Controversy Over Two Oscar Contenders’ Use Of AI On Actors’ Voices

The use of artificial intelligence could become a ferocious battleground during movie awards season, as at least two major contenders were revealed to have used voice-cloning to enhance actors’ performances.

In an interview with moving-image tech publication Red Shark News, The Brutalist editor Dávid Jancsó said that, in an effort to create Hungarian dialogue so perfect “that not even locals will spot any difference”, Jancsó fed lead actors Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones’s voices into AI software, as well as his own.

In the film, Brody plays Jewish-Hungarian architect László Tóth, who emigrates to the US after the second world war, and Jones is his wife Erzsébet. Jancsó, a Hungarian speaker, said that while Brody’s mother was an émigré from Hungary in real life, “coaching” and re-recording via ADR (automated dialogue replacement) with both the original actors and stand-ins “just didn’t work”.

Jancsó said he then employed an AI tool developed by Respeecher, a Ukraine-based company who were previously involved in the “cloning” of the voice of James Earl Jones for the TV series Obi-Wan Kenobi, to add individual sounds and letters to both Brody and Jones’s Hungarian-language dialogue. “Most of their Hungarian dialogue has a part of me talking in there. We were very careful about keeping their performances. It’s mainly just replacing letters here and there … We had so much dialogue in Hungarian that we really needed to speed up the process otherwise we’d still be in post.”

On Monday, in response to the backlash, The Brutalist director Brady Corbet issued a statement to various Hollywood trades.

“Adrien and Felicity’s performances are completely their own,” he said. “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.”

It also emerged that AI cloning was used to enhance the singing voice of Emilia Pérez’s Karla Sofía Gascón, in the trans gangster musical directed by Jacques Audiard. In an interview recorded in May at the Cannes film festival, the film’s re-recording mixer Cyril Holtz said that it was necessary to increase the range of Gascón’s vocal register and that the production utilised Respeecher to blend their singing with that of Camille, the French pop star who co-wrote the film’s score.

Conversely Heretic, the horror movie starring Hugh Grant, has taken a radical anti-AI stance, with its end credits including the message: “No generative AI was used in the making of this film.”

The recent actors’ and writers’ strike were called at least in part over the threat that AI poses to large parts of the film and TV and video game industry, with settlements including “guardrails” against the use of AI to generate scripts. A strike by video game actors over replicating their voices is still ongoing.

Film-maker Paul Schrader revealed in a post on Facebook that he had also been experimenting with AI, using ChatGPT to generate ideas for films by major auteurs, including Paul Thomas Anderson, Quentin Tarantino, Ingmar Bergman and himself. Writing, “I’M STUNNED”, he added: “Every idea ChatGPT came up with (in a few seconds) was good. And original. And fleshed out. Why should writers sit around for months searching for a good idea when AI can provide one in seconds?” Rather than it being an endorsement for AI, Schrader told the Guardian: “People mistakenly think AI is a technological advance like [the] automobile when in fact it’s a virus driven by a hyperbolic curve.”

In Hollywood’s currently febrile mood over AI, it is hard to estimate the impact these revelations of the technology’s use may have on the current Oscars race, for which the final nominations are due to be announced on 23 January. Brody is now a strong contender for the best actor award, having won the Golden Globe for best actor in a drama, while Gascón looks likely to be the first out trans actor to be nominated for the best actress Oscar.