Filmmaking couple Brady Corbet and Mona Fastvold have battle scars from The Brutalist awards campaign last year, and this time, they’re not taking any chances. Fastvold’s upcoming film, The Testament of Ann Lee, has “zero AI,” Corbet told The Hollywood Reporter in a November 24 interview. “It was not required for this one,” Fastvold added. “This one was the most analog experience you could ever have. So there you go.” Ann Lee, which stars Amanda Seyfried as the titular founder of the Shakers, is directed by Fastvold and was co-written by the filmmakers. (They also co-wrote their previous film, but it was directed by Corbet.) Fastvold emphasized the practical work that went into her new film. “On Ann Lee, we’re using hand-painted matte paintings and glass [set] extensions, which is a very old technique that’s almost completely died out,” she said. “I want to engage with it all.”
The discourse over The Brutalist centered on Corbet’s use of AI software to correct some of Adrien Brody’s Hungarian pronunciation as architect László Tóth as well as aid an artist’s creation of Tóth’s drawings and completed buildings. Corbet believes that the headlines surrounding the controversy “were wrong.” “I understand why it’s sensitive, but the thing is, for example, in all grading softwares that every movie is graded on, there’s AI in the software,” he added. Fastvold clarified that they “never corrected the actors’ accents in English or their performances” but did “help them sound Hungarian when they were speaking Hungarian.” “We wanted to represent the Hungarian people accurately and not offend them by having someone doing a poor imitation of their language,” she explained. Ultimately, it wasn’t too brutal on Brody’s awards season — he won Best Actor at the Oscars and then delivered the longest acceptance speech of all time.
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