A pair of big Oscar contenders—Emilia Pérez and The Brutalist—are embroiled in separate controversies after revelations that each film used AI during production.
Although the use of AI technology in The Brutalist was addressed in tech publication Red Shark News’ interview with the film’s editor, Dávid Jancsó, on Jan. 11, the controversy didn’t erupt until Monday when the information made its way to Hollywood’s trade publications.
Word about the use of AI during the production of Emilia Pérez initially surfaced in May. Per The Guardian, the flap has made its way to the front burner again with the brewing controversy over the use of the technology in The Brutalist.
The use of AI—an acronym for artificial intelligence—has become a hot topic in recent years in Hollywood over the fear that it could take jobs away from actors and filmmaking crews.
As such, AI was a major sticking point in negotiations during the Screen Actors Guild and Writers Guild of America’s concurrent strikes against Hollywood’s studios in 2023.
‘Emilia Pérez’s’ Use Of AI
The use of AI during the production of Emilia Pérez was first addressed in May during an interview with the film’s sound mixer during a session about technology at the Cannes International Film Festival in the South of France.
In the video interview—which is in French—Cyril Holtz (via The Guardian) said that Emilia Pérez worked with Ukrainian softward company Respeecher to implement voice cloning techniques during the film’s production.
The purpose, Holtz said, was to increase the voice range of the film’s title character (Karla Sofía Gascón), who sings in director Jacques Audiard’s musical crime drama. To accomplish the desired effect, Holtz said Gascón’s singing voice was blended with that of French pop star Camille—who co-wrote the music for Emilia Pérez.
Not surprisingly, Emilia Perez is the target of criticism over the AI revelation, with many users on X lumping in their complaints over how AI was used in The Brutalist as well.
‘The Brutalist’s’ Use Of AI
The controversy over the use of AI in The Brutalist erupted Monday as news spread quickly about Dávid Jancsó’s interview with Red Shark News.
Like Emilia Pérez, The Brutalist worked with Respeecher to resolve a voice issue in the film. In his interview with Red Shark News, Jancsó said AI was used to tweak certain parts of the Hungarian dialect spoken by stars Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones in The Brutalist for the sake of accuracy.
The editor told publication that the production first tried the standard practice of automated dialogue replacement to fix the issue but to no avail.
“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,” Jancsó explained to Red Shark News. “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.”
In addition, Jancsó told the tech publication was used in the creation of architectural drawings that appeared in the final act of The Brutalist. For those who haven’t seen The Brutalist, the film chronicles the plight of László Tóth (Brody), a fictional Hungarian Brutalist architect who flees post-war Europe in 1947 to start anew in the America. Jones plays László’s wife, Erzsébet.
The Brutalist’s director Brady Corbet—who was recently nominated for the Director’s Guild of America’s top film honor along with Emilia Pérez filmmaker Jacques Audiard—defended the film’s use of AI in a statement issued on Monday.
“Adrien and Felicity’s performances are completely their own. They worked for months with dialect coach Tanera Marshall to perfect their accents,” Corbet said in the statement (via Variety). “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.”
Corbet added that the aim of using the technology “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.”
Regarding the use of AI to recreate the architectural drawings at the end of The Brutalist, Corbet noted in his statement that his production designer, Judy Becker, and her team did not use AI to render any of the buildings in the film and that the 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,” Corbet said in the statement.
Hollywood’s AI Controversies Aren’t Limited To ‘Emilia Pérez’ And ‘The Brutalist’
Months before the controversies over the use of AI by Emilia Pérez And The Brutalist, the filmmakers behind the indie horror hit Late Night with the Devil found themselves in the middle of a storm regarding the technology.
Starring David Dastmalchian, Late Night with the Devil is a found footage film that “re-airs” that final episode of a struggling late-night talk show that goes horribly awry when a demonic presence inhabits the set. At issue was the use of AI to generate 1970s-style title cards that accompany the “broadcast” of the talk show, titled Night Owls with Jack Delroy.
The AI was called out on X, where users warned how using AI to generate graphics threatened the careers of graphic artists.
Explaining their use of AI, Late Night with the Devil co-writers and co-directors Colin Cairnes and Cameron Cairnes said in a statement to Variety, “In conjunction with our amazing graphics and production design team, all of whom worked tirelessly to give this film the ’70s aesthetic we had always imagined, we experimented with AI for three still images which we edited further and ultimately appear as very brief interstitials in the film.”
The use of AI has also led to trouble for a marketing consultant hired to create the trailer for director Francis Ford Coppola’s sci-fi opus Megalopolis.
According to Variety, a trailer used quotes from prominent trade publications that purportedly criticized Coppola’s previous work. However, Variety noted, that the quotes were fact-checked and weren’t real—and AI was apparently used generate to generate the criticism instead.
As such, Variety added, Megalopolis distributor Lionsgate pulled the trailer and dropped the consultant from the film’s marketing campaign.
