Oscars 2025: Why Has Adrien Brody’s The Brutalist Found Itself in Hot Waters? Controversy EXPLAINED

Adrien Brody's The Brutalist gets tangled up in AI controversy amid a successful awards season. Read on to know the details.

Written by Ipshita Chakraborty , Entertainment Journalist

Published on Mar 01, 2025 | 01:51 AM IST | 8.7K

CC: Getty Images

Brady Corbet's movie The Brutalist has gained lots of buzz during this year's awards season; however, it has also caught up in a controversy over the application of generative AI technology during postproduction.

The Brutalist has earned ten Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture, Best Director, and acting nominations for Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones. The controversy arose when the editor of the film, Dávid Jancsó, revealed that Respeecher's AI voice technology was utilized to polish Jones and Brody's Hungarian lines.

In an interview with RedShark News, Jancsó said, "If you're coming from the Anglo-Saxon world certain sounds can be particularly hard to grasp. 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."

Since the actors are not native Hungarian speakers, the AI-aided process ensured perfection in pronunciation by mixing Jancsó's voice with the actors'. He meant to preserve the authenticity of the Hungarian language.

He acknowledged, "It is controversial in the industry to talk about AI, but it shouldn't be. 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."

Budgetary limitations contributed to this technological solution. Since The Brutalist had an independent budget of less than $10 million, postproduction needed to be efficient. Jancsó described that correcting the dialogue manually would have taken time, so AI presented a viable solution to speed up the process.

"We use AI to create these tiny little details that we didn't have the money or the time to shoot," Jancsó added.

Other allegations included the use of AI for architectural drawings in the last scenes of the film, which Corbet denied.

The controversy has raised wider industry issues about the ethical application of AI in filmmaking. Though AI-augmented audio post-processing has precedents—mixing voices together during musical concerts—applying AI to transform spoken words raised questions of morality.

While the cinematic industry continues trying to navigate around such concerns, The Brutalist sits at the heart of contention surrounding AI applications in cinema.