The Controversy and Backlash of ‘Brutalist’ AI, Explained

  • The film editor for The Brutalist revealed that the film used artificial intelligence in post-production.
  • Writer-director Brady Corbet responded to the controversy and defended the film’s use of AI.
  • This likely won’t affect the Oscar nominations, as voting ended before the controversy took off.

People on the internet can’t stop talking about The Brutalist. But this time, the chatter isn’t about the film’s three-hour-plus running time, its eye-catching visual style, or the acclaimed performances that propel it to awards season glory. It’s about artificial intelligence and whether the film’s use of it should make it less deserving of artistic praise and potential awards.

The controversy came to a head this weekend after parts of an interview with “The Brutalist” editor Dávid Jancsó went viral online.

Jancsó told online tech magazine Red Shark News that the production team used AI to perfect minute pronunciation details in the Hungarian accents of stars Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones, who play Hungarian Jews fleeing Europe after World War II in search of a better life in America. . (The film includes scenes in Hungarian and English.)

Jancsó, who is a native Hungarian speaker himself, said the language is one of the most difficult to learn to pronounce. So while Brody and Jones had dialect training and did a “fabulous job” learning the language, the filmmakers wanted to perfect the dialogue “so that even the locals wouldn’t notice any difference.”

“The Brutalist” used AI to improve Adrien Brody’s accent

Jancsó said they first tried to use ADR (automated dialogue replacement) in post-production, but it didn’t work. So the team chose to feed Brody and Jones’ voices into Respeecher, a Ukrainian software company that uses AI to allow one person to speak in another’s voice, then feeds Jancsó’s own voice to enhance it.

“We were very careful to keep their performances. It’s mostly just replacing cards here and there,” he said in the interview. Jancsó added that generative AI was used to create the final sequence where viewers see architectural drawings and completed buildings in the style of Adrien Brody’s fictional architect László Tóth.

The editor said that he knew it was controversial to talk about the use of AI in the film, but claimed that “there’s nothing in the film that uses AI that hasn’t been done before.”

“It just makes the process so much faster. We use AI to create these tiny little details that we didn’t have the money or time to shoot,” Jancsó said.

Some fans are turning on ‘The Brutalist,’ but the news won’t affect Oscar nominations

The revelation, which comes days before Thursday’s Oscar nominations are announced, caused a frenzy on social media, with many fans of the film criticizing the film’s use of AI. Some have even suggested that the movie (or Brody) should be disqualified for this.

The nearly four-hour epic has been a sensation since premiering at the Venice Film Festival in September, where director Brady Corbet won the festival’s Silver Lion. In the months since, it has continued to rack up more wins, most recently picking up three Golden Globes: Best Director for Corbet, Best Actor in a Drama for Brody, and Best Motion Picture Drama.

Users on X joked that “The Brutalist” is the latest Best Picture contender to be eliminated from the race after “Anora” faced backlash for not using an intimacy coordinator, making way for papal thriller “Conclave” to earned.

But if Ralph Fiennes’ drama gets a nomination and “The Brutalist” doesn’t, it likely won’t be because of the latter’s use of AI: Oscar voting, which was extended due to the LA fires, ended up Friday January 17th. , after the interview was published, but before online chatter about the controversy picked up steam that weekend.

As for whether it will affect the chances of “The Brutalist” actually winning anything, that’s less clear, and it all depends on how the voting bodies that make up the Academy feel about the use of AI (ie, if voters even finished watching the entire movie ).

Director Brady Corbet responded to the hype

In an email statement shared with BI by the film’s distributor A24, Corbet defended and clarified the use of AI in “The Brutalist,” asserting that Brody and Jones’ performances are “entirely theirs” and that nothing has been fundamentally changed .

“Innovative speaker technology was only used in editing the Hungarian-language dialogue, specifically to refine certain vowels and letters for accuracy. No English language was changed,” Corbet said. “This was a manual process, done by our voice team and Respeecher in post-production. The goal was to preserve the authenticity of Adrien and Felicity’s performances in another language, not to replace or alter them, and made with maximum respect for the craft.”

Corbet also said that AI was not used to make any of the buildings, which were all hand-drawn. “To clarify, in the commemorative video shown in the background of a photograph, our editorial team created photographs deliberately designed to look like poor digital renderings circa 1980,” he said.

The Brutalist’ isn’t the only film that uses AI

Artificial intelligence has been a major point of contention in Hollywood, particularly during the 2023 writers’ and actors’ strikes, when creators sought reassurance that the technology would not replace their jobs.

The popularity of AI, and Respeecher in particular, is growing. The company reached an agreement with Lucasfilm to clone the voice of James Earl Jones for use in the 2022 Star Wars series “Obi-Wan Kenobi.”

“The Brutalist” also wasn’t the only film to use AI in 2024. Respeecher said in a Facebook post that “Emilia Pérez,” another awards season favorite, used his software, though he didn’t say in what capacity.

Emilia Pérez’s reps did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but an interview with the film’s sound mixer reveals that AI cloning tools were used to help Karla Sofia Gascón sing beyond her vocal range, according to The Guardian .

Other 2024 films such as Civil War, Furiosa, Alien: Romulus, and Late Night With the Devil also faced varying degrees of criticism for their use of visual AI.

Representatives for The Brutalist and Respeecher, as well as Brody, Jones and Jancsó, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.