Director Admits "The Brutalist" Used AI to Alter Characters' Accents

"The Brutalist" director Brady Corbet has confirmed that his critically acclaimed historical drama used AI in post-production to clean up Adrien Brody's and Felicity Jones' Hungarian accents — though he insists it didn't impact the authenticity of their performances.

"Adrien and Felicity's performances are completely their own. They worked for months with dialect coach Tanera Marshall to perfect their accents," the American filmmaker and actor told Deadline in a statement. "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."

Corbet also confirmed claims that generative AI was used to help "conjure" architectural drawings shown in the coda of the film, but emphasized that the final images were human-made. 

"All images were hand-drawn by artists," Corbet said, with the ones in question "intentionally designed to look like poor digital renderings" of their era.

The ambitious 215 minute-long epic follows a fictional Jewish Hungarian man named László Tóth (Brody), who emigrates to the US after being separated from his family and surviving the Holocaust. An acclaimed architect in Europe, Tóth lives in poverty and remains unrecognized in the New World until he's re-discovered by an American businessman, played by Guy Pearce, who makes Tóth a lucrative job offer.

The controversy surrounding the film kicked off last week after an interview with editor Dávid Jancsó was released by Red Shark News. Jancsó said that the production turned to software called Respeecher to clean up Brody and Jones' dialog after the ADR stage — a process in which certain lines of dialogue are re-recorded in post — didn't pan out, a decision that both leads were fully on board with, Jancsó said.

A native speaker, Jancsó fed his own speech into the tool to help refine the Hungarian delivery. He argued that using Respeecher simply sped up something they could have done manually.

"It's mainly just replacing letters here and there," he told Red Shark. "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."

Jancsó also revealed generative AI's use in "conjuring" architectural drawings, but was vague on the extent of the tech's involvement. We find clarification in a Filmmaker Magazine article from 2022, in which Corbet's production designer Judy Becker says that movie's architecture consultant used Midjourney "to create three Brutalist buildings quite quickly" as mockups to be redrawn by a human illustrator.

It's worth noting that "The Brutalist" is considered one of the favorites to clean up this awards season, so the timing of these revelations is a little suspect. Nonetheless, they've now been confirmed — albeit a little downplayed — by the director himself.

We should also note that the film has been lauded for being made on just a $10 million budget. Many framed it as providing a sustainable model for the moribund low to mid-budget mode of filmmaking.

That model may become less appealing to artists after learning about AI tools' involvement, however minor. But perhaps the writing has been on the wall. Many films, from indie horror flicks to huge blockbusters like "Alien: Romulus," have admitted to using AI in some shape or form. And though each has received significant backlash, it's hard to say that it's hurt their success.

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