Who Cares About Hungarian Vowels?

Who Cares About Hungarian Vowels?

The vital stats of The Brutalist make it sound like a behemoth of film art.

It’s got 10 Oscar nominations. It got a 17-minute standing ovation at the Venice Film Festival.

It’s 215 minutes, or 3 hours and 35 minutes long (with a 15-minute intermission). It’s got an 18 certificate. It’s got an Oscar-winning lead actor.

And it’s more than one whole hour longer than the other epic film its leading man starred in to get that Oscar – which itself got 7 Oscars more than 20 years ago.

So take that, Roman Polanski.

Zoom, crash, whoosh. These facts and figures already feel like they’re flying out of the screen at you in movie trailer style.

From its visuals to its music, it all looks like The Brutalist is built for sure-fire success.

Strictly Speaking

But the thing that’s got people talking about this film is not just its length, nor its visually epic scale.

Nor hyberbolic critiques like a “titanic meditation on the nature of the immigrant experience“.

Nor “not a film to devour, but to be devoured by“, nor one-word summaries like “monumental” that partner perfectly with the architectural imagery on screen.

No.

Not the big, banging visuals.

But the subtle, spoken words of the lead actors.

Because it’s the use of AI (Artificial Intelligence) in the dialogue of Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones that has really got people talking – both in the voice-over world and in the wider creative industries.

Hungary For Authenticity?

The brouhaha started when the film’s editor, who is a native Hungarian speaker, revealed that he had used an AI speech synthesis tool to make the stars’ Hungarian dialogue (because the Brody and Jones actually speak in Hungarian in parts) sound authentic.

Dávid Jancsó told Red Shark News that he fed his own voice into the technology and this was then used to enhance Jones’s and Brody’s pronunciations.

It’s not completely clear (to me, at least) how this was carried out, but the film’s director (who is American and not Hungarian by the way) has defended the action, saying that it was done:

“specifically to refine certain vowels and letters for accuracy…

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.”

Artistic Integrity?

Since this is a film about a man and his architecture, I have to say that such a claim feels like it’s built on dodgy foundations.

Because a lot about The Brutalist sounds like it should be authentic.

It was shot in Hungary, the home country of the characters.

It was filmed almost entirely on VistaVision, an old technology used mostly in the 1950s and 60s, which you could say evokes the era of the story.

And lead actor Adrien Brody’s mother is also said to have been born in the country.

Sounds authentic.

However, when you do more reading, you also gradually learn that Brody’s immigrant, architect character is fictional.

Oh.

It’s a fact that The Brutalist‘s director, Brady Corbet perhaps unwittingly played up when he told the BBC that the coming-to-America myth was going to be “undressed” and moved from “familiar territory” to “more unchartered places”.

Reading this, you can almost begin to understand the possible motivations for his actors’ Hungarian lines being given the fictional treatment as well.

But such artistic plans (if they were plans and not whims) are riven with other creative, moral and socially wide-reaching dilemmas.

The first is authenticity, which is now surely fully out of the window. The Brutalist isn’t a true story – though it could easily overwhelm you into believing it.

The second is its humanity, which is undermined by its actors’ months of dialect work being artificially interfered with.

And the third is credibility. Because it seems that in the editor’s pursuit of perfect Hungarian to satisfy his own ears, he’s somehow convinced his director to fiddle with his stars’ performances for the sake of “certain vowels and letters”.

So he wants to be credible to “certain vowels and letters”, eh? How many exactly?

The Brutal Truth

There are 9.95 million people in Hungary who will never be affected, nor bothered by this AI manipulation. The majority of these will see and hear the dubbed version.

Furthermore, Hungarians living in English-speaking countries will consume the international release.

So it’s those people the film is serving then, is it? A minority of ex-pat Hungarians, who are starving for authenticity in a film about their nation, where the main actors are American and British?

“Certain vowels and letters”… erm… was it really worth it?

