How Did ‘The Brutalist’ Utilize AI in Post Production?

Over the weekend, news broke on X that The Brutalist had used AI while refining some elements in post.

Of course, we also learned that some of the other films many assumed would be nominated for Best Picture had also used AI in post-production. But since The Brutalist is the frontrunner, it bore the weight of most of the hot takes. This sent the internet down a rabbit hole of conversations, most weighing how AI should be used and whether or not the Academy should disqualify the movie from being able to compete.

Again, this was all conjecture.

So today, I want to give you a clear view of how The Brutalist used AI so you can make your judgments based on the facts.

Let’s dive in.

(This post has been updated with breaking news)

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‘The Brutalist’ and AI

First of all, this all came to light because editor Dávid Jancsó gave an interview with Red Shark NewsRed Shark News that said he used a tool called Respeecher to adjust Brody’s Hungarian accent in the movie.

He said, “I am a native Hungarian speaker and I know that it is one of the most difficult languages to learn to pronounce,” Jancsó continued, “If you’re coming from the Anglo-Saxon world certain sounds can be particularly hard to grasp.”

They apparently tried to make these changes in ADR, but the sounds are incredibly hard for non-native speakers.

Jancsó expanded on the idea, “We first tried to ADR these harder elements with the actors. Then we tried to ADR them completely with other actors but that just didn’t work. So we looked for other options of how to enhance it.”

For those concerned about how much got changed and how that affects the performance, Jancsó explained, “We were very careful about keeping their performances. It’s mainly just replacing letters here and there.”

Jancsó was careful to assert this was basically dialogue editing and not changing creative work. He said, “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.”

The Brutalist was made for under $10 million, so the budget was incredibly tight. There really was no room to pay for the meticulous editing it may take for a human to replace these sounds, it could have added months to post.

In addition to the accent, Jancsó said that generative AI (Midjourney) was used in the final sequence of the movie to help inspire them for the kinds of architectural drawings and buildings that were designed by Brody’s character, László Tóth.

Once they got that inspiration, those buildings and their designs were hand-drawn by artists.

Jancsó left his interview with a pretty powerful thought: “It is controversial in the industry to talk about AI, but it shouldn’t be,” Jancsó 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.”

Brady Corbet Issues a Response 

The director of The Brutalist, Brady Corbet, just spoke to Deadline, where he issued a response to the online backlash and clarified the editor’s comments.

He said, “Adrien and Felicity’s performances are completely their own. 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. No English language was changed. This was a manual process, done by our sound team and Respeecher in post-production. 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.”

Corbet went on to clarify the ending piece as well. He said, “Judy Becker and her team did not use AI to create or render any of the buildings. All images were hand-drawn by artists. 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.”

He finished with, “The Brutalist is a film about human complexity, and every aspect of its creation was driven by human effort, creativity, and collaboration. We are incredibly proud of our team and what they’ve accomplished here,” says Corbet.

Should We Be Mad At ‘The Brutalist’?

I hate the idea of AI taking jobs from people in Hollywood, especially as production shrinks and work is so hard to come by in the first place.

The Brutalist is an opus of epic proportions. I loved the movie with every fiber of my being. But part of that love was how the movie was signaling film and Hollywood were back. That they could be audacious and that you could dream a dream again.This is a 3.5-hour movie that was on an incredibly tight budget—of course they had to do whatever they could to finish.

But now that we have Corbet’s answers, it feels like people blew this way out of proportion.

Business and art have to collaborate, and it feels like AI is just a normal part of doing business now. Sure, you can avoid it, lots of movies did this year, including Heretic, which mentioned that it did in the credits.

But it’s getting harder and harder to avoid it when you have a tight budget—even if that budget is large, the temptation to use AI to save a buck somewhere and use it elsewhere has to be so hard.

Look, a lot of Hollywood used AI this year. Furiosa made its young actress look like Anya Taylor-Joy. Alien: Romulus used it. It fixed singing pitch vocals for Emilia Perez.

I cannot fault anyone for being mad at The Brutalist, especially under that initial reporting. But that reporting has since been clarified, and it sounds like the team did everything they could to use human ingenuity at every turn.

I do feel like this movie is bearing most of the vitriol based on the state of the industry, rather than how AI was employed here.

Like anything, I find AI is a tool that needs a human behind it to actually wield it with any power. And in The Brutalist, it seems like there was a human behind each use: one who spoke Hungarian and got the words and sounds right.

Personally, I can’t fault it for that. But I understand if you can.

Let me know what you think in the comments.