The Brutalist and the ongoing debate about the role of AI in the movies

Our behind the scenes look at the making of The Brutalist has catalysed a massive debate about the role of AI that even questions whether the film should be allowed into The Oscars.

Well, that escalated quickly. 10 days ago we published an article written by one of our long-established freelancers, Adrian Pennington, that looked at the way that Oscar-tipped movie The Brutalist was put together. Reflecting our readers’ interests in cinematography and editing, mainly it was about the use of VistaVision in the film and how it was the first Hollywood movie to shoot in the format for over half a century.

Buried towards the end of the 2500 word piece though was a section where editor Dávid Jancsó talked about using AI from Ukrainian company Respeecher to improve the Hungarian pronunciation - specifically the vowel sounds - of the some of the actor’s dialogue. 

They tried ADR to begin with, but when that wasn’t working they turned to the software. As Jancsó says: “We were very careful about keeping their performances. It's mainly just replacing letters here and there. 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.”

A week after publication, this blew up over the weekend on a Subreddit that predicts Oscar winners, with Redditor after Redditor saying the movie should be thrown out of Oscar contention for using AI. Others argued against this, and the pile on spread onto X and began to be picked up by media outlets.

We noticed our article being mentioned and linked to by Hollywood trades (Variety, The Hollywood Reporter) and the mainstream press (The Guardian, Metro) on Monday afternoon (UK time) and it snowballed quickly from there. In fact the story gained so much momentum that just after 18.00 UK time (10am in Hollywood), The Brutalist director Brady Corbet felt the need to issue a response to Deadline.

“Adrien and Felicity’s performances are completely their own,” he said. “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 also addressed the fact we mentioned that genAI was used to create some architectural blueprints at the end of movie. “[Production Designer] Judy Becker and her team did not use AI to create or render any of the buildings. All images were hand-drawn by artists,” he said. This seems to be the case, but the lines here are perhaps a bit more blurred, as this December 2022 article in Filmmaker Magazine shows.

Becker says architecture consultant Griffin Frazen used Midjourney “to create three Brutalist buildings quite quickly” by using references to key figures in the movement along with other architectural terms. “Now I will have these digital prints redrawn by an illustrator to create mythical buildings.”

Blurred lines

In fact, it’s fair to say the lines are blurred all over the place. As Deadline notes below Corbet’s statement, Rami Malek’s Oscar-winning portrayal of Freddie Mercury in 2018’s Bohemian Rhapsody and Angelina Jolie’s (potentially Oscar nominated) performance in Maria are a combination of different vocal tracks. And it also seems that Netflix’s Emilia Perez also used the Respeecher technology to enhance the singing range of Karla Sofía Gascón. 

There are a huge amount of questions here about human creativity and where it starts and where it stops. A key point for many is, as Deadline points out, it understands that AI didn’t eliminate jobs on The Brutalist, rather it created them. But the fact that so many people are uncomfortable with any AI being used in a movie at any point is interesting to say the least. As the technology increasingly pervades every element of our lives, and our creative ones in particular, it looks like the debate on where we need to draw the lines regarding its use continues. And those lines will have to move rapidly to keep up with the technology.

Undoubtedly there will be a scandal at some point about the use of AI in a high-profile movie. But we don’t think this is the scandal and we don’t think this is the movie. And we still think the use of VistaVision is really interesting…

Meanwhile, the author of the piece, Adrian Pennington, offers this:

"I knew during the interview with David Janscó that the use of AI was headline news. However, I deliberately placed this aspect of the ‘making of’ much further into my story. Not to bury it, but to give some shield to the fact that while AI was used it was used subtly and nuanced and in micro amounts with all rights (pertaining to actors for example) intact. I did not want an AI headline to detract from what is an incredible piece of filmmaking.

"Social media users jumping to condemn something that they have not seen (strikes me that most people criticising use of AI here have not seen the film) – is sadly not be a surprise but they are in no position to comment and their comments are misleading or plain lies.  For example, the use of AI to help generate some architectural drawings appears on screen for maybe 4 seconds at end of the film, not - as some on social media are claiming - that every image of a building they see in the film is AI generated.

"Perhaps if Hollywood studios had backed the ambitious vision of director Brady Corbet he would not have had to make it on a shoestring $10m budget necessitating some innovative use of AI as a tool to save time and money. If you want to see original, thought provoking film, then you should be backing filmmakers like Corbet.

tl;dr

• The making of The Brutalist has sparked a significant debate about the role of AI in filmmaking, raising questions about its eligibility for The Oscars due to the use of AI technology in dialogue editing.
• Editor Dávid Jancsó revealed that AI from the Ukrainian company Respeecher was used to improve Hungarian pronunciation in actor dialogue, which led to backlash on social media about AI's involvement in the film.
• Director Brady Corbet clarified that while AI was used for specific language editing, the actors’ performances remained intact, and no English dialogue was altered; all architectural blueprints were created by hand, despite some digital references used during the design process.
• The controversy highlights broader concerns regarding human creativity and the implications of AI use in film, with an ongoing conversation about how to navigate its integration into the creative industry as technology evolves.