The Adrien Brody drama “The Brutalist” has received rave reviews and racked up nominations at multiple awards shows — but the film is also coming under fire for its use of artificial intelligence to fill in minor language gaps left by Brody and co-star Felicity Jones in a key part of the film.
In an interview with Red Shark News published last week, editor Dávid Jancsó explained how the film’s team used A.I. and why they chose to in the first place.
The decision to use A.I. was born out of the need to supplement a small part of Brody and Jones’ Hungarian speaking skills. “I am a native Hungarian speaker and I know that it is one of the most difficult languages to learn to pronounce,” he said.
Jancsó added, “It’s an extremely unique language.”
The moment in question is a roughly two-minute segment of the movie in which a letter from Brody’s character to his wife is read aloud. The letter is read in full in Hungarian, and it is understood by TheWrap that no other part of the actor’s performance was augmented with Respeecher.
“If you’re coming from the Anglo-Saxon world certain sounds can be particularly hard to grasp,” he said. “We first tried to ADR these harder elements with the actors. Then we tried to ADR them completely with other actors but that just didn’t work. So we looked for other options of how to enhance it.”
The team used Respeecher to record the actor’s voices and then add in A.I. words in Hungarian. Jancsó’s voice is also in the film. “Most of their Hungarian dialogue has a part of me talking in there. We were very careful about keeping their performances,” he explained.
“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.”
Jancsó also defended talking about A.I. in general.
“It is controversial in the industry to talk about AI, but it shouldn’t be,” he said. “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.”
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