Controversy has engulfed Brady Corbettthree-time Golden Globe winners”The Brutalist” then an interview on January 11 films editor Dávid Jancsó gave the video tech site RedShark News where he said he used AI-powered technology to smooth out the Hungarian dialogue between actors Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones.
Jancsó, a native Hungarian speaker himself, said he used the AI-powered Ukrainian voice synthesizer software Respeecher to blend his own voice into the dialogue articulated by Brody and Jones so that their pronunciations would be perfect.
“Most of their Hungarian dialogue has a part of me talking in there,” Jancsó said. “We were very careful to keep their performance. It’s mainly just replacing letters here and there. You can do this in ProTools itself, but we had so much dialogue in Hungarian that we really needed to speed up the process otherwise we would still be in place.”
A social media firestorm ensued. Such is the wacky backlash to anything AI-related in filmmaking.
Now Corbet himself has weighed in on the controversy in another statement 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 only when editing dialogues in the Hungarian language, specifically to refine certain vowels and letters for accuracy. No English language was changed. This was a manual process, performed by our audio 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 change them and done with the utmost respect for the craft.”
To be fair, this is not a particularly unique use of Respeecher. The Kiev-based company even presented its post-production role on Jacques Audiard’s “Emilia Pérez,” another of the season’s top honors, on own Facebook page. That film’s re-recording mix, Cyril Holtz, gave an interview in Cannes in May 2024where he considered using Respeecher to blend Karla Sofia Gascon’s voice with French pop star Camille, who co-wrote the score, as a way to expand Gascon’s octave range. The “Star Wars” series on Disney+ has also used Respeecher, among other things to vocally clone James Earl Jones’ voice as Darth Vader in the “Obi-Wan Kenobi” series.
As for the use of AI to create images of buildings — “The Brutalist,” as the title suggests, is about an architect, played by Brody — Corbet also noted to Deadline, “Judy Becker and her team did not use AI to create or make any of the buildings. All images are hand drawn by artists. To clarify, in the commemorative video shown in the background of a shot, our editors intentionally created images to look like poor digital renderings of 1980.”
“The Brutalist” is a film about human complexity, and every aspect of its creation was fueled by human effort, creativity and collaboration. We are incredibly proud of our team and what they have accomplished here.”
