David Cronenberg Thinks ‘The Brutalist’s AI Controversy Was A Smear Campaign: “Just A Part Of Moviemaking”

Following controversy around The Brutalist‘s usage of AI, David Cronenberg is coming to the Best Picture Oscar nominee’s defense.

During a conversation with longtime collaborator Howard Shore at the London Soundtrack Festival, the director theorized there was a “campaign against” the Brady Corbet-helmed film, noting that AI is used “all the time” in filmmaking.

“I must confess, there was a scandal [with] The Brutalist,” said Cronenberg, according to multiple outlets. “There was a discussion about Adrien Brody… but apparently they used artificial intelligence to improve his accent. I think it was a campaign against The Brutalist by some other Oscar nominees. It’s very much a Harvey Weinstein kind of thing, though he wasn’t around.”

Cronenberg explained that directors “mess with actors’ voices all the time,” citing John Lone’s performance in his 1993 film M. Butterfly.

“When he was being this character, this singer, I raised the pitch of his voice and when he’s revealed as a man, I lowered to his natural voice,” he said. “This is just a part of moviemaking.”

The Brutalist editor Dávid Jancsó previously revealed that AI tools from Ukrainian company Respeecher were used in the film to enhance actors’ Hungarian dialogue. As a native Hungarian speaker, he noted that the dialect is “one of the most difficult languages to learn to pronounce.”

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

Corbet later said in a response shared with Deadline: “Adrien 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 and Felicity’s performances in another language, not to replace or alter them and done with the utmost respect for the craft.”