The Brutalist received rave reviews when it was released, and there’s a lot of Oscar buzz surrounding it. Adrien Brody plays Hungarian Holocaust survivor László Tóth, and Felicity Jones, his wife, Erzsébet, and the two actors were highly praised. But now, there’s some backlash against the movie because of AI.
AI was used to enhance Brody’s and Jones’ performances, correcting their Hungarian accents and making them sound more polished. Editor Dávid Jancsó revealed this to Red Shark News, saying, “I am a native Hungarian speaker and I know that it is one of the most difficult languages to learn to pronounce. Even with Adrien’s Hungarian background it’s not that simple. It’s an extremely unique language. We coached [Brody and Jones] and they did a fabulous job but we also wanted to perfect it so that not even locals will spot any difference.”
The Ukrainian company Respeecher helped out here. Jancsó used his own voice to train the AI model. “Most of their Hungarian dialogue has a part of me talking in there,” he said. “We were very careful about keeping their performances. It’s mainly just replacing letters here and there.”
That on its own was bad enough for those who worry about the use of AI in filmmaking, but there was more. Jancsó also said that AI was used to create artwork of some of László’s buildings in the film. “It is controversial in the industry to talk about AI, but it shouldn’t be,” he said. “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.”
Red Shark News called this a “subtle and sensitive” use of AI, but many others disagreed. Users of X, formerly known as Twitter, soon made it clear how displeased they were.
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It’s probably fair to assume that Jancsó didn’t realize just how much controversy his comments would cause. But film fans made noise about it to the point where the film’s director, Brady Corbet, has had to release a statement defending the work.
“Adrien and Felicity’s performances are completely their own,” Corbet told Entertainment Weekly, explaining that the AI was just to “refine certain vowels and letters for accuracy.” He went on, “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 issue of AI-generated artwork, Corbet said, “[Production designer] 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.”
However, although the images themselves were hand-drawn, the inspiration for said images came from the generative AI tool Midjourney. According to an interview Becker gave in 2022, the film’s architecture consultant Griffin Frazen used Midjourney to create Brutalist buildings by feeding the machine examples of famous Brutalist work, and then these were, “redrawn by an illustrator to create mythical buildings.”
Corbet concluded his statement with, “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.” But that hasn’t stopped people from raising eyebrows. If AI can be used to adjust an actor’s performance, they wonder, how much further can it go? Will movies eventually be made without “human effort” at all?
Published: Jan 21, 2025 11:02 am