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Adrien Brody won a Golden Globe for Best Performance by a Male Actor in a Motion Picture for his role in ‘The Brutalist’. Picture: REUTERS/MARIO ANZUONI
The brouhaha that has broken out concerning several contenders for this year’s Oscars and their use of AI tools will have ramifications for the movie industry long after the awards season dust has settled.
Last weekend, an interview with Dávid Jancsó, editor of the lauded The Brutalist got industry commentators’ tongues waving after it was published Red Shark News.
The Brutalist is a three-and-a-half-hour epic drama and shot on widescreen VistaVision film, that tells the story of Hungarian Jewish architect Lászlo Tóth, played by Adrien Brody, who immigrates to America after World War 2 and lands up in the ambit of a wealthy Philadelphia businessman played by Guy Pearce who commissions him to build a hulking Brutalist complex on a hillside near his home. Felicity Jones plays Tóth’s long-suffering wife Erzsébet.
Brody has Hungarian roots — his mother Sylvia Plachy was born in Hungary and fled with her family to New York in 1958, two years after the failed Hungarian revolution against Soviet rule. Plachy later became an acclaimed photographer working for a variety of US publications and serving as a staff photographer for the Village Voice.
However, the Hungarian accent required for the role was a challenge to get good enough for even Brody’s mother to approve. Brody and Jones both worked extensively with dialogue coaches and Jancsó said in his interview with Red Shark that automated dialogue replacement (ADR), which involves the actors re-recording parts of their dialogue in post-production, was used but the these traditional takes failed to meet director Brady Corbet’s exacting standards.
So the editor and director turned to an AI tool for help in getting the job done. The tool, Respeecher, was developed by a Ukrainian company and has previously been used by other productions, including the makers of the Star Wars series Obi Wan Kenobi, who used it to clone the voice of actor James Earl Jones.
Jancsó said that Respeecher was used to add individual sounds and letters to the actors’ original Hungarian-language dialogue and that he and Corbet “were very careful about keeping their performances. It’s mainly just replacing letters here and there... We had so much dialogue in Hungarian that we really needed to speed up the process otherwise we’d still be in post.”
The relatively harmless use of an AI tool to sharpen up the authenticity of the Hungarian in the film might have gone largely unmentioned but in a competitive awards season where The Brutalist is a leading contender for several of the major categories at this year’s Oscars, Jancsó’s interview sparked an immediate backlash, with some critics arguing that the use of Respeecher raised questions about the authenticity of the performances of the actors that were too great to ignore.
Corbet rushed to issue a statement this week in which he assured critics and naysayers that “Adrien’s 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’s and Felicity’s performances in another language, not to replace or alter them, and done with the utmost respect for the craft.”
The Brutalist is not the only awards season favourite that has used Respeecher. French director Jacques Audiard’s Oscar favourite and transgender musical Emilia Pèrez also used the technology to enhance the singing voice of its star, Karla Sofía Gascón.
The outcry from some quarters against these films’ use of Respeecher is part of a broader worry within Hollywood about AI’s potential threat to human jobs. The issue was one of the concerns that actors and writers fought to have addressed in the negotiations that ended the strikes of 2023. As Variety reported this week: “If conversation about The Brutalist may seem overblown, it reflects the larger anxiety about turning creative work over to automated processes.”
The truth, though, is that technology has been used to influence performance for years. Natalie Portman won an Oscar for her performance as a troubled ballerina in Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan in 2010, even though as was admitted by Portman’s dancing double and professional ballerina Sarah Lane, the production digitally imposed the actress’ face on Lane’s body in some of the film’s dancing scenes. According to Variety, Lane was asked by the production at the time where “I would please not do any more interviews until after the Oscars because it was bad for Natalie’s image”.
Michael Douglas who won an Emmy in 2013 for his performance as US piano legend Liberace in Steven Soderbergh’s Behind the Candelabra was also digitally aided in his performance when his head was digitally imposed on a professional musician who performed piano playing duties.
These examples all serve as evidence of the ways in which AI can be a useful tool to enhance the work that actors do for the benefit of their performances and the enjoyment of audiences. But whether those tasked with doling out awards and the industry’s nervous human workforce will see it that way, remains to be seen.
The big question beyond this year’s awards season will be whether regulations will be put in place to ensure that the use of AI tools remains ethical because the tools are here to stay and their use will become only more prevalent.
