With ten Academy Award nominations, including Best Motion Picture of the Year, Brady Corbert’s “The Brutalist” is making a name for itself during this year’s award season. However, the film’s use of artificial intelligence (AI) in its production has ignited a conversation about the use of AI in the film industry.
The film follows the story of Holocaust survivor László Tóth (Adrien Brody), a Hungarian-Jewish architect who emigrated to the United States after being separated from his family during the war. In January, Brody received the Golden Globe for Best Male Actor in a Motion Picture Drama for this role. He is also nominated for Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role at this year’s Academy Awards.
Where his success for the role follows, so did controversy.
When speaking to RedShark News, the film’s editor Dávid Jancsó said how they used AI from the Ukrainian AI Company, Respeecher, to perfect the Hungarian accents of both Brody and co-star Felicity Jones.
“We coached [Brody and Felicity Jones] and they did a fabulous job, but we also wanted to perfect it so that not even locals will spot any difference,” he said.
According to RedShark News, Generative AI (GenAI) was also used to create architectural drawings and buildings during the film’s ending sequence.
When asked about the use of AI, Jancsó 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.”
Director Corbert delivered his own response on the issues surrounding the film’s AI usage according to online news site Deadline.
“Adrien and Felicity’s performances are completely their own. They worked for months with dialect coach Tanera Marshall to perfect their accents. 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,” he said.
Additionally, Corbert denied the use of GenAI and said the images were all hand-drawn by artists. Regardless of the response, conversations about the use of AI in such a creative industry still remain.
“AI was created to enhance artistry, not replace it- at least, that’s how it should have been used from the start,” said Elisa Broche.
A senior film production student, Broche said how using AI in such ways erases the human elements from the art of film.
“Technology in film should serve to expand what’s possible, allowing us to bring to life things we could never create otherwise,” she said. “Instead of using AI to craft hyper-realistic dragons or mind-blowing cosmic explosions, it’s being used to erase human elements- like altering an actor’s accent.”
With its rapid expansion, technology such as AI has been implemented more in the film industry following the Hollywood strikes of 2023.
“We cannot allow technology to strip away the very diversity we fought so hard to see on film. Cinema is an art form, and part of its beauty lies in the act of creating it- the hands-on craftsmanship, the human expression, the tangible, real-world magic that goes into bringing stories to life. If everything is reduced to a digital process, we risk losing the essence of filmmaking itself,” said Broche. “We didn’t fight for on-screen representation just to let computers steal it from us again.”