Well, The Brutalist‘s editor declared to Red Shark News that the actors “did a fabulous job but we also wanted to perfect it so that not even locals will spot any difference.”

Why? That makes zero sense.

Do any native German speakers want Tom Cruise’s opening German monologue in the international version of Valkyrie to be re-made now using AI?

Does anyone else in Germany, or Ireland, want Michael Fassbender’s German lines in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds to be re-recorded with AI “for accuracy”?

Do any native or casual French speakers, or anywhere in the Francophone world, want Joaquin Phoenix’s wobbly Anglo/American English accents in 2023’s Napoleon – which is missing its requisite ‘e’ acute accent in the trailer image below, by the way, and which is pronounced differently by him and his co-star in said trailer, to be revised?

I mean, let’s give the whole cast the aw-haw-hee-haw AI treatment, complete with Gallic shrugs, while we’re at it.

And since we’re already talking about Ridley Scott films, are there are any ghosts of dead Romans rising up against Russell Crowe’s Anglo-Australian pronunciation of Elysium, or any other lines in Gladiator, so that it can have lashings of Latin veritas?

I mean, az isten faszára, as they say in Hungary.

Mystery Motives

I can’t decide whether The Brutalist‘s modified Hungarian dialogue is AI for art’s sake, or art for the sake of brutal AI.

That is: has AI been Artfully Instigated for Artistic Integrity? Or has Artistic Intelligence been quietly sacrificed upon the altar of Artificial Intelligence and Big Tech?

More to the point, who’s actually pulling the strings here? Is it the editor who’s so hell bent on having his “perfect” Hungarian? Is somebody paying for this speech synthesis company to have a credit in this film? And who is going to pay for this decision further down the line?

Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones clearly went along with it, but did they have any reservations, or any opportunity to object?

Does the dialogue manipulation, however small, actually deal a big blow to the Screen Actors Guild‘s campaign to protect artists from AI encroachment?

What is the heart of this film? Does it have a hole in that heart now?

And what about the third star, the Australian, Guy Pearce? Has his American accent passed the authenticity-in-acting test, and is it therefore immune from Artificial Interference?

These are just some of the many questions that need to be asked.

As Sociologist Dr Jenn Chubb put it when she appeared on The Last Human Voice podcast to discuss it:

“The real issue here is around transparency…. we really need to be underscoring the importance of clarity, so as not to dupe people… it’s very much about the extent to which the listener knows what it is they’re hearing.

They can then make a choice. That then comes back to these sociological issues of agency and our choice over what we choose to consume. And so in a broader dialogue, this issue of trust and transparency is really important. 

“To state when [AI speech synthesis] has or hasn’t been used is actually very important, fundamentally, when we think about whether something is authentic or not”.

Meanwhile, the show’s other guest, Law Professor Dr Peter Harrison from the University of York remarked:

“It highlights for me… the fact that the voice is special and the voice is really important in relation to relaying trust”. 

Other key points were made by co-hosts Annette Rizzo and Marcus Hutton, who questioned the validity in altering professional actors’ performances, while outlining certain social and political pressures propelling a noticeable trend towards hyperrealism and hypernaturalism.

Unfortunately, the podcast’s discussion – while broad and incisive – nevertheless missed another “really important” point, which is at the centre of all communication.

In the business world, it’s called KYC (Know Your Customer).

While in communications, it’s what I call KYA (Know Your Audience).

So really – who in the cinema-going Anglosphere, apart from the editor of The Brutalist – cares about Hungarian vowels?

You’ll have to ask him that one. And then make your own judgement as to whether the answer you get is authentic – and further to that, what ‘authentic’ even means.

 

 

 

Thanks for reading – and in the meantime, happy voice-over hiring.

If you liked this article, please share it via the social media buttons above. A credit, link and a thank you are always appreciated.

 

Further reading

Five Ways to Write Voice-Over Copy Like a Jedi – Chas Rowe

Five Keys to A Successful Voiceover Project – Chas Rowe