Chicago professor helped train actors to speak with accents in Oscar nominee "The Brutalist"
"The Brutalist," a film about a Hungarian World War II survivor who rebuilds his life in America, could be the darling of the Oscars this year.
Part of the movie's gritty realism is how the actors speak, and the person who taught them is a theater teacher in Chicago.
Adrian Brody's performance earned him an Oscar nomination for Best Actor, and part of that is the accent he learned from University of Illinois Chicago associate theater professor Tanera Marshall, who served as the movie's dialect coach.
Like she does with her UIC students, Marshall taught Brody and other actors in "The Brutalist" how to speak in accents.
"There's a great deal of research and analysis of the accent that we need," she said. "The first big part of the research that I do involves looking for an accent on a real person in the world whose background closely resembles that of the character it looks like we're creating."
In this case, Marshall turned to recordings of Hungarian survivors of the Holocaust.
"I do a phonetic analysis, which involves not just the sounds, but in addition an analysis of how the mouth is held – what we call the oral posture of the accent. And then there's a music analysis, with the rhythm and intonation," she said.
Then she mapped out the accent and taught it to the actors from Chicago, using Zoom.
"An accent is a representation of a culture, of a place, of a person, of a community, and we honor that by not just making it up, but by discovering it," she said.
Marshall has done this kind of work for dozens of movies and TV shows – including Chicago Fire, The Bear, Fargo, and Queen of the South.
She said getting accents right helps the actors get the whole character right.
"That helps the actors then connect on a deep emotional visceral level with the story, the world, and with their characters. They're able to sort of see it in life and be influenced and inspired by it," she said. "In the end, it's about creating a life, and telling a story."
Marshall didn't just have to teach actors how to speak in Hungarian accents. There were British actors in the movie who she taught to speak with American accents.
