BRENDAN GUNN IS THE ALL-STAR ACCENT COACH ALLOWING MOVIE A-LISTERS TO LINGUISTICALLY TRAVEL THE GLOBE. WE MEET THE MAN WHO HELPED THE STARS OF THE NORTHMAN MASTER THE ICELANDIC TONGUE.
WORDS AND INTERVIEW BY MARK ASCH
When interviewing a linguist, transcription is an adventure. I must begin with an expression of enormous gratitude to LWLies’ own Marina Ashioti, for dealing with exchanges such as this:
“I took the phonology of modern Icelandic English and extracted some features from it. There’s a process called devoicing: so Zs become Ss, Vs become Fs, Ds become Ts. That gives you a base, and if everyone does that, it’s easier than trying to get the more obvious characteristics which are very different – what’s called a palato-alveolar fricative. They would say ‘eyeshland,’ well, ‘eyeshlant,’ so it’s a T at the end instead of the D. We have consistency words, like ‘ghot,’ which takes you away from ‘gawd.’ Another word which, strangely enough, happens a lot in The Northman is ‘bloht’ which is ‘blood’ and then there are ‘slayfes,’ and ‘sun,’ which is a round vowel rather than ‘son’.”
This is Brendan Gunn, speaking on how he and director Robert Eggers developed the accents for an English-language Viking epic. In addition to his work with individual actors, it’s Gunn’s job to decide, in large part, how much disbelief a film’s audience is asked to willingly suspend. The sound of The Northman would have to find a happy medium between Richard Fleischer’s 1958 epic The Vikings, in which Tony Curtis plays a Norse warrior who sounds oddly like a guy from the Upper East Side of New York City named Bernard Schwartz (Curtis’ birthplace and birth name), and a subtitled film in which everyone speaks a dead language.
Gunn, an Irishman, is an academic linguist who trained as a phonologist before the movies found him. Beginning with 1987’s A Prayer for the Dying, starring Mickey Rourke, he worked for decades helping American and British stars to master the brogue, during an era in which the Troubles, and other Irish tales, were much on the mind of the American and UK film industries: In the Name of the Father; Moll Flanders; The Butcher Boy. With Brad Pitt, with whom he first worked on The Devil’s Own, he developed the brash, dense Traveller patois the actor famously demonstrates in Guy Ritchie’s Snatch. He’s subsequently branched out on the language tree, with credits including: Sahara, with its French West African-influenced English; Sweeney Todd, with Sacha Baron Cohen as the exotic Italian in Victorian London; and 10,000 BC. Yes, 10,000 BC,the Roland Emmerich movie set in the Stone Age. Why did a movie set in the Stone
