“The Brutalist” filmmaker Brady Corbet responded Monday to mounting backlash to his film’s use of artificial intelligence in post-production, arguing that stars Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones’ performances “are completely their own,” despite employing an AI tool to auto-correct their Hungarian speech.
“Adrien and Felicity’s performances are completely their own. They worked for months with dialect coach Tanera Marshall to perfect their accents,” Corbet said in a statement obtained by TheWrap via distributor A24. “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,” he said.
Corbet also denied that production designer Judy Becker and her team used AI “to create or render any of the buildings,” instead noting “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 added.
Concerns over the lauded drama’s use of the tool Respeecher first ignited when, in an interview with Red Shark News published last week, editor Dávid Jancsó revealed that he relied on the tool to feed his own Hungarian speech into the editing process to help round out certain phrases and pronunciations as the actors spoke at length in his native tongue.
Despite the tool being used to correct some elements of the actors’ Hungarian dialogue, no technology was used to alter the stars’ English language dialogue, according to an individual with knowledge of the film’s process.
The Hungarian dialogue only occurs within a two-minute segment of the movie — which clocks in at a total run time of 3 hours and 35 minutes — during which Brody’s character reads a letter aloud.
“I am a native Hungarian speaker and I know that it is one of the most difficult languages to learn to pronounce,” Jancsó said in the interview, adding that a background from the Anglo-Saxon world makes “certain sounds … be particularly hard to grasp.” “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.”
It was then that Jancsó and his team used Respeecher to record the actor’s voices as well as Jancsó’s own voice to record the correct pronunciation, using A.I. to replace the correct pronunciation into Brody’s dialogue. “We were very careful about keeping their performances,” Jancsó explained.
“‘The Brutalist’ is a film about human complexity, and every aspect of its creation was driven by human effort, creativity, and collaboration,” Corbet said. “We are incredibly proud of our team and what they’ve accomplished here.”
