Good morning. The Brutalist has raised Hollywood eyebrows by dabbling in AI – more on that below, along with Donald Trump’s drilling hurdles and Amazon’s layoffs in Quebec. But first:
Today’s headlines
- Split on U.S. tariffs, premiers agree to focus on dismantling interprovincial trade barriers
- For some anti-Trump organizers, resistance gives way to resignation as his second term begins
- Carney lines up support from top Liberal brass in leadership race
Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones in The Brutalist.The Associated Press
Oscars
The Brutalist under fire
This morning, the Oscars will announce their 2025 nominations, and while I’m personally bullish on Mikey Madison in Anora and my forever-crush Ralph Fiennes in Conclave, one film is expected to dominate the categories: the wildly ambitious saga The Brutalist. Clocking in at three-and-a-half hours, it centres on Adrien Brody as Laszlo Toth, a Jewish-Hungarian architect trying to rebuild his life in the United States after the Holocaust.
Brody has already won a bucket of awards for his performance. So has writer/director Brady Corbet, who knits together questions of identity, trauma, patronage and addiction into a movie about one man’s unyielding passion for his work. The Globe’s film critic, Barry Hertz, adored it. And The Brutalist’s “great big juicy sell,” he told me, “is that it was made as a throwback to a certain era of Hollywood epic: huge historical drama with important themes and layered characters taking place in the physical world.”
Except over the weekend, a very 2020s controversy kicked up about the film’s use of artificial intelligence. It turns out The Brutalist deployed an AI tool called Respeecher to tweak the Hungarian spoken by Brody and his on-screen wife, Felicity Jones. “It is one of the most difficult languages to learn to pronounce,” editor David Jancso, a native Hungarian speaker, told the trade publication RedShark News. Despite working for months with a dialect coach, the stars couldn’t master it – so the AI software combined their lines with Jancso’s own voice for a more convincing result.
That doesn’t sound great? But it’s not entirely uncommon. Respeecher also surfaced in fellow awards contender Emilia Pérez, where it mixed Karla Sofía Gascón’s singing voice with a French pop star’s to increase her range. Lucasfilm tapped the tool to generate the distinctive baritone of the late James Earl Jones in Obi-Wan Kenobi. Rami Malek won an Oscar for Bohemian Rhapsody singing as an amalgam of himself, Freddie Mercury and Canadian Christian rocker Marc Martel.
Brady Corbet in Toronto last month.Christopher Katsarov/The Globe and Mail
Still, The Brutalist’s filmmakers have been careful to emphasize Respeecher’s limited scope. “It’s mainly just replacing letters here and there,” Jancso said. “You can do this in ProTools yourself, but we had so much dialogue in Hungarian that we really needed to speed up the process.” On Monday, Corbet sent a statement to The Hollywood Reporter, explaining that “the aim was to preserve the authenticity of Adrien and Felicity’s performances in another language, not to replace or alter them.”
On the one hand, Corbet is keen on authenticity: To get just the right period feel for The Brutalist, he mostly shot on VistaVision – big, honking, cumbersome cameras that haven’t been used in American film for 60 years. On the other hand, he likes to describe his movies as “virtual histories,” where fictional characters plunge into real-life disasters. “It’s to free myself of the responsibility to quote-unquote the truth,” Corbet told Hertz in an interview last month. “It removes everyone’s internal detective.”
In which case, who cares if Adrien Brody doesn’t quite nail his Hungarian vowels? And after Hollywood strikes partly spurred by the threats of AI, why business with Respeecher at all? “I’m not an AI absolutist – it’s a tech that’s here, we can’t ignore it, and in this case it feels like it’s used as any other post-production audio tool,” Hertz told me. “But to learn that there were digital alterations or additions does detract from the very tangible, real-touch element of The Brutalist that its moviemakers are selling.”
Hertz is more troubled by the film’s other high-tech controversy: using the generative AI program Midjourney to conjure blueprints and buildings for its closing sequence, a retrospective of Laszlo Toth’s work. Corbet was quick to tell The Hollywood Reporter that “all images were hand-drawn by artists.” But in a 2022 interview, The Brutalist’s production designer, Judy Becker, said they prompted Midjourney with big-name Brutalist architects and terms in order to whip up three different buildings, which an illustrator then redrew. Seems kind of shady! “The movie is all about this genius whose work is revolutionary,” Hertz said. “Using AI to generate, or pre-generate, schematics undercuts that badly. It’s simply not a good look.”
Okay, but: Why are we only now hearing about the creative misdeeds of this Oscar frontrunner, when Jancso spoke with RedShark two weeks ago, and Becker gave her interview two years before that? Hertz has his suspicions. “These stories do not just spread around organically,” he told me. “It’s basically political dirty tricks – finding an opponent’s weakness and exploiting it.”
The nominations may be revealed today, but final voting begins next month. We’ll have to wait until March 2 to see if The Brutalist can cement its victory.
The Shot
Drill, baby, drill?
Oil pump jacks in Rocky View County, Alta.Amir Salehi/The Globe and Mail
Donald Trump promised an energy revolution – but it’s not at all clear whether the oil and gas industry can live up to his grand ambitions. Read more about the financial, logistical and geological constraints on his crude promises here.
The Wrap
What else we’re following
Abroad: Israeli forces escalated its attacks on Jenin in the West Bank – a shift in military operation that Defence Minister Israel Katz said was “the first lesson from the method of repeated raids in Gaza.”
At home: As part of its anti-union campaign, Amazon is closing all seven of its Quebec warehouses and laying off 1,700 permanent staff.
Name game: The best … talent? The best … working conditions? Donald Trump’s cuts to DEI programs have forced chief executives in Davos to find new words for diversity.
Bot doc: Could venting to an AI therapist actually improve your mental health?
Royal treatment: Prince Harry ended his long-running lawsuit with Rupert Murdoch’s British papers, scoring an unequivocal apology and an eight-figure sum.