The Brutalist‘s smooth march to the Oscars has hit a snare over an admission that the film used AI.
In an interview with the video tech publication Red Shark News, The Brutalist editor Dávid Jancsó said the film, about a Holocaust survivor architect, used AI tools to tweak actors Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones’ Hungarian dialogue to make it sound more authentic. The revelation sparked a social media backlash from people who think AI has no place in filmmaking.
The debate comes at a moment when many in Hollywood think AI poses an existential crisis to their careers: Objections to AI were central in the writers’ and actors’ strikes that hobbled Hollywood productions last year.
Much of The Brutalist is in Hungarian, and Jancsó said technology from the Ukrainian specialist Respeecher helped make it more accurate.
“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.”
But online critics noted that getting an accent right is typically the domain of actors. Brody won the Golden Globe for best actor in a drama before Jancsó’s interview came to light, and he is a front-runner at the Oscars. The Brutalist is also a strong contender in several categories after the film won the Golden Globe for best picture in the drama category, and Brady Corbett won for best director. (Jones was nominated for best actress in a drama.)
This is the period in awards season when Oscar contenders seem to be vetted more carefully than political appointees. Last month, Anora came under scrutiny for not using intimacy coordinators, whose inclusion on film sets became popular after #MeToo.
More recently, Emilia Perez has come under criticism in some circles for its portrayal of Mexicans and its transgender protagonists — though some critics and fans have praised the film for its representations.
The Brutalist and AI
The AI issue for The Brutalist may be the most sensitive, though, because many in the industry consider AI such a threat. It also raises questions about the underdog narrative around The Brutalist: The film’s team has noted that it was made for less than $10 million — low for any Hollywood film, but especially a historical epic like The Brutalist.
In an interview for MovieMaker‘s winter issue, which did not touch on AI, The Brutalist production designer Judy Becker said she and others worked for less than they usually would because they believed in Corbett’s vision. (Corbett has clarified that Becker did not use any AI.)
“I would have done it for free if I could afford to do it,” she said. “The budget was ‘low’ because Brady hired the best craftspeople who normally work for more money.”
The fear among many Hollywood artisans is that filmmakers will cut corners with AI, at the expense of paying people. One could argue, for example, that a dialect coach should have helped Brody and Jones perfect their accents, with no help from AI.
One X user gave a brutally succinct version of the complaint: “They used AI in The Brutalist not only to avoid paying visual artists for their work but also to manipulate the actors’ accents, a fundamental aspect of… acting. This is a disgrace.”
More lively debate took place on Reddit, with some treating AI as a hard no, and others saying its part of the new reality of filmmaing.
For his part, the film’s director, Corbett, argues that humans were key to every part of the actors’ performances, and that AI was only used as a refining tool.
“Adrien and Felicity’s performances are completely their own. They worked for months with dialect coach Tanera Marshall to perfect their accents,” Corbett said in a statement to MovieMaker. “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.”
But The Brutalist doesn’t just use AI for dialogue. Jancsó told Red Shark News that GenAI was used right at the very end of the film during a sequence at the Venice Biennale to create a series of architectural drawings and finished buildings in the style of Brody’s character, fictional architect László Tóth.
“It is controversial in the industry to talk about AI, but it shouldn’t be,” Jancsó told Red Shark News. “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.”
Corbett explained in his statement: “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. “
He concluded: “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.”
Main image: The Brutalist. A24
Editor’s Note: Update with longer statement from The Brutalist director Brady Corbett.