BACKGROUND

How did you become a dialect coach?

Barbara: I was an actress for a number of years, I trained at RADA and worked in England and Ireland as an actress, and then when I had my son it became very difficult. I toured with him on my back when he was 6 months old around England each week in a different place, but it was rather difficult. It came up that they were going to run a course in voice at the Central School of Speech and Drama; it was the first time it had ever happened. Somebody recommended me so I went to see them but said I didn't have any money and I've got a child, so they gave me a bursary to do the course. I never intended to go fully into it, I had a notion that I would do it and go on acting, but it rather overtook me, and from there I went to teach at the Drama Centre London where I took over the voice department. I taught at LAMDA [The London Academy of Music & Dramatic Art], and directed and taught voice there, and also taught some voice at RADA [Royal Academy of Dramatic Art].

Then I went into films by chance. When I was studying at Central there was a lady called Joan Washington who was the voice coach and she very kindly let me come and watch her classes at RADA and we kept in contact. My specialty was actually classical texts, very rare texts.

What did your specialty entail?

Barbara: I taught actors how to speak them and how to understand them. I was the voice director for the production of Othello with Michael Gambon. There were several productions that I was the voice director on; it was about verse and how you speak it and all that sort of thing. I had also taught dialect across the board when I taught in schools, but I began to give it up because there was a lot of work available that was more into text, which I was very interested in.

The first film I ever did was French Kiss with Kevin Kline and Meg Ryan. After that I did a series of other ones, mainly Emma with Gwyneth Paltrow, as well as Shakespeare in Love with Gwyneth, and also Possession, and then I worked with Renee Zellweger, I did Bridget Jones's Diary, Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason, and Angela's Ashes with Emily Watson. I did Seven Years in Tibet with Brad Pitt and David Thewlis, and Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl with Geoffrey Rush, as well as The Life and Death of Peter Sellers, which he did 41 different accents for. I also worked Johnny Depp on The Man Who Cried, and on Aliens Vs. Predator I re-voiced with one of the actors on that, as well as some work on Finding Neverland as well. I've done quite a lot of different films.

How did you become involved on V For Vendetta?

Barbara: I got a call from the production and unfortunately at the time I thought I wouldn't going to be able to do it because I was going to do a film about Mary Queen of Scots but the film collapsed as these things happen, and Joel Silver rang my agent and asked if I could do it.

DIALECT COACHING

Do you find that people have different abilities to be able to take on language?

Barbara: I do. They've actually proved that if you play music you listen with a different part of the brain to music than if you don't play music. Therefore you listen with different parts of the brain. We know very little in this moment in time, when we know more how it functions, we may find that different people have different abilities with different places. My husband, for example, speaks five languages. He comes from Eastern Europe and is fluent in three languages, my son speaks three languages and I would say he's bilingual in English and Spanish, and his French is quite good.

I also think your ear is important in how you listen and hear sounds, so a lot of it depends on as a child how exposed you are to different sounds and different languages. If someone lives in a village and they rarely hear anything but what's in the village, it becomes more difficult to pick language up. Also, some people have a better hearing ability. It is possible to teach people to hear better and that's why something like phonetics - when you just learn sounds and divorce the sound from the spelling - it develops your ear, and anybody's ear can be improved by learning phonetics. Now, in England, we teach drama students phonetics, but we don't teach children in schools. In Europe a lot of the European schools teach phonetics, and that's how they teach languages, so from a young age it's set. It's all by sounds, so it's by learning about sounds. You can interfere with a person's learning patterns if you introduce written language too soon. A child learns by the mother looking in saying “coo koo coo koo" and the child sees how the mouth moves, hears the sound, and connects them. That's how we actually learn sound. Once you put it on written page, it puts a barrier between you.

If you speak a language well you don't translate in your head, you switch, that's the moment that's very important. And that's the same thing we want to do with an actor: we don't want an actor thinking, is it this sound, or that sound? We want them to switch into the accent so it becomes part of them, so it's like a second skin. It's not an imitation of an accent. Imitating is not for the actor because there's a moment in which you are imitating and you are not being. The actor has to be in this accent, and when they're having emotional recall your natural accent, or your childhood accent, is most likely to come out.

The accent has to be very strong, so that's why I believe in working for a long time to get the accent together, and it's not something you can easily do. We don't go to the text for a long time. If we take RP (received pronunciation, an English dialect represented in the pronunciation of most British dictionaries),it is easy to plot out: it has twelve pure simple vowels, eight diphthongs in the basic language. If you're American, and you're going to do RP you have to learn all the different vowels, and that is getting you to change the shape of your mouth.

