The Brutalist is one of the most talked-about films of 2024. So much so that it has won the Golden Globe for Best Drama Film, Best Director (Brady Corbet) and Best Actor (Adrien Brody). In addition, it has received 13 Oscar nominations. However, this feature film has caused something to talk about due to the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in its production.
The story of The Brutalist tells the story of László Tóth, a Hungarian Jewish architect who emigrates to the United States after World War II to try to rebuild his life. The plot addresses topics such as immigration and artistic ambition and is even a criticism of the imaginary of the “American dream.”
It is an American film whose main actor, Adrien Brody, is of the same nationality (although he has Hungarian roots on his mother’s side). Therefore, it would be strange to hear him speak bad Hungarian. The character is Hungarian, so it is expected that he has a Hungarian accent, not a US one. For that reason, they used AI during production. In addition, they also made use of this technology for the film’s epilogue scenes.
The actors’ performance remains
Brody and Felicity Jones’ performances are completely real. As noted by the film’s editor. Dávid Jancsó in RedShark News, AI was only used in post-production to refine specific details. In order to justify himself to the users most critical of the use of this technology, the editor of The Brutalist has come out in defense of its use in the feature film.
“I am a native Hungarian speaker and I know that it is one of the most difficult languages to learn to pronounce,” Jancsó clarified. Adrien is of Hungarian origin, so the casting of the film was quite accurate. However, he could not imitate the accent, even though he was trained to do so with his co-star Felicity Jones. To perfect the results, they turned to AI, so that “not even the locals would notice the difference.”
Jancsó notes that, in order for the AI to do a good job, he was the one who perfected the pronunciation: “Most of his Hungarian dialogue has a part of me speaking in there.” However, they worked to not lose the performance of the protagonists.
“It’s mainly about replacing letters here and there,” explains the editor of The Brutalist. 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 would still be in post-production.”
What is ProTools?
ProTools is a digital audio editing program developed by Avid Technology. It is used for creating, recording, editing and mixing audio. Professional studios and experts in audio post-production have this platform highly valued for the results it offers.
The program has a wide variety of plugins, virtual instruments and sounds. Furthermore, for some time now, the presence of functions with artificial intelligence has stood out, through some plugins and third-party tools added by users. Jancsó does not specify what exactly he used to give a native accent to Adrien and Jones’ Hungarian dialogues, but it is clear that they worked.
AI has often been accused of taking jobs away from professionals, but it can also have an ethical use that simply improves the work done by human professionals. Although they could have used Hungarian actors from the beginning, we cannot accuse The Brutalist of having made a poor selection of characters. Also, much of the acting was kept and the only thing that was changed was the pronunciation a little.
