The film’s director confirmed that AI was used to enhance the Hungarian spoken by Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones, casting doubts on the authenticity of their performances as Oscar season arrives.
“The Brutalist,” considered by many to be a frontrunner for this year’s Academy Awards, has been racking up more than just awards recently. The epic drama recently found itself at the center of one of the most controversial conversations in Hollywood after the film’s editor and director revealed artificial intelligence was used to enhance the Hungarian spoken by the two lead actors, Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones.
Following a Hungarian Jewish architect (Brody) who survived the Holocaust and immigrated to America where he struggles and strives to make a name for himself, language is at the center of “The Brutalist.”
It’s so central that the production partnered with Ukrainian software company Respeecher to tweak and augment Brody and Jones’ Hungarian to ensure they sounded like native speakers, the film’s editor, Dávid Jancsó, revealed to Red Shark News.
The decision to use AI has already sparked controversy around the film, raising ongoing concerns about whether the technology impacts the authenticity of an actor’s performance or signals further automation of human creativity. However, Jancsó and the film’s director, Brady Corbet, say AI was used with creative intent.
“I am a native Hungarian speaker and I know that it is one of the most difficult languages to learn to pronounce,” Jancsó said. “It’s an extremely unique language. We coached [Brody and Jones] and they did a fabulous job but we also wanted to perfect it so that not even locals will spot any difference.”
“There was an artistic reason for doing it,” says Rupal Patel, a professor of communication sciences and disorders at Northeastern. “The artistic reason was that the viewer of the movie isn’t questioning the authenticity of the role of these actors in Hungarian. … I think it’s actually to be more inclusive for the Hungarian listeners and viewers.”
The production team tried to edit the actors’ Hungarian during the traditional post-production process but found that the peculiarities of Hungarian, specifically the vowels, made it challenging. The production team then turned to Respeecher, known for its AI voice work in Hollywood, to merge Brody and Jones’ performances with Hungarian spoken by native speakers, including Jancsó. The process, voice conversion, is more modification than manufacturing, Patel explains.
“If you want to convert my voice to Michelle Obama’s voice, I say something, she says something and we graft that one person’s voice into the other,” Patel says. “You’re not completely removing the performance of Brody or Jones, but you’re modifying it. These actors did learn to speak in Hungarian and they did take on the role. It’s pretty amazing what they did.”
Patel says AI’s application in “The Brutalist” is an evolution of more traditional voice editing in film where manual tweaks are made to add, remove or adjust the way an actor says a particular word or line. However, she acknowledges that the anxieties around AI are rooted in real concerns about the future of the technology and its potentially disruptive effect on industries like Hollywood.
“The tricky thing here with AI is that it feels like it’s the beginning of the end,” Patel says. “It feels like today we’re ok with AI just removing some of the imperfections of the accent … [but] then, maybe over time, it will become less and less so about the artist, and the AI will do it themselves. You can discard the human. That’s the big worry with AI now. Are we scaffolding ourselves out of existence?”
Patel maintains that “AI is an evolution of the tools we have,” but Rébecca Kleinberger, an assistant professor at Northeastern who studies the use of voice technology, says voice conversion is a much bigger technological leap than those in the past. She is unsure whether it’s a leap forward, but it comes with some potential benefits.
Some people are just more wired for language and accent acquisition than others, and it becomes even more difficult the older we get. For some actors, AI could be a kind of language assistant that works in tandem with traditional voice training.
“Yes, maybe with a lot of training the actors could have reached a very realistic accent; it depends on the accent,” Kleinberger says. “Depending on the accent, it might be easier or harder or almost impossible for some people to learn them.”
Kleinberger is adamant that there is inherent value to actors like Brody and Jones learning a language or accent, one that shouldn’t be lost as AI becomes more widely adopted. Language, especially one as specific as Hungarian, is tied to culture, behavior and psychology in ways that are instructive for actors and moving for audiences.
“It’s very meaningful for their preparation and learning of the culture,” Kleinberger says. “If you remove that from a movie, does that remove some of the authenticity, some of the meaningfulness of the actors’ jobs themselves?”