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I still haven’t seen The Brutalist, but I’m looking forward to seeing it and I’ve heard excellent things about the film and the performances of the actors – Adrien Brody, Felicity Jones and Guy Pearce especially. The Brutalist is waging a pretty typical “late surge” Oscar campaign and it’s been working, and many believe that Adrien Brody and the film itself are major contenders for Best Actor and Best Picture. Before now, the only thing “hurting” The Brutalist’s Oscar chances are run time and the reports that most Oscar voters haven’t watched the whole movie (it’s 3 hours and 35 minutes long, and it has an old-school intermission). Well, there’s a new knock on The Brutalist which might actually hurt its Oscar campaign: editor Dávid Jancsó admitted that they used AI to massage Brody’s Hungarian accent in the film. Oh????
The Adrien Brody drama “The Brutalist” has received rave reviews and racked up nominations at multiple awards shows — but the film is also coming under fire for its use of artificial intelligence to fill in minor language gaps left by Brody and co-star Felicity Jones in a key part of the film. In an interview with Red Shark News published last week, editor Dávid Jancsó explained how the film’s team used A.I. and why they chose to in the first place.
The decision to use A.I. was born out of the need to supplement a small part of Brody and Jones’ Hungarian speaking skills. “I am a native Hungarian speaker and I know that it is one of the most difficult languages to learn to pronounce,” he said. Jancsó added, “It’s an extremely unique language.”
The moment in question is a roughly two-minute segment of the movie in which a letter from Brody’s character to his wife is read aloud. The letter is read in full in Hungarian, and it is understood by TheWrap that no other part of the actor’s performance was augmented with Respeecher.
“If you’re coming from the Anglo-Saxon world certain sounds can be particularly hard to grasp,” he said. “We first tried to ADR these harder elements with the actors. Then we tried to ADR them completely with other actors but that just didn’t work. So we looked for other options of how to enhance it.”
The team used Respeecher to record the actor’s voices and then add in A.I. words in Hungarian. Jancsó’s voice is also in the film. “Most of their Hungarian dialogue has a part of me talking in there. We were very careful about keeping their performances,” he explained. “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.”
Jancsó also defended talking about A.I. in general. “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.”
In general, I’m on Team We Don’t Need AI For 99.9% Of This Sh-t, but I have to admit, I find this fascinating. They used AI to enhance an actor’s Hungarian pronunciation and make it sound more realistic in one particular scene? That’s such a specific use and I can sort of understand why they would turn to whatever technology would make it easier. At least, easier than forcing Brody to learn every single nuance of Hungarian, with a very specific Hungarian accent. Now, do we think this AI admission will affect the Oscar race? Some Oscar-campaign watchers think so.
Posters for ‘The Brutalist’ courtesy of Instagram.
