CMU School of Drama


Wednesday, March 12, 2025

The Adrien Brody AI controversy, explained

The Mary Sue: The film’s Oscar-nominated editor, Dávid Jancsó, did an interview prior to the Oscars talking about his work on The Brutalist. In the interview, he said that the film used the company Respeecher to help fix the dialogue. Jancsó explained that he would speak Hungarian himself, as he is Hungarian, and would use his own accent to help alter that of Brody and co-star Felicity Jones’ accents when speaking the language.

2 comments:

Sharon Alcorn said...

I have not seen the Brutalist, and the only things I know about it were learned in this article. I didn’t even know that there was controversy surrounding possible AI usage in it. I think it is interesting that AI was used to perfect the inflections of a dialect, as this is a use of AI I have not encountered or imagined before. Even without knowing the plot, I now am interested in seeing the film because of this. I also remember watching The Pianist a few years ago, and Adrien Brody’s performance brought me to tears, so I am curious to see what won him the Oscar for best actor in this film. While I normally don’t approve of AI being used in films, I don’t have much of a problem with this particular use, similarly to the author of the article. I’m willing to give it a chance.

Audra Lee Dobiesz said...

I think this entire controversy has been blown absolutely completely out of proportion. On one hand, i do think it is important to make sure an actor has the most accurate accent to the language of the character they are acting as possible and I can see how there are modern technologies that can help. Accuracy is very important. When I heard about the controversy I thought Adrien Brody's face or a scene had been edited over to make something more accurate but I guess not. I do think it is an actor's job to work with vocal coaches to be as accurate as can be and I think the brutalist’s use of AI was completely unnecessary overall in general. If the accent was such a crucial part of the character and Adrian Brody wouldn't have been able to fulfill the needs of the role, they simply should have casted a different actor that could.