As an American you would never have to put your mouth in those particular positions?

Barbara: Exactly, because as an American you would say would say 'dance' [with a flat 'a' and partially open mouth], you would never say 'dance' [with a long 'a' ­ 'aaaah' ­ and an open mouth]. So you learn from dropping your tongue completely flat in the mouth and going 'aaaah'. The other thing is opening the mouth and moving your tongue to make all the vowel sounds. All the vowels are voiced, and as you learn how to change the shape of your face to make the sounds your look changes.

There are also secondary gestures that change. We think of Americans as having more space, so they tend to have a much more open body than, say, someone who's English. And they tend to talk louder because they expect people to listen to them. Whereas the English - this is generalization I'm talking to, but there's an essence in it - the body is tighter, people are more prim. The idea of learning different vowel sounds is that you then go into a series of exercises that bring you the vowel sounds so you go into the accent without thinking about going into the accent.

So a person's environment also conditions their accent?

Barbara: Yes, and climatic conditions can also make a change. If you come from Australia you look up at the sun and that action changes your voice and the way you pronounce words. In Cornwall there are seamen who have their faces up against the sea and that makes their accent a certain way. The Devon accent is quite rolling like the countryside, it goes up and down. If it's an urban accent, it's quite blunt. A Yorkshire accent from England is very busy in the mouth, and that's because they used to work in the mills where they made cloth. It was very noisy, so they used to mouth things across the mill floor to each other, and as a result that mouth action has remained. People who lived in very poor conditions, like working class Birmingham and the East End of London, they would have adenoids that would develop through generations because they lived in wet, cold, damp conditions. That would develop into their accents as a result of the living conditions of the people.

An actor has to find - within the accent - their character's accent, because no two people speak the same, it's like a fingerprint. You have your own tunes in your voice, then your have to learn the accent tunes, and then you have to marry them to become your own voice. The idea is not to teach the actor in a parrot fashion to repeat sounds, but to take it, digest it and let it come out of their own accent.

I can't think of the accent for the person 'til I hear their voices; it's marrying their voice with what you're doing. It comes with what class you are, what your job is, what your perception is of yourself… it all makes a difference. In the English context, some people who come from the north of England might arrive at Euston train station, and immediately they step off the train their accent gets stronger, because they are asserting themselves, other people will blend in. That's all about how your attitude to yourself is. The voice is a part of the soul really.

You can actually tell from a recording if someone is depressed or ill; you can tell so much about a person from their voice that it's very important for the character to find their voice. Someone like Peter Sellers, who did lots and lots of voices, used to talk about finding the voice for different characters. That's how he worked because he started out in radio with, I think, The Goon Show, so he was used to finding various voices for the character. He found the voice first and then he created the character around the voice. Everybody may not work that way, but part of my function is to help an actor develop that voice into their character, rather than pour on them a voice that has nothing to do with their character.

How many languages do you speak?

Barbara: I only speak English and pidgin French, I studied at the Mime School in Paris. My vocabulary is quite good but I don't speak very correct French. However, I can teach somebody English spoken with a German accent or a French accent, an Arabic accent, Palestinian or Lebanese. I would interview someone who came from there and would make a tape and then I would notate it phonetically, and from that I would work out exactly what sounds they change and what sounds do it. I would also notate the tune of the voice. It's important to go and interview them because you actually acquire a lot of information by just looking at them and sitting there with them. Usually I would ask people to talk about their childhood and things that have happened because that's when the voice is most relaxed, with the most natural tones coming out of it.

If you remove the conditions does a local accent change as well?

Barbara: Yes. The East End of London is a perfect example. First of all you have the Irish moving in, and then at the turn of the century there's Jewish immigration from the pogroms in Russia and then today it's Bangladeshi immigration, so the accent changes by the people that move into the area, how they move out, and how the see themselves. When they get on better and they move out to the suburbs they might see themselves as more pretentious maybe, so they try to be more correct, and they get a suburban accent. They don't know exactly how to make the sound, but they want to speak “proper".

Many years ago this lady came to me who worked for one of the top banks in London, and she said that she felt that her voice wasn't posh enough. We worked for a long time and I really didn't think her accent was changing so I asked if she thought her lessons were really worthwhile. She said, “Yes, when I speak on the phone I have my phone voice, and I'm able to communicate with people." She rose up the organization by what she perceived herself to be; she felt better about the way she spoke, although I could not discern a change in her accent.

