“The Brutalist” Editor Confirms A.I. Use

A24
Brady Corbet’s “The Brutalist” is, in many ways, an old-school film. Shot in VistaVision, the film manages to craft an epic scale in terms of visuals, despite only a very limited budget to work with.

To pull off such a feat, the filmmakers had to rely on whatever tools they could use – one of which has turned out to be artificial intelligence (A.I.). The film’s Hungarian editor Dávid Jancsó, speaking with Red Shark News, has revealed that the awards favorite film used generative AI for two key elements – the dialogue and the designs.

Jancsó says he fed his own voice into the AI software Respeecher to clean up the actors’ Hungarian accents. He says Hungarian is ‘extremely unique’ and one of the most difficult languages to learn to pronounce.

They coached the actors, but the team were perfectionists and wanted to make it so good that “not even locals will spot any difference”. They initially tried ADR with the actors, then brought in other actors, and in both cases, it didn’t work. That’s where A.I. came in to help with certain letters and phrases, with Brody and Jones fully involved in the process:

“Most of their Hungarian dialogue has a part of me talking in there. 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.”

That wasn’t the only part. The film’s epilogue at the Venice Biennale includes a series of architectural drawings and finished buildings in the style of Brody’s character László Tóth. Speaking about A.I. in general, he says:

“It is controversial in the industry to talk about AI, but it shouldn’t be. 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.”

The comments have immediately sparked speculation about how they might impact the film’s Oscar chances, as the use of AI remains a very tricky subject in the film industry.

Source: The Wrap