Director Brady Corbet of "The Beast" recently confirmed that this highly acclaimed historical drama indeed utilized AI technology during post-production, primarily to optimize the Hungarian dialogue of the lead actors and to assist in the creation of architectural design sketches.
Addressing concerns about the actors' accents, Corbet emphasized in an interview with Deadline: "The performances of Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones are entirely their own. They worked with dialect coach Tanera Marshall for months to perfect their accents." He explained that the innovative Respeecher technology was only used to improve certain vowels and letters in the Hungarian dialogue for accuracy, and did not alter the English dialogue.
Image Source Note: Image generated by AI, licensed by Midjourney
Film editor David Yansky revealed that after failing to achieve the desired results during the ADR (Automated Dialogue Replacement) phase, the production team turned to Respeecher software. As a native Hungarian speaker, Yansky used his voice input system to help optimize the pronunciation. He believes that this technology simply expedited work that would have originally been done manually in ProTools.
Regarding the architectural blueprints that appear at the end of the film, Corbet admitted that generative AI was used to assist in the creation, but emphasized that the final presentation is a hand-drawn work. Production designer Judy Becker previously revealed that the team quickly created reference models for three Beast-style buildings using Midjourney, which were ultimately redrawn by human illustrators.
This epic work, which cost only $10 million, tells the story of a fictional Hungarian Jewish architect, Laszlo Toth (played by Brody), who immigrates to the United States after the Holocaust. Although the use of AI technology has sparked some controversy, it also presents new possibilities for low to mid-budget filmmaking. Recently, from independent horror films to major productions like "Alien: Romulus," many have acknowledged the use of AI technology, and despite facing scrutiny, it seems to have not affected the success of these projects.
