d still be in post.”
Corbet’s Response
Only using Respeecher to tweak the performaces that were already there is a claim backed up by the director.
“Adrien and Felicity’s performances are completely their own,” Corbet wrote in a statement. “They worked for months with dialect coach Tanera Marshall to perfect their accents. Innovative Respeecher technology was used in Hungarian language dialogue editing only, specifically to refine certain vowels and letters for accuracy. No English language was changed. This was a manual process, done by our sound team and Respeecher in post-production. The aim was to preserve the authenticity of Adrien and Felicity’s performances in another language, not to replace or alter them and done with the utmost respect for the craft.”
But Wait There’s (Possibly) More AI
Generative AI was also supposedly used for a sequence at the end of the film. Specifically, a scene where we see a bunch of architectural drawings and finished buildings designed by Brody’s character, architect László Tóth. According to the editor, it seems that the sketches were hand-drawn but the buildings were generated.
“It is controversial in the industry to talk about AI, but it shouldn’t be,” Jancsó explains. “We should be having a very open discussion about what tools AI can provide us with. There’s nothing in the film using AI that hasn’t been done before. It just makes the process a lot faster. We use AI to create these tiny little details that we didn’t have the money or the time to shoot.”
These revelations are what sparked a torrent of online outrage with people demanding “The Brutalist” be disqualified from, at least, the Oscars. Prompting Corbet to release his own statement.
Corbet’s Response
This claim the filmmaker flat out denies. “Judy Becker and her team did not use AI to create or render any of the buildings,” the director states. “All images were hand-drawn by artists. To clarify, in the memorial video featured in the background of a shot, our editorial team created pictures intentionally designed to look like poor digital renderings circa 1980.”
“The Brutalist is a film about human complexity, and every aspect of its creation was driven by human effort, creativity, and collaboration. We are incredibly proud of our team and what they’ve accomplished here,” Corbet adds.
While this could be Corbet saving face considering how frowned upon most uses of AI are. We are more inclined to belive the director, over a single editor. Purely because one is more involved in the overall fillmaking process than the other.
We’ll keep you posted on updates about “The Brutalist” use of AI as it develops. You can check out a trailer for the film below:
