David Cronenberg believes there was a "campaign against" 'The Brutalist'.
The 82-year-old filmmaker has defended the Oscar-nominated movie after it came under attack over the use of AI to enhance the Hungarian dialogue between Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones, and insisted the technology is used "all the time" in the industry.
Speaking at the London Soundtrack Festival, he said: “I must confess, there was a scandal [with] 'The Brutalist'.
“There was a discussion about Adrien Brody… but apparently they used artificial intelligence to improve his accent.
"I think it was a campaign against 'The Brutalist' by some other Oscar nominees. It’s very much a Harvey Weinstein kind of thing, though he wasn’t around.”
David argued directors “mess with actors’ voices all the time,” using his own 1993 film 'M. Butterfly' and John Lone’s performance as an example.
He said: “When he was being this character, this singer, I raised the pitch of his voice and when he’s revealed as a man, I lowered to his natural voice.
“This is just a part of moviemaking.”
The backlash over 'The Brutalist' began when editor Dávid Jancsó explained AI tools from Respeecher had been used to enhance the dialogue, noting that as a native Hungarian speaker, it can be “one of the most difficult languages to learn to pronounce.”
He told Red Shark News: "If you’re coming from the Anglo-Saxon world certain sounds can be particularly hard to grasp...
“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.
“It is controversial in the industry to talk about AI, but it shouldn’t be. 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."
Director Brady Corbet later defended the "authenticity" of his lead stars' performances amid the backlash.
He said in a statement: “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.”
