Director Brady Corbet is defending the use of AI in “The Brutalist” after facing heavy backlash for utilizing the controversial tech to alter Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones’ Hungarian dialect and to create certain images in the film’s ending.
“Adrien and Felicity’s performances are completely their own,” Corbet said. “They worked for months with dialect coach Tanera Marshall to perfect their accents. Innovative Respeecher technology was used in Hungarian language dialogue editing only, specifically to refine certain vowels and letters for accuracy. 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.”
He continued, “Judy Becker and her team did not use AI to create or render any of the buildings. 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.”
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Corbet finished his statement by saying “‘The Brutalist’ is a film about human complexity, and every aspect of its creation was driven by human effort, creativity, and collaboration. We are incredibly proud of our team and what they’ve accomplished here.”
The drama started after editor Dávid Jancsó revealed that AI was used to improve the authenticity of Brody and Jones’ Hungarian accents and to create a “series of architectural drawings and finished buildings” in the film’s final scene.
“We should be having a very open discussion about what tools AI can provide us with,” Jancsó said. “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.”