Good morning: In today's edition of The Industry, we look at:
Adrien Brody’s voice, Margot Robbie's horror and a Blue Moon.
Let’s go!
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The Brutalist and the AI controversy.
The editor of The Brutalist has detailed in an interview that Adrien Brody’s voice was augmented in the scenes where he speaks Hungarian.
His voice was modified using this AI tool that incorporated:
Brody’s original Hungarian pronunciation
Editor Dávid Jancsó’s voice, who is a native Hungarian speaker
I’m generally against the use of AI (as you can read in the tech section here), but I don’t have an issue with this other than the fact that Brody’s performance has been slightly misrepresented.
Hollywood has a long history of using tools to augment actor’s voices to make them fit the films better.
American singer Marni Nixon was renowned for replacing the singing voices of famous actresses in musicals with her own voice:
My Fair Lady (replaced: Aubrey Hepburn)
West Side Story (replaced: Natalie Wood)
The King And I (replaced: Deborah Kerr)
In the first sound film in Great Britain, Alfred Hitchock’s Blackmail (1929), the lead actress Anny Ondra’s Swedish accent was deemed not appropriate for the role, so she was dubbed live on set by Joan Barry.
David Niven (Sir Charles Lytton in Pink Panther) was dubbed when he had Lou Gehrig's disease, and his voice was too frail to enunciate properly.
And Andie MacDowell was dubbed by Glenn Close in Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes.
Of course, using AI for audio is a slippery slope, and one can see studios rushing to replace the dubbing stage as a perverted cost-cutting measure. Or even modifying performances by changing their delivery to the director’s liking. This latter extrapolation is particularly painful as the beautiful imperfections of human speech should never be smoothed over or replaced by a machine.
There is an irony that in tweaking Brody’s Hungarian dialect to sound more authentic with AI it is in fact less so.
Regardless, Brody is a powerhouse in The Brutalist who displays a mammoth chip on his shoulder from the continual brutalization by those who regard him as an outsider. This is balanced with his sublime charisma for achieving impossible visions.
For More:
Blackmail (1929), Anny Ondra's original audio screen test (featuring Hitchcock) vs. Joan Barry’s on-set dub of Ondra in the film.
My Fair Lady (1964). Hepburn vs. Nixon’s singing.
The Brutalist trailer.
THE INDUSTRY TLDR
Margot Robbie's LuckyChap is adapting the webtoon Stagtown into a horror film.
Apple TV+’s Ted Lasso has likely been renewed for season 4.
Sony Pictures Classics Richard Linklater-directed film Blue Moon will premiere at the Berlin Film Festival.
Margaret Qualley stars in Blue Moon, and the forthcoming Honey Don’t by director Ethan Coen.
Dubai-based sales agent Cercamon is now attached to Perla, premiering at Rotterdam.
Hong Kong-based sales company Asian Shadows has acquired the neoclassical war drama This City Is A Battlefield (Perang Kota), premiering at Rotterdam.
Park Chan-Wook (dir: The Handmaiden, Decision to Leave) just dropped a first look photo for his new film, No Other Choice.
Disney+ launches their first Nordic original Whiskey on the Rocks.
THE INDUSTRY NEWS
Another Lucky look for Adaptation: Margot Robbie's prolific producing LuckyChap is no stranger to adaptations, with projects currently in development for Comics, Video Games, and yes more Mattel Toys, but the next point of inspiration might be from a medium that some people don't even know exist: Webcomics.
Luckychap is partnering with Wattpad Webtoon studios to adapt the popular Stagtown into a horror film. Stagtown is a webcomic never actually published outside of its online domain which has garnered over 18 M views praised for its haunting plot and eerie artwork.
Directed and written by Benjamin Brewer, known for his VFX work on Everything Everywhere All at Once and acclaimed projects like Arcadian and The Trust, the film follows three friends, Frankie, Jeremy, and Felix, as they uncover the horrors lurking in Stagtown.
Currently in pre-production, this joins Wattpad’s slate of other adaptations, also developing several high-profile projects, including Lore Olympus and Death of a Pop Star.
This fancast of the first two chapters might give you a good place to start. It is not hard to visualize the transition from screen to page.
Unofficial Renewal:
Apple TV+’s Ted Lasso (Season 4)
Hinted at by one of the actors, Nick Mohammed.
Trailer:
Paramount+’s 1923 (Season 2) Trailer
Starring Helen Mirren and Harrison Ford
THE ACTOR SPOTLIGHT
Following a shockingly memorable performance in last year’s Cannes gem The Substance, on-the-rise actress Margaret Qualley has an even busier upcoming slate set for 2025.
The Maid actress is set to star in one half of the directing brother duo Ethan Coen’s next film, Honey Don't, alongside Aubrey Plaza and Chris Evans, where she will play a private investigator looking into a California-based cult led by its charismatic founder (Evans). Qualley, just last year, was the lead in Ethan’s zany road trip lesbian comedy Drive-Away Dolls (2024, trailer). Honey Don’t is expected to have a theatrical release this May.
