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Oscars-favourite The Brutalist under fire as editor admits AI enhanced Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones' performances
The Brutalist won three Golden Globe Awards and is one of the top contenders for the Best Pictures prize at Oscars 2025.
The Brutalist is being considered one of the favourites at this year's Academy Awards. The Brady Corbert film has been praised for the performances of its two leads - Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones. However, a storm has erupted after the film's editor admitted that artificial intelligence (AI) was used to enhance the actors' performance. (Also read: Golden Globes 2025 Best Picture winner The Brutalist is 3.5 hours long! Got a rare India-style ‘interval’ in theatres)
The Brutalist editor on AI usage
In an interview with Red Shark News, The Brutalist editor Dávid Jancsó said the filmmakers tried to get the actors' Hungarian accents and diction right but could not. “If you’re coming from the Anglo-Saxon world certain sounds can be particularly hard to grasp. We first tried to ADR these harder elements with the actors. Then we tried to ADR them completely with other actors but that just didn’t work. So we looked for other options of how to enhance it,” he said, adding that they eventually relied on AI tool Innovative Respeecher for it.
“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,” Jancsó added.
This revelation led to increased chatter on the internet that the actors' performances should not be deemed for the Oscars or any other major awards as they are AI-enhanced. Many commenters on Reddit and X expressed their anger. "Any projects altering performance with ai should not be allowed to be considered for acting awards," one wrote. Another added, "Unless Chalamet sung with AI, give him the award. This is super disappointing. Accents are part of acting. That’s lazy."
Director Bradey Corbet defends his actors
However, the film's director, Brady Corbet, has defended his performers. In a statement to The Hollywood Reporter on Monday, he countered the allegations, saying, “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.”
The Brutalist is a 2024 epic period drama film starring Adrien Brody as László Tóth, a fictional Hungarian-born Jewish architect who survives the Holocaust and immigrates to the United States, where he struggles to achieve the American Dream. Felicity Jones stars as Erzsébet Tóth, László's wife. The film won three Golden Globe Awards, including Best Motion Picture – Drama, and is a top contender for the Best Picture Oscar.
