Emmy-Winning Producer on ‘Brutalist’ AI Controversy: “Don’t Let This Noise Diminish a Truly Terrific Film” (Guest Column)
I’ve been making movies and series long enough to remember when cable television arrived and was going to be the death knell of network television. News flash: broadcast TV is still going strong. I remember when home video arrived and was going to kill the theatrical feature film business. News flash: there is still a theatrical feature business.
The latest “Aliens have landed in Grover’s Mill” moment is the plaintive cry over the filmmakers of The Brutalist using A.I. to enhance Adrien Brody‘s and Felicity Jones’s Hungarian-language performances. I am baffled that we’re again focusing on the wrong target.
The squabble centers around the editor of The Brutalist using “Respeecher” software to manipulate certain vowel sounds when Brody and Jones speak Hungarian, their characters’ native tongue. In the current issue of Vanity Fair, there is an article about this brouhaha quoting a viral social media post: “The Brutalist A.I. shit makes me so sad because how many times will this happen in the future where I see some beautifully crafted movie and find out it hid A.I. in parts…”
Why is this even dinner chatter, much less a controversy? We have been doing this exact same thing in editing suites, sound edit rooms and mixing stages for as long as I can remember.
You Might Also Like
My producing career began in the late ’80s, and I’ve produced and directed over 80 movies and television episodes. For as long as I’ve been in the business, we’ve done tiny things to enhance voice performances. For example, if an actor delivers a perfect reading in take three of a scene, but there’s a mic bump, car horn or loud noise masking a word, do we go to the second-best take? Not if we can avoid it. With the Pro Tools software, which replaced time spent in a sound edit suite, we can try and grab just that word from another take and place into take three. We save the best performance.
When actors are standing on the edge of a freeway and we can’t hear a single word of dialogue, we replace it digitally with ADR (additional dialogue replacement), which replaced the earlier analog version of “looping.” Some actors even ask to come in and do ADR for specific scenes, where the sound recording is perfect, to improve their performances. Donald Sutherland was a big fan of “looping,” telling me he learned ways to enhance his performance from none other than Federico Fellini, on Casanova.
There are more ways we enhance dialogue. On one film, we needed to address a sibilance in an actor’s speech. The mixer used a special plug-in filter — called a “de-Esser” — changing the dialogue on just the distracting syllables. That’s not exactly A.I., but it’s still a digital fix to a vocal performance.
We do these minuscule adjustments on every movie, and nobody says a peep.
I work primarily in the television movie business, where, as was the case with The Brutalist, we work insanely hard to try to make our films look and sound perfect despite having insanely low budgets and short shooting schedules. The Brutalist reportedly had a budget of only $10 million, and is nominated for the best picture Oscar alongside films that, in some cases, were made for ten or fifteen times that.
As a filmmaker, you use the tools available and hope to diminish compromises.
The last film I directed took place in Texas — and we shot it in Vancouver. We made it work. I was able to shoot efficiently, knowing that with a 4K image I was comfortable if I needed a close-up and missed it. We can blow up a two shot and find the close-up. If we end up in the editing room seeing a Canadian flag in the middle of our shot, I know I can easily use affordable CGI to remove it. Are these digital tools diminishing the film’s integrity or cheapening it? I’d argue to the contrary.
This is not to say that I’m unsympathetic to the perils of A.I. I own a library of 45 films, the income from which will hopefully help me to retire one day. Do I want A.I. grabbing plot, dialogue or images from my library to create something “new” for someone else, without compensating me? Of course not. Do I want A.I. to start writing movies, series or other original content without crediting and paying the dozens (or hundreds? thousands? millions?) of sources that it referenced to do so? That’s a hard no.
On another film that I recently directed, I was on the mixing stage when we discovered that the loop group had forgotten to record a two-word acknowledgment between two characters in a hallway. It wasn’t a big deal, but it left an unnecessary hole in the dialogue track. In every other previous movie instance, we’d call a loop group actor and ask them to swing by and add it. I was getting ready to do that when the lead mixer said, “Wait, I got you.” Just seconds later, he replayed the scene and there was the dialogue, as if a loop group thespian had done it. “Where did you find that?!” I asked. “I didn’t. It’s A.I. software. I can make the voice lower, higher, more or less ethnic — whatever you want.”
In that innocuous moment at 11 o’clock at night on a darkened mixing stage, I saw the embodiment of everyone’s fears. This A.I. could easilyreplace loop groups. Real performers. Real jobs. I have many actor-friends who get by during lean times by doing background loop group work. We should all be justifiably alarmed and fight to help loop groups survive.
But let’s not let those screaming from the sidelines, without understanding the details of our process, distract us from the places where A.I. is actually a threat to people’s livelihoods and careers. Using A.I. as a tool to replace a process we’ve already performed for decades is not that threat. So don’t let this noise around The Brutalist diminish a truly terrific film from a gifted filmmaker.