In 2025, Qualley will also be getting to fulfill a lifelong goal of working with Boyhood (2014) director Richard Linklater in his upcoming feature, Blue Moon, a Lorenz Hart biopic with Ripley’s Andrew Scott and two-time Oscar nominee Ethan Hawke.
Just days before the Academy Award nominations are announced both Qualley and The Substance (trailer) are majorly in the conversation. In French writer-director Coralie Fargeat’s satirical over the top body horror, Qualley was quite literally born out of Demi Moore’s back. She takes on the dead-eyed narcissistic Sue, the “younger, more beautiful, more perfect” version of Moore’s Elizabeth Sparkles, who, despite maintaining her insouciant innocence amidst suggestive lip biting and promiscuous hip thrusts, is consumed by her need to be desired and loved.
From Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019) to Fosse/Verdon (2019) to now The Substance, Qualley has shown extensive range and rare scene-steal qualities in a career that’s just beginning to really take off.
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FESTIVALS
Sony Pictures Classics Blue Moon, directed by Richard Linklater, will premiere at the Berlinale.
The film is about Lorenz Hart, a songwriter who wrote over 500 songs and 28 musicals, including A Connecticut Yankee, Babes in Arms, and Pal Joey. The film centers particularly on Hart’s struggles with alcoholism and mental health as he tries to save face during the opening of "Oklahoma!"
Linklater will direct, and his long-time collaborator, Ethan Hawke, will star. No stranger to music biopics, Hawke starred as tragic singer Chet Baker in Born to be Blue (2015).
Berlin Film Festival runs Feb 13th - Feb 23rd.
Berlin Tidbit:
The festival received a $1.9 € cash infusion from the German Culture Ministry, likely to make up for the Berlin Senate not providing the festival with $2 € this year.
Tidbit:
Dubai-based major sales agent Cercamon is now attached to Perla, an emotional story of motherhood and self-reflection from director Alexandra Makarová (Crush My Heart). The film is set in the 1980s and follows a single mother who fled communist Czechoslovakia to return to her homeland in order to pay an old debt. This news comes just before Perla’s world premiere at the 54th International Film Festival Rotterdam in the Tiger Competition.
Hong Kong-based sales company Asian Shadows has acquired the neoclassical war drama This City Is A Battlefield (Perang Kota) ahead of its premiere in the coveted closing night spot at this year’s International Film Festival Rotterdam. This marks the second collaboration between Asian Shadows and Indonesian director Mouly Surya (Trigger Warning) following her Cannes feature Marlina the Murderer in Four Acts (2017), which became very critically acclaimed in Indonesia.
INDIE FILMMAKER SPOTLIGHT AND INTERNATIONAL NEWS
Park Chan-Wook (dir: The Handmaiden, Decision to Leave) just dropped a first look photo for his new film, No Other Choice.
Here’s the official synopsis:
After being unemployed for several years, a man devises a unique plan to secure a new job: eliminate his competition.
This is right up Chan-Wook’s alley as he excels at playing with deeply disturbed characters who break out of tightly controlled settings like in The Handmaiden (trailer). His imagery is electrically stylized with a neo-noir twist.
We look forward to his new film, which is set to release in the fall. But given his history with Cannes (he has won Best Director, Grand Prix, and Jury Prize), we could expect it at the festival this year.
Whiskey on the Rocks: a satirical six-part series dramatizing the 1981 Soviet submarine U137 incident in Sweden, blending humor with high-stakes Cold War drama, is coming to Disney+. This will be the streaming platform's first Nordic Original. It just premiered on SVT, debuts on Disney+ in Europe on January 22, and rolls out on Hulu in the U.S. Check out the trailer to this deliriously goofy historical satire.
ON THIS DAY
Cecil B. DeMille (1881 - 1959), director of The Ten Commandments, passed away at 77.
See you tomorrow!
Written by Gabriel Miller, Spencer Carter, and Madelyn Menapace.
Editor: Gabriel Miller.
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Personally against AI overall (which is ironic, considering my larger point) but it's starting to feel like the term has become all encompassing - if this had been initially represented as the sound department modulating Brody's voice and accent and dubbing some sections, it may not have become such a big deal. The film industry is currently at a crossroads with AI, and rightly so, but to properly discuss its advantages and disadvantages, we (and the media especially) need to be able to dissect it properly and get into the weeds. AI is not a looming monolith. It's a collection of many, many new avenues, some of which might genuinely be helpful and many of which are going to cannibalize existing processes. We need to be able to discuss this more smartly.
Been very interested in this topic as a Brady Corbet fan and someone who loved The Brutalist. I listened to an interview with Corbet yesterday where he says that they really wanted Hungarian viewers to feel it was as authentic a representation as possible, given that Hungarian is notoriously tricky to learn fully.
And it seems like they really went to every length they could to make sure this wasn't your typical case of using AI to cut corners. Brody and Felicity Jones both still had to learn Hungarian and own all of the rights to any output in perpetuity, and the process of using ReSpeecher was a manual one which focused on replacing individual letters where necessary (rather than creating anything from scratch) that actually created extra jobs in post-production, rather than getting rid of them. Hopefully (though probably not) this could serve as an example of the beneficial ways in which AI can used in the film industry, as opposed to the very destructive ways.