TL;DR: The awards season frontrunner The Brutalist faces intense backlash over using AI tools during post-production. The movie’s director, Brady Corbet, responded to the criticism, stating that the crew only used AI to refine the authenticity of a few Hungarian dialogues in the film and that it didn’t replace the actors’ hard work.
The AI tools in question come from the Ukranian company Respeecher. Corbet told The Hollywood Reporter that they only used the tools in post-production to enhance the accuracy of specific Hungarian vowel and letter sounds spoken by Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones. He maintains that the AI editing did not replace their months of work perfecting their accents with a dialect coach.
The film’s editor, Dávid Jancsó, who first revealed the AI usage in an interview with Red Shark News, explained that as a native Hungarian speaker, he recognized how challenging those nuanced sounds can be for non-native actors. Since the film had a tight budget of around $10 million, they opted to use AI to make targeted adjustments at scale rather than manually editing each sound they figured could be improved. Jancsó also insisted that the work done in post was almost identical to traditional dialogue editing techniques, except aided by technology instead of human editors.
“We were very careful about keeping their performances. It’s mainly just replacing letters here and there,” said Jancsó. “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.”
Jancsó also revealed that the production team used some AI in background architectural renderings. Corbet clarified that they did not use it to create or render any full building designs; they only used images made to look like dated digital renders.
Critics have praised Brody’s and Jones’s acting performances in the WWII refugee drama. However, the mere notion of employing AI has stoked controversy, with some arguing it should disqualify the film from awards. Besides The Brutalist, other hit films from last year, including Civil War, Alien: Romulus, and Furiosa have also faced criticism for using AI. After the 2023 writers and actors strike, such sentiments reached a boiling point that demanded reassurances that technology wouldn’t replace human creativity.
The Brutalist is not the first film to use Respeecher. The AI voice cloning technology became popular after adding the voice of James Earl Jones to Disney’s Obi-Wan Kenobi series.
