The producer behind Oscar frontrunner The Brutalist has asked that the audience not “diminish a truly terrific film from a gifted filmmaker” over the revelation that it employed AI tools.
The film’s editor, Dávid Jancsó, revealed earlier this month they used the Respeecher voice cloning software to make Hungarian dialogue spoken by Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones sound more authentic.
“I am a native Hungarian speaker and I know it is one of the most difficult languages to learn to pronounce,” Jancsó told tech publication Red Shark News. “It is an extremely unique language.”
They had coached Brody and Jones to speak the language, the editor said, “and they did a fabulous job but we also wanted to perfect it so that not even locals will spot any difference”.
Jancsó said the AI software enabled them to blend his own speech with the performances of the actors.
In a column for Variety, Emmy-winning producer Stan Brooks said that the AI tools used for The Brutalist enhanced the performances of the actors.
It was a process, he claimed, that had been followed in “editing suites, sound edit rooms and mixing stages for as long as I can remember”.
“My producing career began in the late ’80s, and I’ve produced and directed over 80 movies and television episodes. For as long as I’ve been in the business, we’ve done tiny things to enhance voice performances,” he said.
Brooks pointed out that film producers used different processes and software to ensure the best performances from actors made it into the final cut. “If an actor delivers a perfect reading in take three of a scene, but there’s a mic bump, car horn or loud noise masking a word, do we go to the second-best take? Not if we can avoid it,” he said.
“With the Pro Tools software, which replaced time spent in a sound edit suite, we can try and grab just that word from another take and place into take three. We save the best performance.”
The producer then explained the process of ADR, or additional dialogue replacement, in which actors record dialogue for a scene shot somewhere noisy.
He said Donald Sutherland was a “big fan” of a similar process called looping, which he learned from “none other than Federico Fellini on Casanova”.
Brooks, however, clarified that he did not condone the “perils of AI”. He did not want “AI to start writing movies, series, or other original content without crediting and paying the dozens (or hundreds? thousands? millions?) of sources that it referenced to do so,” he wrote.
To differentiate between the tools used on The Brutalist and the kind of AI he said could be detrimental, Brooks brought up a film that he directed recently, where a sound technician used an AI tool to create dialogue that had been mistakenly left unrecorded.
“In that innocuous moment at 11 o’clock at night on a darkened mixing stage, I saw the embodiment of everyone’s fears. This AI could easily replace loop groups. Real performers. Real jobs,” he wrote.
Brooks ended by asking for more understanding of the filmmaking process and for viewers to not confuse it with situations where AI was “actually a threat to people’s livelihoods and careers”.
“Using AI as a tool to replace a process we’ve already performed for decades is not that threat. So don’t let this noise around The Brutalist diminish a truly terrific film from a gifted filmmaker.”
The Brutalist was one of the big winners at this year’s Golden Globes, winning Best Director, Best Male Actor for Drama and Best Picture for Drama, and quickly became a frontrunner for the Oscars, with 10 nominations.
Shortly after the interview with Jancsó dropped, there was speculation that this could hurt the film’s chances at the Oscars. Director Brady Corbet defended the film saying: “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.”
Corbet also clarified that AI was not used 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.”
