David Cronenberg has offered up his thoughts on the backlash that the Oscar-winning film The Brutalist was on the receiving end of throughout awards season.
The Canadian filmmaker was at a London Soundtrack Festival talk with career-long collaborator Howard Shore to discuss some of the films they’ve partnered on over the years.
The two visionaries discussed M. Butterfly, Cronenberg’s 1993 film about a French diplomat (Jeremy Irons) who becomes infatuated with a Chinese opera performer, Song Liling (John Lone). Their affair lasts for 20 years, and they subsequently marry, but Irons’ character is unaware or willfully ignorant that Liling is a man.
Cronenberg compared his editing of the film to the criticism surrounding Brady Corbet’s post-war epic when it was revealed that artificial intelligence was used on the film’s lead, Brody (who went on to win the best actor Oscar for his performance), to enhance the accuracy of his character’s Hungarian accent.
“I must confess, there was a scandal [with] The Brutalist,” the director began at London’s Royal Festival Hall. “There was a discussion about Adrien Brody… but apparently they used artificial intelligence to improve his accent. I think it was a campaign against The Brutalist by some other Oscar nominees. It’s very much a Harvey Weinstein kind of thing, though he wasn’t around.”
“We mess with actors’ voices all the time,” Cronenberg continued. “In the case of John (Lone), when he was being this character, this singer, I raised the pitch of his voice [to sound more feminine] and when he’s revealed as a man, I lowered to his natural voice. This is just a part of moviemaking.”
Cronenberg and Shore have collaborated on all of the former’s films, bar one, since 1979. At Saturday’s discussion, they unpacked movies such as The Fly (1986), Dead Ringers (1988), M. Butterfly (1993), Crash (1996) and most recently, The Shrouds (1994).
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