‘The Brutalist’ director defends Adrien Brody’s performance following AI backlash
"Adrien and Felicity’s performances are completely their own" The post ‘The Brutalist’ director defends Adrien Brody’s performance following AI backlash appeared first on NME.
The Brutalist director Brady Corbet has defended the epic period drama amid backlash surrounding the use of AI in Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones’ performances.
The movie, which follows fictional Hungarian-born Jewish architect, László Tóth (Brody), as he moves to the US with his wife Erzsébet (Jones), has been acclaimed by critics. However, it’s also been the subject of criticism after editor Dávid Jancsó shared that AI was used to alter Brody and Jones’ Hungarian accents.
Following the criticism, with some speculating that AI technology had been used to improve the stars’ performances, Corbet defended its use in a statement provided to The Hollywood Reporter.
He said, “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.”
A lot of the film’s dialogue is in Hungarian, and Jancsó told Red Shark News that small adjustments were required to enhance certain vocal sounds to make the movie as accurate as possible. He said, “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.”
He explained that, with the filmmakers being on a tight budget – under $10million for the entire movie – the Ukrainian startup Respeecher was used. Brady and Jones recorded their own voices for the AI while he fed his own native Hungarian into it as a model.
“We were very careful about keeping their performances. It’s mainly just replacing letters here and there,” he added. “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.”
The Brutalist, which comes to the UK on Friday (January 24), won three Golden Globes earlier this month, with Corbet using his acceptance speech for Best Director to send his condolences to Aubrey Plaza following the death of her husband Jeff Baena a few days prior.
The movie was named one of NME’s “absolutely unmissable films” coming out this year, while it was also given a glowing five-star review. “An epic about the literal building blocks of America, sure, and a big historical immigrant story, absolutely, it is deliberately never an easy watch,” wrote Paul Bradshaw. “The unholy union of art and money isn’t meant to be palatable, and obsession never looks pretty if it’s done properly.
“The Brutalist earns its title even when it’s being occasionally hilarious and the running time isn’t the only thing about it that will leave you emotionally wiped out by the finale. But even though Corbet probably does a bit too much to make his film come across as a masterpiece, it’s impossible not to think it also actually is.”
The post ‘The Brutalist’ director defends Adrien Brody’s performance following AI backlash appeared first on NME.
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