The Brady Corbet-directed awards contender The Brutalist is causing a stir after the film’s editor, Dávid Jancsó, revealed artificial intelligence was used to enhance the performances of the film’s stars, Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones.
While speaking with Red Shark News, Jancsó said the filmmakers used AI to change Brody and Jones’ Hungarian 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 said. “If you’re coming from the Anglo-Saxon world certain sounds can be particularly hard to grasp.”
He continued by praising the actors’ performances, but saying the small tweaks were necessary to enhance some Hungarian vocal sounds.
“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.”
The revelation that AI was used has sparked outrage online. On Monday, Corbet issued a response to the backlash to Deadline.
“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,” 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.”
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