‘The Brutalist’ Editor Says Filmmakers Used AI Tools To Enhance Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones’ Hungarian Dialogue

Zac Ntim

20 January 2025 at 12:05 pm·2-min read

Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones’s Hungarian dialogue in The Brutalist was enhanced using AI tools, according to the film’s editor Dávid Jancsó.

“I am a native Hungarian speaker and I know that it is one of the most difficult languages to learn to pronounce,” Jancsó said in an interview with the tech mag Red Shark News, adding that Brody and Jones were thoroughly coached through the language.

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“They did a fabulous job but we also wanted to perfect it so that not even locals will spot any difference,” Jancsó added.

“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.”

To perfect the dialogue, Jancsó says the filmmakers used AI tools from the Ukrainian company Respeecher. Jancsó added that he even fed some of his own voice into the AI systems to help the filmmakers find the correct balance.

“We were very careful about keeping their performances. It’s mainly just replacing letters here and there,” 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 magazine notes that AI was also used to create a series of architectural drawings during a late sequence in the film.

“It is controversial in the industry to talk about AI, but it shouldn’t be,” Jancsó said. “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.”

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