What Everyone Gets Wrong About AI and Accents (Starting with The Brutalist)

Here's the question everyone's been asking about The Brutalist: should they have used AI to fix Adrien Brody's accent?

Here's the better question: what is an accent, actually?

Because once you understand that, everything about what the AI did, what it didn't do, and why the real conversation about accents and AI hasn't even started yet comes into focus.

So What Is an Accent, Actually?

Most people think an accent is a collection of sounds. Swap in some different vowels, adjust a few consonants, change up the rhythm, and you've got it. Like putting on a costume.

That's not what an accent is.

An accent is physical behavior. It lives in your body. The way your tongue rests when you're not talking. The shape of the space inside your mouth. The tension in your jaw, your lips, the back of your throat. What your vocal tract is doing before you even open your mouth to speak. That's vocal tract posture, and it's the foundation of everything.

When you grew up speaking the way you speak, you didn't learn a list of sounds. You learned a way of being. The muscles in your mouth and throat organized themselves around the people you heard, the community you grew up in, the identity you were building. By the time you were five or six, that organization was set. Not locked. Not permanent. But deeply, physically familiar.

An accent is identity expressed through the body. It is not a set of pronunciation corrections.

That distinction matters. And it's the distinction that nearly every headline about The Brutalist has missed.

The Actors and Their Coach Killed It

Let me say this plainly: Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones did extraordinary work on this film. They prepped for months with dialect coach Tanera Marshall. Months. That is the kind of timeline that allows actors to actually build an accent into their bodies, not just memorize a set of sounds.

And Tanera Marshall deserves real recognition here. Coaching actors through Hungarian is no small task. This isn't British RP, where the actor's native language and the target share a huge amount of phonetic territory. Hungarian is one of the most difficult languages for English speakers to approach. The vowel system is different. The consonant combinations are different. The rhythm and melody of the language are different. The vocal tract posture is different. Everything is different. To guide two actors through that process and deliver performances this strong? That's exceptional coaching. The kind of work that deserves to be recognized by name. That's the kind of work that should be celebrated.

Brody and Jones committed to this work, and it shows in every frame of the film. Brody didn't win the Oscar because an AI cleaned up his vowels. He won it because his performance lived and breathed in that character's language, in that character's body.

The AI came in during post-production. Editor David Jancso, a native Hungarian speaker, used Respeecher's voice conversion technology to refine specific vowels and consonants in the Hungarian-language dialogue. Not the English dialogue. Not the performance. Particular Hungarian sounds that are very, very difficult for non-native speakers. Not impossible. But under the pressures of actual performance, on a set, with everything else an actor is managing in the moment, things slip. And if you don't have a coach on set who is a fluent Hungarian speaker catching those slips in real time, this is exactly how they end up needing attention in post-production. That's not a failure of the actors. That's a production reality.

So what did the AI actually do? It corrected pronunciation. It made specific speech sounds more accurate to a native Hungarian ear.

What did the coaching build? The accent. The behavior. The physical reality of a Hungarian man speaking, thinking, breathing in that language. The thing that made the performance feel real.

Those are not the same thing. And that's what nearly everyone has gotten wrong about this story.

Here's What Should Actually Concern You

The Brutalist is not the cautionary tale here. The Brutalist is actually one of the best-case scenarios. The production invested in real coaching. They gave the actors real time. The AI was used to polish, not to build.

The cautionary tale is every production that doesn't do this.

Over the last five to ten years, there have been a number of high-profile films and series with everything going for them. Talented casts. Strong scripts. Stories worth telling. And the accent work became the thing audiences couldn't get past. Critics spent more time writing about the accents than about the performances. Audiences checked out. The work the actors and the rest of the creative team put in got buried under a problem that was almost entirely preventable.

Here's what I need you to understand: in every one of those cases, the issue was not the actor's talent. The issue was the production's investment. Not enough time. Not enough support. Not enough understanding of what accent work actually requires. An actor who gets two weeks to build an accent that needs four months is not failing. The system around them is failing.

And accent is the very first thing an audience encounters. Before they process the story, before they connect with the character, before they evaluate the writing, they hear the voice. If that voice doesn't feel authentic, it sits between the audience and everything else in the film. Every scene. Every emotional beat. Every moment that should land but doesn't quite, because something in the viewer's brain is going: something's off.

That's what happens when productions skip the process. And that's what should concern people about AI and accents in film. Not that a tool like Respeecher exists. It's a useful tool. But the moment a producer watches The Brutalist and thinks "we don't need the coaching, we'll just fix it in post," that's when we have a real problem. Because what Respeecher did on The Brutalist only worked because the foundation was already there. You can polish something that's been built. You can't polish something that doesn't exist.

Just Tell People

This part is simple. Always disclose. Always.

The technology wasn't the problem with how The Brutalist rolled this out. The silence was. When the AI use came out through an interview with the editor rather than through the production's own communication, it let the internet fill in the gaps. And the internet is not kind with gaps.

Director Brady Corbet's statement clarifying the scope of the AI use was good. It should have come first.

If you're a production using any AI tools in your accent work or dialogue editing, say so. Explain what the tool did. Explain what it didn't do. Audiences and the industry can handle the truth. What they can't handle is finding out later and feeling like they were deceived. The Academy is already moving toward mandatory AI disclosure for awards submissions. It's worth getting ahead of that.

What Comes Next

AI is going to keep showing up in accent work. Voice conversion tools will get better. The pronunciation correction will get more precise. That's not a threat to the craft. A tool that helps an actor's Hungarian vowels sound more authentic to native speakers? That's a tool I'd want to know about on any production I'm working on.

But a tool is only as useful as the understanding behind it. And right now, there is a real gap between what these tools can do and what productions think they can do. Pronunciation and accent are not the same thing. Fixing sounds in post and building an accent into an actor's body and identity are not the same thing. An AI that maps one speaker's vowels onto another speaker's performance is doing something fundamentally different from a coach who spends months building an accent into an actor's identity, their physical behavior, their imaginative life in the role.

The productions that will get this right are the ones that understand the full picture. Where the craft lives. Where the technology helps. Where one stops and the other starts. That kind of understanding, the ability to see the whole landscape of voice, accent, identity, and the tools that are now available, and build a plan that actually serves the story? That's where this work is headed. The future isn't coaches versus AI. It's knowing what each one does.

Adrien Brody's performance in The Brutalist is proof that when a production invests in the work, and then uses technology to support what's already been built, the result speaks for itself.

Three Oscars. Including Best Actor.

The work was real. The technology helped. In that order.

Chris Lang is a master dialect and accent coach with 21+ years of experience across 50+ film and television productions. He coaches actors in pre-production, on set, and remotely worldwide.

Working on a production that needs dialect support? Contact my manager Pamela Vanderway to discuss your project. Preparing for an audition or role on your own? Start here.