Film director clarifies that historical epic The Brutalist did use AI during production, but not how you think
The Brutalist, the Adrien Brody-led historical fiction epic currently in theatres, has cinema sickos like me frothing at the mouth. For a start, it's already won three Golden Globes, and for another, The Brutalist is one of vanishingly few pictures to be shot entirely in VistaVision since the 1960s. Besides that though, this period piece is also notable for how it's leveraging more recent technological advancements—namely, AI.
The Brutalist builds the life story of fictional architect László Toth brick-by-brick, a Hungarian-born Jew who flees Europe amid antisemitic persecution. Though leading actors Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones both worked with dialect coach Tanera Marshall to perfect their Hungarian accents, it's since come to light that AI was used as part of the post-production process to alter lines of spoken dialogue. In a statement issued to Deadline, director Brady Corbet insisted that Jones and Brody's performances remain «completely their own» though.
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Corbet explains, «Innovative Respeecher technology was used in Hungarian language dialogue editing only, specifically to refine certain vowels and letters for accuracy. No English language [dialogue] 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.»
Deadline also claims that generative AI was used to create architectural blueprints shown during one of the film's final sequences, though Corbet writes, «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 for the buildings so pivotal to the film's architectural arc,
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