Brady Corbet defends The Brutalist stars amid criticism of use of AI technology

Brady Corbet has insisted Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones' performances in 'The Brutalist' are "completely their own" after the film was criticised for using AI technology.

The movie's editor Dávid Jancsó had told how filmmakers used tools from Ukranian company Respeecher to tweak the two stars' Hungarian dialogue to make it sound more authentic, sparking a backlash, but the director has insisted the "innovative" technology was used carefully in post-production to "refine" sounds for accuracy while maintaining the "authenticity" of the two stars' work.

Brady told The Hollywood Reporter in a statement: “Adrien and Felicity’s performances are completely their own.

"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.”

Dávid had praised Adrien and Felicity's performances but explained small amendments were needed to enhance specigic Hungarian sounds to make it sound accurate to native speakers. His own delivery was fed into the system as a model, and the two stars recorded their own voices for the AI.

He noted in an interview with Red Shark: “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...

Under tight budget constraints — the entire budget for The Brutalist was less than $10 million — the film

“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.”

And the editor also revealed Generative AI was also used for a sequence at the end of the film, as part of the inspirationfor a series of architectural drawings and finished buildings created by Adrien's character Laszlo Toth, though the designs themselves were hand-drawn.

But Dávid doesn't think there should be any controversy around the use of the technology.

He said: “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.

“[Production designer] 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.”