Director Brady Corbet defends the use of AI in ‘The Brutalist’ after facing strong backlash for using the controversial technology to alter Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones’ Hungarian dialect and to create certain images in the end of the film.
“Adrien and Felicity’s performances are entirely their own,” Corbet said. “They worked for months with dialect coach Tanera Marshall to perfect their accents. The innovative Respececher technology was used only in editing the Hungarian language dialogues, specifically to refine certain vowels and letters to improve accuracy. No English language has been changed. This was a manual process, carried out by our sound team and Respecter in post-production. The goal was to preserve the authenticity of Adrien and Felicity’s performances in another language, not to replace or alter them, and this, with the greatest respect for the profession.
He continued: “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 commemorative video shown in the background of one shot, our editorial team created images intentionally designed to look like bad digital renderings from the 1980s.”
Corbet ended his statement by saying, “‘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 have accomplished here.
The drama began after editor Dávid Jancsó revealed that AI was used to enhance the authenticity of Brody and Jones’ Hungarian accents and to create a “series of finished architectural drawings and buildings” in the film’s final scene .
“We should have a very open discussion about the tools that AI can provide us,” Jancsó said. “There’s nothing in the film that uses AI that hasn’t already been done. It just makes the process much faster. We use AI to create these little details that we didn’t have the money or time to film.
