Editor for ‘The Brutalist’ Admits AI Was Used to Fix Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones’ Hungarian Dialogue
Well, this isn’t good. The Brutalist, Brady Corbet’s sweeping epic that touches on everything from the post war immigration struggle to the never-ending battle between art and commerce is coming under fire following a comment made by the film’s editor in a recent interview.
While speaking with tech publication Red Shark News, editor Dávid Jancsó stated that the filmmakers used AI tools from Ukrainian specialist Respeecher to make Brody’s and Jones’ Hungarian dialogue in the film sound as authentic as possible. Jancsó says in the interview:
I am a native Hungarian speaker and I know that it is one of the most difficult languages to learn to pronounce. If you’re coming from the Anglo-Saxon world certain sounds can be particularly hard to grasp.
This is especially hard to hear (no pun intended) following the overwhelming praise received by Brody and Jones for their performances in the film, where they play Hungarian refugees who make their way to the U.S. following World War II. Brody recently won the Golden Globe for best actor in a drama and is positioned as the front-runner for this year’s Academy Awards.
About half of the film’s dialogue is in Hungarian, which is why Jancsó says it was so important to nail the pronunciation. He says that initially the actors tried to ADR the lines, and when that didn’t work they tried a series of voice actors to help massage the performance. When that failed to nab the correct pronunciations the crew turned to technology provided by Ukrainian AI startup Respeecher. Jancsó says Brady and Jones recorded their own voices for the AI and that he fed his own native Hungarian delivery into the system as a model:
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.
Jancsó continues:
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.
Jancsó is right, there are many aspects of post-production that are mind-numbing to the point of exhaustion, and if there’s a program that can handle those details and leave the creativity up to the artists then that’s great. At the same time, we’re at a crucial moment with AI technology where we have to be careful about how it’s applied. Obviously, some people online didn’t have as nuanced of a take. One user on X (formerly Twitter) wrote:
I saw The Brutalist on 35mm film and was utterly taken aback by how beautiful the movie was. Learning that ai was used not just to enhance Adrien Drody’s accent but to design buildings in the movie is absolutely pathetic.
Ukrainian company Respeecher is best known for working with Lucasfilm to use the iconic voice of the late James Earl Jones for future Darth Vader projects. Jones authorized the use of his voice recordings for this purpose. The company also worked with Lucasfilm to create a younger version of Mark Hamill’s voice for a Luke Skywalker cameo in the final episode of the second season of The Mandalorian.
