Director Brady Corbet has defended the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in his award-winning film The Brutalist.
In the epic drama, Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones play Hungarian-Jewish Holocaust survivors László and Erzsébet Tóth who emigrate to America in search of a better life.
Fans were outraged over the weekend after editor Dávid Jancsó revealed to Red Shark News that they used the Respeecher software to finesse Brody and Jones's Hungarian dialogue.
Defending the decision, filmmaker Corbet said 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."
Jancsó, who is Hungarian, previously explained that they replaced letters "here and there" to make them sound more authentically Hungarian.
"I am a native Hungarian speaker and I know that it is one of the most difficult languages to learn to pronounce," he said. "If you're coming from the Anglo-Saxon world certain sounds can be particularly hard to grasp."
During the interview, the editor also revealed that Generative AI was used to create a series of architectural drawings seen towards the end of the film.
Addressing those designs, Corbet insisted, "(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."
The Brutalist is one of the key frontrunners during this awards season. It won three Golden Globes earlier this month for best drama, best dramatic actor for Brody and Best Director for Corbet.
