Brady Corbet knows backlash can be brutal.
That's why The Brutalist director has come to Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones' defense after it was revealed that AI tools were used to enhance the actors' Hungarian dialect.
"Adrien and Felicity's performances are completely their own," Corbet said in a Jan. 20 statement to The Hollywood Reporter. "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."
He added that "no English language was changed" through AI technology.
"This was a manual process, done by our sound team and Respeecher in post-production," Corbet explained of how the Hungarian dialogue was manipulated. "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."
Also starring Joe Alwyn and Guy Pearce, The Brutalist centers around Hungarian-Jewish Holocaust survivor László Tóth (Brody) and his work as an architect in the United States. Jones plays his wife Erzsébet Tóth, who immigrates to the U.S. to support him.
Both actors have already received critical acclaim for their performances, with Brody recently winning a Golden Globe. He's also currently nominated for a SAG and BAFTA awards, while Jones is up in the Supporting Actress category at the upcoming 2025 BAFTA Film Awards.
Since much of the dialogue between Brody and Jones were in Hungarian, the movie's editor Dávid Jancsó said filmmakers wanted their speech to sound so authentic that "not even locals will spot any difference."
“I am a native Hungarian speaker and I know that it is one of the most difficult languages to learn to pronounce," he told tech publication Red Shark News in an interview published Jan. 11. "Even with Adrien's Hungarian background—it's not that simple. It’s an extremely unique language."
He said both Brody and Jones were on board with using AI tools to finesse their speech.
“Most of their Hungarian dialogue has a part of me talking in there," Jancsó shared. "We were very careful about keeping their performances. It's mainly just replacing letters here and there."
He continued, "We should be having a very open discussion about what tools AI can provide us with. There’s nothing in the film using AI that hasn't been done before. It just makes the process a lot faster. We use AI to create these tiny little details that we didn't have the money or the time to shoot."
But that wasn't the only place in the movie where filmmakers leaned on AI. Jancsó confirmed that generative artificial intelligence was also used in a sequence at the end of the film to conjure a series of images in the style of Brody's artitect character.
However, as Corbet noted in his Jan. 20 statement, production designer Judy Becker and her team "did not use AI to create or render any of the buildings."
"All images were hand-drawn by artists," he added. "To clarify, in the memorial video featured in the background of a shot, our editorial team created pictures intentionally designed to look like poor digital renderings circa 1980."