Brady Corbet Issues Statement About the Use of AI-Powered Software in Making ‘The Brutalist’
Controversy has engulfed Brady Corbet’s three-time Golden Globe winner “The Brutalist” since a January 11 interview the film’s editor Dávid Jancsó gave video tech site RedShark News in which he said that he used AI-driven tech to smooth the Hungarian dialogue of actors Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones.
Jancsó, a native Hungarian speaker himself, said that he used the AI-powered Ukrainian voice synthesizer software Respeecher to mix his own voice into the dialogue articulated by Brody and Jones so that their pronunciations would be perfect.
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“Most of their Hungarian dialogue has a part of me talking in there,” Jancsó said. “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.”
A social media firestorm ensued. Such is the kneejerk backlash to anything AI-related in filmmaking.
Now, Corbet has weighed in on the controversy himself in a statement to Deadline.
“Adrien and Felicity’s performances are completely their own. 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.”
To be fair, this is not an especially unique use of Respeecher. The Kyiv-based company even touted their post-production role on Jacques Audiard’s “Emilia Pérez,” another of the season’s top awards contenders, on their own Facebook page. That film’s re-recording mixer, Cyril Holtz, gave an interview at Cannes in May 2024, in which he touted using Respeecher to blend Karla Sofia Gascon’s voice with that of French popstar Camille, who co-wrote the score, as a way of extending Gascon’s octave range. The “Star Wars” series on Disney+ have also used Respeecher, including to vocally clone James Earl Jones’s voice as Darth Vader on the “Obi-Wan Kenobi” series.
Regarding the use of AI to generate images of buildings — “The Brutalist,” as its title would suggest, is about an architect, played by Brody — Corbet also noted to Deadline, “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.”
“‘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.”
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