Will AI rob Adrien Brody of an Oscar or win him one?
As the Oscars approach, the ‘Best Actor’ race has seemed until this week to be one of the least exciting categories. Adrien Brody already won a Golden Globe for his portrayal of the fictional Hungarian-born Jewish architect László Tóth in Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist and is nominated for a Bafta, Screen Actors Guild Award, and Critics Choice Award. All of this has singled him out as the frontrunner for the Academy Award, but that may change after an admission from the film’s editor last week that he used artificial intelligence to clean up the actor’s Hungarian accent.
In an interview with RedShark News earlier this month, Dávid Jancsó revealed that he fed his own voice into the AI software Respeecher to brush up Brody’s pronunciation and dialect. He did the same for Felicity Jones, who plays Tóth’s wife. “Most of their Hungarian dialogue has a part of me talking in there,” he said, adding that he was “careful about keeping [the actors’] performances” by “mainly just replacing letters here and there”.
He also admitted to using GenAI to produce Tóth’s drawings and architecture in the epilogue of the film. “It just makes the process a lot faster,” he explained. “We use AI to create these tiny little details that we didn’t have the money or the time to shoot.”
Yesterday, Corbet addressed the social media firestorm that those comments sparked, saying that “Adrien and Felicity’s performances are completely their own” and that they worked for months with a dialogue coach to master their accents. The Respeecher technology was only used in Hungarian language dialogue, he continued, and the goal 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”.
The irony of making a movie about the power of human creativity with the help of artificial intelligence is almost too narratively tidy, even for Hollywood, but it also feels like a watershed moment for the industry. We’ve all seen the writing on the wall. Since actors went on strike in 2023 to protest, among other things, their possible replacement by AI, the movie-going public has been put on notice that someday soon, many of the movies they watch will be crawling with artificially generated sound and images, no matter what placatory clauses or scraps of legislation those strikes managed to secure.
One of the small pieces of consolation to come from all of this was the feeling that there would still be filmmakers – the type that you could credibly call “artists” without earning an eye-roll in response – who would lean even harder into the magic of human-made cinema. The Guillermo del Toros, Robert Eggers, and Claire Denis of the world. The Brutalist seemed like the perfect example.
Critics have been falling over themselves to hail the movie as a landmark example of the power of cinema, with infamously intellectual critic Xan Brooks proclaiming it “a distinctive masterpiece at loggerheads with conventional film industry wisdom” and a movie “that could save Hollywood”. In other words, The Brutalist seemed like one of the good guys. Now, all of that seems depressingly naive.
Part of what is so galling about Jancsó’s revelation is that the uses of AI in the film are entirely unnecessary, especially regarding the accents. Corbet and Jancsó appear to have been striving for flawlessness – an accent so authentic that even native speakers couldn’t point to a single wobbly vowel. The history of bad accents in movies is about as lengthy as the history of talking pictures, but the conclusion shouldn’t be that humans are incapable of delivering a pitch-perfect performance and should, therefore, be replaced with software. If Brody couldn’t master the pronunciations, perhaps he needed more dialect coaching, or maybe (and more likely) it wasn’t that bad in the first place. Then, there is the elephant in the room: If you’re going to place so much emphasis on the authenticity of the accent, why not hire a Hungarian actor?
Brody and Jones will have given their permission for the voice retouching, which begs the question: How pervasive is this type of performance tweaking already? It’s all well and good for actors to go on strike out of fear that their jobs will be taken by synthetic performers, but what about when digital technology is used to make their performances better?
For more than a decade, productions have been quietly setting aside large portions of their budgets for post-production beauty work to de-age, smooth out, or slim down their actors, no Botox or Ozempic necessary. Speaking to Vulture in 2016, one studio executive revealed that in one of his biggest movies, an A-list female star refused the touch-ups, only to hastily accept after seeing that her male co-stars had been heavily retouched. In the end, the executive revealed, “We did 275 touch-ups on her.” The practice is pervasive and shrouded in non-disclosure agreements. “I am so heavily NDA-ed, I would have somebody fly through my window with AK-47s,” one technician said when asked to provide names of actors who he’d touched up in post-production.
So perhaps the question of whether Brody’s Oscars chances will be affected by Jancsó’s revelations is equally naive as believing that there are still filmmakers out there who do not use AI. If everyone in the Academy has already tacitly welcomed post-production tweaks as a performance enhancer, none of this will be shocking. Embarrassing? Absolutely. Surprising? Not at all.
It is worth noting that The Brutalist is an unfortunate scapegoat here. Just because it is the most prominent “art film” to be outed for using AI does not mean it is the first. In fact, another Oscars frontrunner, Emilia Pérez, used Respeecher for its Mexican accents and musical numbers, which is even more problematic given that the film has faced backlash for exploiting negative clichés about the country.
There is a sense of parasocial betrayal in all of this, like finding out that Dave Grohl fathered a child by a woman who wasn’t his wife of two decades. Brady Corbet and his ilk do not owe us cinematic purity (however that dangerously slippery term can be defined), but it’s hard not to see The Brutalist in a less flattering light, one in which it is no longer a piece of art made with uncompromising vision, but the small-budget equivalent of a Marvel movie in which anything is possible, and therefore the awe-inspiring variations and resourcefulness of human ingenuity no longer apply.
Like doping in sports, the issue is partially about fairness and partially about the inevitable extremities that arise when there are no rules. An actor might enjoy having their wrinkles smoothed and their singing voices enhanced, but where does it end? And on a frivolous note, who gets the awards? If everyone can turn into Meryl Streep or Daniel Day-Lewis through post-production tweaks of facial expression and voice, actors who master the craft will no longer be lauded anywhere but the theatre.
