Is that one accent coach on YouTube about to be out of a job? Here’s everything to know about the use of AI in The Brutalist, including how director Brady Corbet and star Adrien Brody have responded.
How did this start?
The Brutalist used AI tools to zhuzh the Hungarian of stars Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones, according to the film’s editor Dávid Jancsó. “If you’re coming from the Anglo-Saxon world certain sounds can be particularly hard to grasp,” he told tech mag Red Shark News. “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.”
Was anything else done with AI in The Brutalist?
The film also used generative AI to make some of László Tóth’s drawings and completed buildings at the Venice Biennale.
Why AI?
Before AI, movies had a different tool for getting accents down pat: AH (acting harder). “I am a native Hungarian speaker and I know that it is one of the most difficult languages to learn to pronounce,” Janscó said. Even Brody, who has a Hungarian mother, apparently needed the robo-Hungarians to step in. “It’s an extremely unique language. We coached them and they did a fabulous job but we also wanted to perfect it so that not even locals will spot any difference.” Janscó compared the tweaks AI did to something that used to be done in ProTools by a human (probably unionized) sound engineer. “You can do this in ProTools yourself,” he said, “but we had so much dialogue in Hungarian that we really needed to speed up the process otherwise we’d still be in post.”
How is the film world reacting?
With Conclave memes, duh.
How has Corbet responded?
The director issued a statement to Deadline. “Adrien and Felicity’s performances are completely their own,” it reads. “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.”
How has Brody responded?
Speaking to Vanity Fair, Brody asserted that The Brutalist had “quite a typical postproduction process” and that there was “no technology implemented that takes work from people.” Noting that he grew up with Hungarian parents who spoke the language at home, Brody added that he added Hungarian curse words that weren’t in the script. “Obviously, [Corbet’s] postproduction process only touched some lines spoken in Hungarian,” the actor said. “Nothing of the dialect was altered; that’s all done through a lot of hard work with our wonderful dialect coach, Tanera Marshall. We all worked incredibly hard on it, and we all know that.”
Brody said he understand that “even just the mention of AI is a bit triggering” right now, but suggested that people haven’t grasped the full truth of this situation. “We live in a time where, unfortunately, things can get misappropriated quite easily on the internet,” he said, “and I just wish people had more understanding of the context and facts of the circumstances.”