Filmmaker Brady Corbet's critically acclaimed period epic The Brutalist has been the topic of a heated social media debate and outrage for the last few days after an interview of its editor David Jancso, wherein he mentioned that the nearly four-hour film had sought the assistance of AI tools to make the post-production process faster.
In a chat with Red Shark News, Jancso pointed to the fact that since the film's principal characters, played by Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones, come from a Hungarian background, with their language being "one of the most difficult", the team had to tweak their accents a bit using the Respeecher software to perfect it, to mask any noticeable differences.
Jancso, a Hungarian native himself, shared that the editing team initially opted for ADR (automated dialogue replacement) to fix the "harder elements" and even used the same for the other actors but later turned to the aforementioned Ukrainian software company to employ their AI tools for speech editing, with the permission of everyone involved.
“Most of their Hungarian dialogue has a part of me talking in there. 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-production,” he explained.
Jancso's statements met with much backlash and knee-jerk reactions after some assumed Brody's Hungarian-accented English-language dialogues were AI-generated, information now debunked as untrue by a production source.
Some outrage was also aimed at the information related to the role of generative AI in creating “architectural drawings and finished buildings" designed by the architect character played by Brody.
Director Brady Corbet has now clarified that the information about the film's AI use doing the rounds is false. In a chat with Gold Derby, he said the performances of Brody and Jones remain unaltered. “Their performances are completely their own. They worked for months with dialect coach Tanera Marshall to perfect their accents,” he added.
Elaborating further, Corbet clarified that “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.”
As for the buildings' designs, Corbet recalled that all images were drawn by hand. “Judy Becker and her (art department) 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 said.
The Brutalist recently bagged three trophies at the Golden Globe Awards, with Corbet taking home Best Drama and Best Director, aside from Best Drama Actor for Brody. After getting nine nominations from BAFTA (British Academy Film Awards), the film has become a prime Oscar contender, with multiple nominations expected, and possibly some wins, at this year's Oscars ceremony.
