Director Brady Corbet’s stunning new film, The Brutalist, has won three Golden Globes and remains a frontrunner for this year’s Oscars despite a controversy over its use of AI which erupted this week. (The film has received 10 Oscar nominations, including best film, best director and best actor.) The growing backlash centres on whether the film should have used AI to improve the Hungarian accents of its stars, Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones.
Many of today’s actors are superb at delivering accents – like American Renée Zellweger’s perfect English in Bridget Jones, or British actor Idris Elba’s Baltimore accent in The Wire or Australian Margot Robbie’s utterly convincing American accent in Barbie.
For The Brutalist, the accent challenge faced by Brody and Jones was truly brutal: the tricky vowel sounds of the Hungarian language. It was even difficult for Brody, whose mother was a Hungarian refugee who arrived in the US in 1956.
