David Cronenberg has suggested the AI controversy over Adrien Brody’s Hungarian accent in The Brutalist was an issue manufactured by the campaign of a rival Oscar film.
Cronenberg was speaking at the London Soundtrack festival alongside composer Howard Shore, and in remarks reported by the Hollywood Reporter, said that film-makers “mess with actors’ voices all the time”. Cronenberg said: “There was a discussion about Adrien Brody … [and] 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 referred to his 1993 film M Butterfly, in which John Lone plays Beijing opera performer Song Liling. “We mess with actors’ voices all the time. In the case of John [Lone], when he was being this character, this singer, I raised the pitch of his voice [to sound more female] and when he’s revealed as a man, I lowered to his natural voice. This is just a part of moviemaking.”
The row originally erupted in January when The Brutalist’s editor Dávid Jancsó said in an interview with Red Shark that his voice was combined with the film’s lead actors Brody and Felicity Jones, using an AI tool to create a more convincing Hungarian accent. The film’s director Brady Corbet defended the practice in a statement, saying: “Adrien and Felicity’s performances are completely their own … The aim was to preserve the authenticity of Adrien and Felicity’s performances in another language, not to replace or alter them.”
It emerged around the same time that a similar AI-created hybrid was used to enhance Emilia Pérez’s Karla Sofía Gascón’s singing voice; it was blended with vocals by Camille, the French pop star who co-wrote the film’s score.
The issue did not appear to hurt Brody, who won the best actor Oscar for The Brutalist; however Jones, Gascón and Corbet failed to win.
Source: theguardian.com
