The Brutalist is receiving widespread acclaim leading up to the 97th Oscars, but now it’s been revealed that the film used AI in its production, upsetting some corners of the internet.
The film follows a fictional Hungarian Architect (Adrien Brody) who immigrates to America after WWII. While he mainly speaks English, during some scenes, he speaks Hungarian, and the audio team used AI to tweak his voice to make it sound more authentic. This process was also applied to Felicity Jones’ character when she speaks Hungarian.
According to an in-depth interview with RedShark News, the film’s editor clarifies that the AI does things that are already available in regular editing tools, but just automates them. The specific tool in question is called Respeecher, and it was also applied to Better Man, Here, Alien Romulus and Emilia Pérez this year.
The movie was shot with a tiny budget of roughly $10 million USD (roughly $14 million CAD). “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,” said editor Dávid Jancsó.
Jancsó himself is Hungarian and claims it’s one of the most challenging languages to master. Therefore, he wanted to use every tool at his disposal to ensure that native Hungarian speakers didn’t notice when Jones or Brody’s accents slipped up. He even fed his own native Hungarian language into the AI to help use the tool to finess tricky dialects.
While this likely helped save money and time, two things there isn’t a lot of on indie film sets, there has been a lot of debate around AI use in Hollywood since the strikes last year. That said, I think at this scale where it’s being used subtly to enhance the already fantastic story, it shouldn’t be viewed as a negative. To me, it feels like the same thing as the AI tools in Photoshop: you can do everything the AI can do manually, but the AI just makes it easier.
Source: RedShark News
Image source: IMDB
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