Brady Corbet’s award contender The Brutalist is coming under fire online after the film’s editor admitted in an interview some AI was used to enhance the performance of the film’s leads, Adrian Brody and Felicity Jones.
In an interview with video tech publication Red Shark News, editor Dávid Jancsó said the filmmakers used AI tools from Ukrainian specialist Respeecher to tweak the Brody’s and Jones’ Hungarian dialogue in the film 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 says in the piece. “If you’re coming from the Anglo-Saxon world certain sounds can be particularly hard to grasp.”
Critics have applauded both Brody and Jones for their performances in the film, in which they play Hungarian refugees who emigrate to the U.S. after World War II. Brody’s starring turn won the Golden Globe for best actor in a drama and he is considered a front-runner for this year’s Oscars.
Much of the film’s dialogue is in Hungarian and Jancsó says it was important to make it as accurate to native speakers as possible. Jancsó praises Brody’s and Jones’ performance but says small tweaks were needed to enhance specific Hungarian vocal sounds. Initially, the filmmakers tried to re-record these elements in post.
“We first tried to ADR these harder elements with the actors. 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,” he says.
Under tight budget constraints — the entire budget for The Brutalist was less than $10 million — the filmmakers used technology from Ukrainian AI startup Respeecher to finesse the delivery. Jancsó says Brady and Jones recorded their own voices for the AI and that he fed his own native Hungarian delivery into the system as a model.
“Most of their Hungarian dialogue has a part of me talking in there,” says Jancsó. “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.”
Jancsó says Generative AI was also used in a sequence at the end of the film, to create a series of architectural drawings and finished buildings supposedly designed by Brody’s character, the fictional architect László Tóth.
“It is controversial in the industry to talk about AI, but it shouldn’t be,” Jancsó tells Red Shark. “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.”
But the news has sparked online outrage, with many condemning the use of AI in the film and suggesting it should disqualify it for awards consideration.
“My take on The Brutalist AI thing is it’s a slippery slope to award Adrian Brody knowing his accent was edited with AI,” noted one user on X. “IMO altering a performance with AI like that should automatically disqualify someone from these awards shows.”
“I saw The Brutalist on 35mm film and was utterly taken aback by how beautiful the movie was,” noted another. “Learning that ai was used not just to enhance Adrien Drody’s accent but to design buildings in the movie is absolutely pathetic.”
Others argued that it would be unfair to reduce the actors’ performances to a few vowel pronunciations.
“On one hand, it slightly diminishes the detailing, but I can’t say the accent was a deciding factor in [Brody’s] performance’s resonance,” noted one user on X. “I wasn’t moved by the accent; I was moved by how he conveyed emotion.”
Ukrainian company Respeecher has been at the cutting edge of audio AI for several years now. The company made headlines —and sparked controversy in some quarters —after they did a deal with Lucasfilm to use the iconic voice of the late James Earl Jones for future Darth Vader projects. Jones had authorized the use of his voice recordings in this manner. The company also worked with Lucasfilm to create a younger version of Mark Hamill’s voice for a Luke Skywalker cameo in the final episode of the second season of The Mandalorian.