Did you have an interest in accents before you fell into this work?

Barbara: Being in acting you're always fascinated by characters and people. As I said, verse and things like that was more my métier, so obviously you learn about it when you go into it. When I was teaching it, I would bring in pictures of the people from a particular area and talk about what they did to build the accent, rather than just teaching them the sounds. I can't think of an accent without thinking of all the things around it.

Does your job often introduce you to accents you are not familiar with?

Barbara: Yes, it does. You have to go and find out about whatever you need, there are no books, and it's terribly useful if you can just go and be for a day, wherever it is, around people in the market or something, you pick up so much from that.

There is a thing with accents, though, I find it quite exciting when you do something that you think you mightn't be able to do, it's that moment of will you get it or won't you get it. I have to get it first, before my student gets it. I don't mean I have to speak it, I mean that I have to know all about it before I can teach it to somebody else. And obviously you learn far more than you're passing on, because some people are not that interested. I'm a facilitator, it's not up to me to tell somebody how to work, I present them with things and sometimes if they have a low threshold of interest, you have to make up lots of things to work around that. Some people pick it up quickly, and some people don't, and some people are very fastidious.

When we do accents, particularly in the English way, people tend to place the accent where they think it is. For instance, if you come from Devon it's a comedy part, if you have a strong cockney accent you're not very bright. So that is a problem: you have to get across the stereotypical. For instance, in America if you want to do a bread commercial you get a voice from Kansas, because that's warm and comforting. In England, in RP, we don't pronounce the 'r,' whereas in America it's working class if you don't pronounce the 'r's and it's upper class if you do pronounce the 'r's.

These kinds of things change all over the place. The 'r' and obviously the phonemes you have in language change. There's the joke that people say 'flied lice' if they're Chinese: there was one phoneme for the 'r' and the 'l' at one time, and it's become two phonemes, but some languages just keep the one phoneme and don't have both phonemes. In England you can still get old recordings where people would say 'vield' instead of 'field', so at one point the same phoneme of 'vuh' was used for 'field' and 'vield'. The Scandinavians have a sound that's just fractionally off that, they say, 'ffaaah' and 'rrr' where they don't actually close their lips, and you find that in certain Irish accents, like Wexford, which had a large Viking influence hundreds of years ago, and they still have that sound when they speak. It's fascinating how language travels. In the north of England there is also lots of influence from the Vikings as well in Yorkshire.

Has work sent you looking for period pieces?

Barbara: Yes, in London there's a studio of recorded sound where you can go and listen. You can listen to a 1930s thatcher from Sussex - you can't take the recording away or record it - but you can go and listen to it. Plays from the 1950s, I think, are all stored, so you can go and listen to a play that has been. I think there are lots of things on the internet like that now, so when you're doing something you go and research it.

EVEY

Had Natalie Portman done accents before?

Barbara: I don't think she'd done any English accents before; although she does speak Hebrew and she speaks Arabic. Before filming started I went to work in Israel with her where she was making an improvised film, so we worked at five thirty in the morning, or ten thirty at night when she finished. James [McTeigue, director] had said very specifically that he didn't want her accent to be RP, he wanted it to be more urban, a bit off, which is actually very difficult. It's much easier to do something that's precise and to the point.

People have an accent they come with first, so really you have to do RP to remove the American accent, you have to dirty it down and how you dirty it down is with the character. I'm very pleased that, as Evey, Natalie has got an accent that suits her voice and her character. It's not easy to pick up, it requires a lot of thinking about: how the person speaks, do they assert themselves, do they draw the voice back, do they send the voice forward? All these things are part of the character

When did you start working together?

Barbara: We started about 3 weeks before we came to Berlin. Once we got to Berlin we were able to work more aggressively, but of course there are other things that come in as well, so that's why I like if I can to have a good solid preparation time before you go in. People always say there'll be time, but there's never time because there are costume fittings and film testing and rehearsals, there are a thousand and one things.

Some actors will speak in the accent all the time, and Natalie did that a lot towards the beginning. Someone like Renee never spoke in anything but the accent for the total shoot until she shot the last scene, then people were flabbergasted when they heard her own accent, because it's a Texan accent! Someone like Gwyneth will do the accent and then as soon as she finishes a scene she'll cut back to her own accent. Natalie kept the accent at first; she came to Berlin with the accent and she used the accent when she went out in Berlin.

What was the process before you started working?

