- The film editor for “The Brutalist” revealed the movie used AI in post-production.
- Writer-director Brady Corbet responded to the controversy and defended the film’s use of AI.
- This likely won’t affect the Oscar nominations, as voting ended before the controversy went mainstream.
People online can’t stop talking about “The Brutalist.” But this time, the chatter isn’t about the movie’s over three-hour runtime, its eye-catching visual style, or the acclaimed performances propelling it to awards season glory. It’s about AI, and whether the film’s use of it should make it less deserving of artistic praise and potential awards.
The controversy reached a peak this weekend after excerpts from an interview with “The Brutalist” editor Dávid Jancsó went viral online.
Jancsó told online tech magazine Red Shark News that the production team used AI to perfect minute pronunciation details in the Hungarian accents of stars Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones, who play Hungarian Jews who flee Europe after World War II in search of a better life in America. (The film includes scenes in both Hungarian and English.)
Jancsó, who is a native Hungarian speaker himself, said the language is one of the most difficult to learn to pronounce. So while Brody and Jones had dialect coaching and did a “fabulous job” learning the language, the filmmakers wanted to perfect the dialogue “so that not even locals will spot any difference.”
‘The Brutalist’ used AI to improve Adrien Brody’s accent
Jancsó said they first tried to use ADR (automated dialogue replacement) in post-production, but it didn’t work. So the team opted to feed Brody and Jones’ voices into Respeecher, a Ukrainian software company that uses AI to let one person speak in the voice of another, then fed in Jancsó’s own voice to finesse it.
“We were very careful about keeping their performances. It’s mainly just replacing letters here and there,” he said in the interview. Jancsó added that generative AI was used to craft the final sequence where viewers see architectural drawings and completed buildings in the style of Adrien Brody’s fictional architect László Tóth.
The editor said that he knew it was controversial to talk about using AI in film, but maintained that “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,” Jancsó said.
Some fans are turning on ‘The Brutalist,’ but the news won’t impact Oscar nominations
The revelation, which comes days before Thursday’s Oscar nominations announcement, threw social media into a frenzy, with many film fans criticizing the movie’s use of AI. Some have even suggested the movie (or Brody) should be disqualified over it.
The nearly four-hour epic has been a sensation since premiering at the Venice Film Festival in September, where director Brady Corbet won the festival’s Silver Lion award. In the months since, it’s continued to rack up more wins, most recently taking home three Golden Globes: best director for Corbet, best actor in a drama for Brody, and best motion picture drama.
Users on X joked that “The Brutalist” is the latest best picture contender to be knocked out of the race after “Anora” faced backlash for not using an intimacy coordinator, clearing the way for papal thriller “Conclave” to win.
But if the Ralph Fiennes drama does clinch a nomination and “The Brutalist” doesn’t, it likely won’t be due to the latter’s use of AI: Oscar voting, which was extended due to the LA fires, concluded on Friday January 17, after the interview was published but before online chatter over the controversy picked up steam that weekend.
As for whether it will affect the chances of “The Brutalist” actually winning anything, that’s less clear and all depends on how the voting bodies that make up the Academy feel about AI usage (that is, if the voters even finished watching the whole movie).
Director Brady Corbet responded to the uproar
In an email statement shared with BI by the film’s distributor A24, Corbet defended and clarified the use of AI in “The Brutalist,” maintaining that Brody and Jones’ performances are “completely their own” and that nothing was substantively altered.
“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,” Corbet said. “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.”
Corbet also said that AI wasn’t used to render any of the buildings, which were all hand-drawn. “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,” he said.
The Brutalist’ isn’t the only movie to use AI
AI has been major point of contention in Hollywood, particularly during the 2023 writers and actors strikes, when creatives demanded reassurances that the technology wouldn’t replace their work.
The popularity of AI, and Respeecher in particular, is growing. The company struck a deal with Lucasfilm to clone James Earl Jones’ voice for use in the 2022 Star Wars series “Obi-Wan Kenobi.”
“The Brutalist” also wasn’t the only film that used AI in 2024. Respeecher said in a Facebook post that “Emilia Pérez,” another awards season favorite, used its software, though it didn’t say in what capacity.
Reps for “Emilia Pérez” didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment, but an interview with the movie’s sound mixer indicates AI cloning tools were used to help Karla Sofia Gascón sing beyond her vocal range, per The Guardian.
Other 2024 films like “Civil War,” “Furiosa,” “Alien: Romulus,” and “Late Night With the Devil,” also faced varying degrees of criticism for their use of AI in visuals.
Reps for “The Brutalist” and Respeecher, as well as Brody, Jones, and Jancsó, didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.
