David Cronenberg thinks Brutalist AI controversy was "a campaign" from its Oscar competitors

Before setting a record for the longest Oscar acceptance speech of all time, two-time Academy Award winner Adrien Brody was embroiled in a controversy over his accents. No, this wasn’t regarding his long-speculated ban from Saturday Night Live over his dreadlocked introduction of Sean Paul, telling audiences to protect their necks, respectively. Instead, the controversy surrounded The Brutalist’s use of artificial intelligence to sweeten Brody’s approximation of a Hungarian accent with the more authentic accent of editor Dávid Jacsó, a native Hungarian speaker.

The production used and credited the software Respeecher, which was also used by Emilia Pérez and Maria, to combine Brody’s and co-star Felicity Jones’ performances with the editor’s to smooth over inaccuracies. They also used generative AI to “conjure a series of architectural drawings and finished buildings in the style of the fictional architect,” but that’s not on the mind of David Cronenberg, who invoked the controversy at the London Soundtrack Festival last night.

David Cronenberg's Perspective

In conversation with his longtime composer Howard Shore, Cronenberg criticized the criticism of The Brutalist, chalking it as some “Harvey Weinstein” stuff. Commenting on the “discussion about Adrien Brody,” Cronenberg said he thinks “it was a campaign against The Brutalist by some other Oscar nominees,” presumably hoping to crater Brody’s chances. “It’s very much a Harvey Weinstein kind of thing, though he wasn’t around,” Cronenberg continued, referencing Weinstein’s storied history as an Oscar saboteur.

“We mess with actors’ voices all the time,” Cronenberg said, exemplifying his point through his film M. Butterfly. “In the case of [Butterfly star John Lone], when he was being this character, this singer, I raised the pitch of his voice [to sound more feminine], and when he’s revealed as a man, I lowered to his natural voice. This is just a part of moviemaking.”

We get Cronenberg’s point. AI, like a sound engineer’s mixing board, can be another tool for filmmakers to deepen the illusion of their work. He’s also right that, as others have suspected, there’s a good chance that the fateful Brutalist interview from RedShark News, a little-known outlet aggregated by an even smaller outlet before industry trades picked up the story, was part of some attempt to damage Brody and the film’s chances. Still, we don’t vote for awards, but we assume that whether or not an actor can pull off an accent is a factor in recognizing them as Best Actor. Brody’s accent is perhaps the most immediately recognizable element of his performance, so it makes sense that people would want more information about how much the post-production mechanics were involved—and might even be dismayed by it.

Brady Corbet's Defense

In response to the controversy, director Brady Corbet defended the film, clarifying that “Respeecher technology was used in Hungarian language dialogue editing only, specifically to refine certain vowels and letters for accuracy [...] 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.”

The controversy didn’t matter because Brody won the prize and delivered the most mocked Oscar speech of the year, even sans dreadlocks. (via The Hollywood Reporter)

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