‘The Brutalist’ director Brady Corbet defends Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones following AI admission
Director Brady Corbet has addressed the backlash against the use of artificial intelligence in his Golden Globe-winning film, The Brutalist.
The movie was met with widespread condemnation over an interview that its editor, Dávid Jancsó, gave earlier this month in which he revealed that he had used the AI software Respeecher to improve the accents of lead actors Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones. In the film, they play Jewish-Hungarian refugees who immigrate to the US following the Holocaust.
“Most of their Hungarian dialogue has a part of me talking in there,” the editor said, adding that he was “careful about keeping [the actors’] performances” by “mainly just replacing letters here and there.” He also revealed that he used GenAI to add architectural drawings in the epilogue of the three-and-a-half-hour movie.
In response to the backlash over these comments, Corbet released a statement to clarify where AI had been used in post-production, and defended Brody and Jones’s performances, both of which are heavily favoured to earn Oscar nominations later this week.
“Adrien and Felicity’s performances are completely their own,” the director said, explaining that the actors worked with a dialect coach for months to master their accents and that the Respeecher technology “was used in Hungarian language dialogue editing only, specifically to refine certain vowels and letters for accuracy.”
The goal, he concluded, “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.”
Corbet also set the record straight about the use of AI in the epilogue, saying that, contrary to some previous reports, none of the buildings was rendered with AI and all the images were hand-drawn by artists. “To clarify,” he added, “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.”
His comments may quell some of the anger directed at the film, but the conversation about where AI belongs in cinema and which movies and filmmakers get a pass for using the technology is just getting started.
The Brutalist is certainly not the first awards favourite to use the technology. In fact, Emilia Pérez, another Oscar favourite this year, used Respeecher for its accents and musical numbers. However, the conversation surrounding The Brutalist appears to have kickstarted the debate in a new way, and Corbet will likely be one of many directors who find themselves defending the use of artificial intelligence in small-budget, auteur-driven films in the coming months.
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