‘The Brutalist’ Director Responds To Backlash Over Use Of AI In His Movie

“The Brutalist” director Brady Corbet has responded to the backlash against his choice to use artificial intelligence in his post World War II era movie to “preserve the authenticity” of the actors “performances in another language.”

Corbet responded to critics who claimed his movie shouldn’t be up for things like the Academy Awards because the use of AI “was used not just to enhance Adrien [Brody’s] accent but to design buildings in the movie,” according to The Hollywood Reporter.

“Adrien [Brody] and Felicity’s [Jones] performances are completely their own,” Corbet said in a statement to THR.“They worked for months with dialect coach Tanera Marshall to perfect their accents.”

#TheBrutalist is coming under fire online after the film’s editor admitted in an interview some AI was used to enhance the performance of the film’s leads, Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones: https://t.co/ef4TYSdKUL pic.twitter.com/5PR0xrQLO8

— The Hollywood Reporter (@THR) January 20, 2025

“Innovative Respeecher technology was used in Hungarian language dialogue editing only, specifically to refine certain vowels and letters for accuracy,” he added. “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,” his statement continued.

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Corbet also responded to accusations that AI was used to create part of the end of the film, which showed a sequence of completed buildings and architectural drawings supposedly designed by Brody’s character, THR noted.

“[The Brutalist production designer] Judy Becker and her team did not use AI to create or render any of the buildings,” Corbet said. “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 editor of the film, Dávid Jancsó, also responded to the criticism and said that the technology — from Ukranian specialist Respeecher — was only used to make the performer’s Hungarian accent sound more authentic, Red Shark News reported.

“I am a native Hungarian speaker and I know that it is one of the most difficult languages to learn to pronounce,” Jancsó said. “If you’re coming from the Anglo-Saxon world certain sounds can be particularly hard to grasp.”

“We were very careful about keeping their performances. It’s mainly just replacing letters here and there,” he added. “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.”

“It is controversial in the industry to talk about AI, but it shouldn’t be,” Jancsó continued. “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.”

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