EXCLUSIVE: Following news that the 3x Golden Globe winning movie The Brutalist used AI in post to smooth the Hungarian accents of its stars Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones as well as that of its cast, the pic’s director Brady Corbet has issued a response.
“Adrien and Felicity’s performances are completely their own. 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.”
Additional generative AI usage is also utilized to conjure a series of architectural blueprints and finished buildings in the film’s closing sequence, to which Corbet says: “Judy Becker and her team did not use AI to create or render any of the buildings. 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,” adds Corbet.
Deadline has also reached out to SAG-AFTRA on the matter of AI being used in The Brutalist, particularly since Brody is up for Best Actor Drama at the SAG Awards. Some sources tell us that the practice of cleaning up audio in post is a common practice for all movies.
The Brutalist was shot in Hungary. A24 picked up the independently financed under $10M drama following its Venice Film Festival premiere. The movie was a surprise win at the Golden Globes taking home not just Best Picture Drama, but Best Actor Feature Drama for Brody and Best Director Corbet. Corbet is also nominated for best director at the DGA Awards, while the movie is up for the top Daryl F. Zanuck Best Producer award at the PGAs.
A24
How did this whole brouhaha with The Brutalist come to be? The pic’s editor Dávid Jancsó, who is also a native Hungarian speaker, revealed in a Jan. 11 interview with online video tech publication RedShark News, that the 18-month-long post-production process included the usage of Ukrainian artificial intelligence-driven speech synthesis software Respeecher.
At first, the production opted for ADR — with Brody and Jones, as well as other actors — to enhance the delivery’s accuracy, but that process ultimately didn’t work, paving the way for Respeecher, which recorded the actors’ voices to produce an AI-generated Hungarian accent. Jancsó added that he fed his voice into the AI model to further nail the dialect. The editor told RedShark news that Brody and Jones “did a fabulous job” with the pronunciation of the “difficult” and “extremely unique” language, and that the aim was perfection, “so that not even locals will spot any difference.” Brody was specifically cast by Corbet for the lead role since he’s of Hungarian descent his mother coming to the U.S. as a refugee from Hungary).
“Most of their Hungarian dialogue has a part of me talking in there,” the editor told the outlet. “We were very careful about keeping their performances. It’s mainly just replacing letters here and there. 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.”
“It is controversial in the industry to talk about AI, but it shouldn’t be,” Jancsó said. “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.”
Corbet shot the movie in the 35MM film format VistaVision.
The Brutalist follows Hungarian Jewish architect László Tóth (Brody), who emigrates to the U.S. after surviving the Holocaust, as he looks to rebuild his life, career and marriage. Once settled in unfamiliar Pennsylvania and awaiting the arrival of his wife Erzsébet (Jones), the visionary is spotted by a wealthy industrialist (Guy Pearce). The sprawling narrative — also co-written by Mona Fastvold, Corbet’s wife and an actress/filmmaker — spans 215 minutes and three decades of post-war America, featuring a 15-minute intermission.