Brady Corbet says The Brutalist's AI usage was done with "utmost respect for the craft"

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The most ironic controversy that could have come for The Brutalist is one involving AI, and that’s exactly what it got. Onscreen, the story of Hungarian holocaust survivor and single-minded architect László Tóth is one of the triumph of art and undying nature of human creativity in the face of impossible odds. Behind the scenes, however, its director, Brady Corbet, took a few shortcuts that seem to undermine that exact missive.

As originally revealed by editor Dávid Jancsó to the video tech publication RedShark News, the team used a Ukrainian AI program called Respeecher to clean up some of the film’s Hungarian dialogue. In a new statement, director Brady Corbet insists that the whole thing was done with a light hand and none of Adrien Brody’s (László) nor Felicity Jones’ (László’s wife, Erzsébet) English-language acting was touched. “Adrien and Felicity’s performances are completely their own. They worked for months with dialect coach Tanera Marshall to perfect their accents,” he said, per Deadline. “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.” Brody was awarded a Golden Globe for his performance earlier this month. 

In the original RedShark interview, Jancsó, a native Hungarian speaker, said that the actors’ dialect had been infused with some of his own speech to bolster the “difficult languages” authenticity onscreen. “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 tech publication also claimed that AI was used to create architectural designs in the film’s closing sequence, which Corbet denies. “Judy Becker and her team did not use AI to create or render any of the buildings,” he said. “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.”

As Deadline points out, The Brutalist is far from the only film—even just within this year’s Oscar race—to make AI-assisted editing tweaks in post. Golden Globe winner Emilia Pérez used Respeecher to expand Karla Sofía Gascón’s singing range, for example, while Angelina Jolie’s arias are infused with real-life opera singer Maria Callas’ in Maria. Considering The Brutalist‘s subject matter, however, it’s not surprising that the outrage over its AI use—however subtle—is so much greater. As Matt Schimkowitz wrote last week, “It opens the door to ask where his vision ends and ChatGPTs begin—we know he didn’t use GPT, but to the broader public, it’s all the same, and if he didn’t want us asking that, maybe he should have used just a bit more of the creativity the film argues for.”

Still, Corbet stands by his work. “The Brutalist is a film about human complexity, and every aspect of its creation was driven by human effort, creativity, and collaboration,” he said. “We are incredibly proud of our team and what they’ve accomplished here.”