Barbara: I met with James and we spoke about Evey's character. He gave me a sketch that he didn't want it to be RP, he wanted it to be off RP. She's a girl who's grown up in a children's home at times, so her accent is a mixture. So you have a problem there: you don't want it to be too harsh because it can be a negative force throughout the whole film, so you have to find an accent that's sufficiently attractive to the character that you are. James didn't want it too strong, he didn't want it too posh, he didn't want it RP.

After you talk with the director and get his ideas for the characters, do you talk to the actors themselves about how they view the character?

Barbara: Yes, I think Natalie was looking very much in the background because this girl had been taken away from her family, which was a major trauma that happened to her early on. Then she was sent to this kind of government house where she was presumably indoctrinated and she becomes quite good because she then gets a job in television. So all that builds up the character.

Was the character's change and arc, discussed at all; going from somewhat timid in the beginning to confident?

Barbara: Not in terms of the accent so much. Sometimes a character will speak in a slightly different way to a different person, but I don't think that happened in this film because Evey is of herself carried along, so she's not changed by people, it is circumstances that change her.

V

How did you approach working with Hugo Weaving?

Barbara: With Hugo, he does two characters that we're not supposed to know that it's V, so we worked with that. He's doing a very light west country accent, which is rather good in a menacing sort of way, and a Yorkshire accent that we based on Howard Wilson, a [British] labor prime minister [1964 ­ 1976] who is now dead, but he was in just before Thatcher [1979 ­ 1990]. He was a don from Oxford as well, so he was a bright, intellectual man, but he had an accent.

Hugo has a long career of using different accents, how has it been working with him?

Barbara: Very easy and very nice. We just did the two accents when he's pretending not to be V. He's got a very quick ear, having done so many things, so you just need to tweak it a bit here and there. Also, he was very receptive to things like emotions being carried on the vowels in language. If somebody steps on your foot, you don't go 'tut, tut,' you go, 'ow!'. So it's the vowels that carry the emotion. If a piece of verse or poetry is written with a lot of emotion, you have diphthongs and long vowels coming out all the time. If something is very thoughtful and thinking, you have a lot of consonants. Something like the Duke from Measure for Measure… he has this speech in which he says, "Reason thus with life: If I do lose thee, I do lose a thing that none but fools would keep: a breath thou art, servile to all the skyey influences," this is very consonant orientated. It means that it's a very thinking piece of work; that the person is very intellectual and they're thinking. That's why we used Wilson. Hugo was very clear that he wanted someone who's intellectual and thinking, so we watched Wilson and he has all the consonants there, the consonants are sharp and vowels are not long, they're quite short.

The Rookwood character's text is quite long, it's two pages, and it's quite important, so we thought about going to an accent that he was fairly familiar with like a Lancashire accent. We were thinking about people like Tom Courtenay who is very Lancashire in his voice, however James was very specific, he didn't want a very strong accent, he just wanted a light accent. So we were going around looking at the sounds for a Lancashire accent and then I thought of Wilson and Hugo immediately knew who Wilson was so it became perfect. As I suggested that he immediately saw all the points that would be good for him from that and picked it up very quickly. Hugo was thinking in those terms: that he's intellectual and he gets his point over quickly. We were amazed that we got some tapes from the BBC of Wilson and how quickly he got points over, he spoke very quickly.

The V character has such lengthy dialogue and some classical lines, did you target RP for that?

Barbara: That was the target, being RP. The V character is a complex character with many different facets. Sometimes he's on television giving a great Churchill-like speech, sometimes he's being very intimate with Evey, so that is quite a lot of things to find when you've got a mask on. Everything has to be conveyed in the voice because the mask doesn't have any expressions. This man hasn't spoken to anybody for a long time, he lives in this world where he doesn't see people. He watches a lot of films, so maybe the big things he's doing are easier for that, like the speeches and that wonderful scene in Fingermen Alley, which is like a vaudeville musical act in the way it goes so quickly.

The character presents very much in love with language, but you have to find the heart of the man as well, like when he's with Evey and when he's saying goodbye to her. It requires a different quality and that had to be found within himself as the mask is on all the time; he has the mask and the costume and there's nothing else. Body language plays into it too. I think he moves rather well, and he's quite free with it, which is important because the mask can make you very stiff. I think being Australian, they have more loose quality of body.

Do you usually work for the length of the production?

Barbara: Usually, yes. And then do the ADR [Automatic Dialogue Replacement] as well with the actor. However I don't need think I'll need to be there for all of Hugo's ADR, he's got it on the V character, he'll just be away on it.

Thank you very much for your time Barbara.