Could Adrien Brody and The Brutalist lose at the Oscars because of AI?

The editor of Brady Corbet’s film, Dávid Jancsó, admitted to using generative AI to “adjust” the star’s Hungarian accent. Among other half-human, half-fabricated retouching using software.

Artificial intelligence is increasingly present in cinema. The screenwriters’ and actors’ strikes which impacted the Hollywood industry in 2023 were aimed, among other demands, at better supervise its usein order to maintain decent jobs and salaries, whether in the fields of extras, dubbing, or script writing.

Scandals have recently erupted following the use of scans of extras in the series WandaVisionfor example, making it possible to infinitely replicate the image of an actor in the background while only paying him for a single day of “filming”time to capture its appearance and movements. Last week, there was also the broadcast ofa dubbing test from Sylvester Stallone’s new action film with his French voice, Alain Dorval, recreated almost a year after the actor’s death.

The voice of Alain Dorval (Stallone’s French version) resurrected in AI: the result is catastrophic

This weekend, an example is on everyone’s lips in Hollywood: The Brutalistof Brady Corbett. Its editor, Dávid Jancsó, gave a long interview to The Red Shark News in which he admits to having used generative AI to “adjust” HungarianAdrien Brody. Since the accent is difficult to master perfectly, some of the star’s lines were retouched via Respeecher, a voice AI program.

He also details using Midjourney to design buildings in a sequence near the end of the film. These were then redrawn by an artist before being integrated into The Brutalist.

Could such use of artificial intelligence software be detrimental to this work, however critically acclaimed ? Could it lead Oscar voters not to select or reward Adrien Brody, for example? Or are these changes so small that they could still be in the running for various statuettes? The question arises all the more since this same type of technology was used to rework Selena Gomez’s accent in Emilia Perezby Jacques Audiard, specifies World of Real. Which did not prevent the actress from being criticized for the lack of authenticity of her Spanish…

The Brutalist: Brady Corbet and Adrien Brody explode American mythology in a powerful fresco

What about using AI on real images? Where should the limits of its use be set? A little over a month before the 97th Oscars ceremony (it will be held on March 2, and its nominations will be known this Thursday, January 23), will this A24 production be put aside for this use of AI, which could be considered as “cheated” by being a tool to improve performance?

So far, Brody has received continued praise for his portrayal of the Jewish Hungarian architect and camp survivor who arrives in the United States after the war, but now that these details have leaked, some voters might not be inclined to reward performance that has not been 100% achieved by a human being…

To understand everything, here is a translation of Jancsó’s revelations:

“My mother tongue is Hungarian and I know it is one of the most difficult to learn to pronounce. Even with Adrien’s Hungarian origins (Brody’s mother is a Hungarian refugee who emigrated to the United States in 1956, editor’s note)it’s not that simple. It is a very particular language. We coached him, as did Felicity Jones, and they both did a fabulous job, but we also wanted to perfect him so that even locals wouldn’t notice any difference.”

“If you come from the Anglo-Saxon world, certain sounds can be particularly difficult to grasp,” he continues. We first recorded the performances with the actors, even the most complicated intonations. Then we tried to completely redo them with other actors (including Jancsó himself, editor’s note)but it didn’t work. So we looked for other ways to improve them. Most of their Hungarian dialogues contain part of my voice. We were very careful to maintain their performance. It’s mostly just replacing letters here and there. You can do it yourself in ProTools, 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.”

“It’s controversial in the industry to talk about AI, but that shouldn’t be the case,” he concludes. “We should have a very open discussion about the tools that AI can provide us. There’s nothing in the film that uses AI that hasn’t been done before. It just speeds up the process. We’re using AI to create these tiny details that we didn’t have the money or time for. to film.”

Already winner of the Silver Lion for Best Director at the 81st Venice Film Festival, The Brutalist will be released on February 12 in France. Here is its trailer: