Oscar frontrunner picture, Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist, is criticized by some critics for using artificial intelligence (A.I.) to fill in minor language gaps for Adrien Brody and his co-star Felicity Jones during a distinct part of the movie.
Film editor Dávid Jancsó revealed in an interview with Red Shark News the ways A.I. was utilized: A.I. just supplements a small portion of Adrien and Felicity’s Hungarian speaking skills.
For about two minutes, a letter from Adrien’s character written to his wife is read out loud–in full Hungarian.
According to “TheWrap,” this was one the only part of the performance that relied on Respeecher.
“If you’re coming from the Anglo-Saxon world certain sounds can be particularly hard to grasp,” Dávid said. “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.
“Most of their Hungarian dialogue has a part of me talking in there. We were careful about keeping their performances,” he shared. “It’s 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.”
Despite critics calling out The Brutalist for leaning A.I., Dávid sticks by the decision to use it.
“It is controversial in the industry to talk about A.I., but it shouldn’t be,” he noted. “We should be having open discussion about what tools A.I. can provide us with. There’s nothing in the film using AI that hasn’t been done before. It just makes the process faster. We use AI to create these tiny little details that we didn’t have the money or the time to shoot.”
Corbet Response to AI Dialogue Backlash
Brady Corbet is defending the use of AI in “The Brutalist” after facing backlash for utilizing the controversial tech to alter Brody and Jones’ Hungarian dialect and to create certain images in the film’s ending.
“Adrien and Felicity’s performances are completely their own,” Corbet said. “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.”