Support our award-winning journalism. The Premium package (digital only) is R30 for the first month and thereafter you pay R129 p/m now ad-free for all subscribers.
AI controversy hits award season
The brouhaha that has broken out concerning several contenders for this year’s Oscars and their use of AI tools will have ramifications for the movie industry long after the awards season dust has settled.
Last weekend, an interview with Dávid Jancsó, editor of the lauded The Brutalist got industry commentators’ tongues waving after it was published Red Shark News.
The Brutalist is a three-and-a-half-hour epic drama and shot on widescreen VistaVision film, that tells the story of Hungarian Jewish architect Lászlo Tóth, played by Adrien Brody, who immigrates to America after World War 2 and lands up in the ambit of a wealthy Philadelphia businessman played by Guy Pearce who commissions him to build a hulking Brutalist complex on a hillside near his home. Felicity Jones plays Tóth’s long-suffering wife Erzsébet.
Brody has Hungarian roots — his mother Sylvia Plachy was born in Hungary and fled with her family to New York in 1958, two years after the failed Hungarian revolution against Soviet rule. Plachy later became an acclaimed photographer working for a variety of US publications and serving as a staff photographer for the Village Voice.
However, the Hungarian accent required for the role was a challenge to get good enough for even Brody’s mother to approve. Brody and Jones both worked extensively with dialogue coaches and Jancsó said in his interview with Red Shark that automated dialogue replacement (ADR), which involves the actors re-recording parts of their dialogue in post-production, was used but the these traditional takes failed to meet director Brady Corbet’s exacting standards.
So the editor and director turned to an AI tool for help in getting the job done. The tool, Respeecher, was developed by a Ukrainian company and has previously been used by other productions, including the makers of the Star Wars series Obi Wan Kenobi, who used it to clone the voice of actor James Earl Jones.
Jancsó said that Respeecher was used to add individual sounds and letters to the actors’ original Hungarian-language dialogue and that he and Corbet “were very careful about keeping their performances. It’s mainly just replacing letters here and there... We had so much dialogue in Hungarian that we really needed to speed up the process otherwise we’d still be in post.”
The relatively harmless use of an AI tool to sharpen up the authenticity of the Hungarian in the film might have gone largely unmentioned but in a competitive awards season where The Brutalist is a leading contender for several of the major categories at this year’s Oscars, Jancsó’s interview sparked an immediate backlash, with some critics arguing that the use of Respeecher raised questions about the authenticity of the performances of the actors that were too great to ignore.
Corbet rushed to issue a statement this week in which he assured critics and naysayers that “Adrien’s 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’s and Felicity’s performances in another language, not to replace or alter them, and done with the utmost respect for the craft.”
The Brutalist is not the only awards season favourite that has used Respeecher. French director Jacques Audiard’s Oscar favourite and transgender musical Emilia Pèrez also used the technology to enhance the singing voice of its star, Karla Sofía Gascón.
The outcry from some quarters against these films’ use of Respeecher is part of a broader worry within Hollywood about AI’s potential threat to human jobs. The issue was one of the concerns that actors and writers fought to have addressed in the negotiations that ended the strikes of 2023. As Variety reported this week: “If conversation about The Brutalist may seem overblown, it reflects the larger anxiety about turning creative work over to automated processes.”
The truth, though, is that technology has been used to influence performance for years. Natalie Portman won an Oscar for her performance as a troubled ballerina in Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan in 2010, even though as was admitted by Portman’s dancing double and professional ballerina Sarah Lane, the production digitally imposed the actress’ face on Lane’s body in some of the film’s dancing scenes. According to Variety, Lane was asked by the production at the time where “I would please not do any more interviews until after the Oscars because it was bad for Natalie’s image”.
Michael Douglas who won an Emmy in 2013 for his performance as US piano legend Liberace in Steven Soderbergh’s Behind the Candelabra was also digitally aided in his performance when his head was digitally imposed on a professional musician who performed piano playing duties.
These examples all serve as evidence of the ways in which AI can be a useful tool to enhance the work that actors do for the benefit of their performances and the enjoyment of audiences. But whether those tasked with doling out awards and the industry’s nervous human workforce will see it that way, remains to be seen.
The big question beyond this year’s awards season will be whether regulations will be put in place to ensure that the use of AI tools remains ethical because the tools are here to stay and their use will become only more prevalent.
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