Brady Corbet Responds to Backlash Over AI Use in The Brutalist

Director Brady Corbet defends the use of AI in The Brutalist as a tool for refining Hungarian dialogue without altering performances, amid online backlash and debates over its impact on the film’s awards eligibility.

Elena Ternovaja, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Brady Corbet, director of the awards-season hopeful The Brutalist, has addressed the backlash surrounding the use of artificial intelligence in the film. The controversy arose after editor Dávid Jancsó revealed in an interview that AI tools were employed during post-production to refine the Hungarian dialogue spoken by the film's leads, Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones.

In a statement to The Hollywood Reporter, Corbet emphasized that the actors’ performances remained untouched by AI, stating, “Adrien and Felicity’s performances are completely their own. They worked for months with dialect coach Tanera Marshall to perfect their accents.” Corbet clarified that the AI, developed by Ukrainian company Respeecher, was used only in the editing phase to adjust certain vowel and letter pronunciations in Hungarian dialogue. “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.”

The film, a historical drama centered on Hungarian refugees who immigrate to the U.S. after World War II, required significant dialogue in Hungarian. According to Jancsó, a native speaker, minor tweaks were necessary to ensure linguistic accuracy, particularly given the challenges Anglo-Saxon speakers face when mastering the language. "Hungarian is one of the most difficult languages to learn to pronounce," Jancsó explained in his interview with Red Shark News. “If you’re coming from the Anglo-Saxon world, certain sounds can be particularly hard to grasp.”

Working with a budget of under $10 million, the production team leveraged Respeecher’s technology to streamline the process. Jancsó explained that the adjustments were subtle and primarily replaced specific letters, comparing the work to standard dialogue editing. He noted that the process, while aided by AI, was driven by human input: “You can do this in ProTools yourself, but we had so much dialogue in Hungarian that we really needed to speed up the process.”

The controversy extends to the film’s final sequence, which features architectural drawings attributed to Brody’s character, a fictional architect named László Tóth. While AI was reportedly part of the inspiration process for these designs, Corbet clarified that all the finished renderings were hand-drawn by the production designer Judy Becker and her team. Any AI-generated elements were intentionally designed to resemble outdated digital renderings from the 1980s for a background memorial video.

Despite the backlash, critics have largely praised The Brutalist for its performances and craftsmanship. Brody’s portrayal has already garnered him a Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Drama, positioning him as a strong contender for the Oscars. Felicity Jones has also received acclaim for her work in the film, with both actors delivering emotionally charged performances that have resonated with audiences and critics alike.

Still, the use of AI in any capacity has sparked a heated debate online. Some argue that AI involvement in performance enhancement—no matter how minimal—sets a problematic precedent for awards recognition. Others maintain that the nuanced use of AI did not undermine the actors’ craft. “It slightly diminishes the detailing,” one commenter noted, “but I can’t say the accent was a deciding factor in [Brody’s] performance’s resonance. I was moved by how he conveyed emotion.”

For Corbet, the discussion underscores the broader challenges and possibilities of integrating new technologies into filmmaking. "The Brutalist is a film about human complexity, and every aspect of its creation was driven by human effort, creativity, and collaboration. We are incredibly proud of our team and what they’ve accomplished here,” he said.

Respeecher, the AI company behind the dialogue editing, has been at the forefront of audio technology, previously collaborating with Lucasfilm to recreate iconic voices, including a younger version of Mark Hamill’s Luke Skywalker and James Earl Jones’ Darth Vader. While the debate surrounding AI in filmmaking continues, The Brutalist has ignited a timely conversation about the intersection of tradition and innovation in cinema.