The Dialog Coach

i was unemployed in Moscow when a friend called: would I like to be the dialog coach on a movie being made in St. Petersburg? Well, I had sometimes wondered what a dialog coach actually does, now was my chance to find out.

The movie In Tranzit (2008) is based on a true story. At the end of WWII, there was a prison camp in Leningrad for Russian women (“enemies of the state,” “saboteurs,” etc.), run by female NKVD guards. One day, when they were expecting a new delivery of Russian women prisoners, they instead got a delivery of male German POWs. That’s the true bit. The rest of the film fictionally explores what “happened” while the German men were prisoners under the guard of Russian women.

The film is in English, with a British director, Tom Roberts, but the cast was international. The “Germans” were played by German, British and Russian actors. The “Russians” were played by American, Ukrainian, British, Dutch, Lithuanian, Irish and Russian actors and actresses. The range of accents was colossal and I was told to get the “Russians” to sound British and the “Germans” to sound, well, German.

The German Germans (Thomas Kretschmann – The Pianist, King Kong, etc. – and Daniel Brühl – Goodbye Lenin) were perfect, of course, since they were real Germans speaking good English. The difficulty was to get the non-Germans to sound just like them and then to get all the “Russians” to sound somehow different. After a few days I came up with some basic rules which I grandly described as an attempt to establish two distinct ways of speaking that would have, for the audience, “phonetic credibility,” without striving for “linguistic accuracy.”

I told the “Germans” to speak with an up-and-down lilt in their speech (since that was what Thomas and Daniel were doing) and the “Russians” to keep their speech flat, only allowing them to stress words of emphasis and excitement. This was not difficult for most of the “Russian” cast – apart from the Russians themselves, since Russian is a very musical language and I had to work quite hard to get them to “flatten out.”

Then I moved on to how certain letters are pronounced. The “Germans” would say “v” instead of “w,” “z” instead of “th,” and “t” instead of “d” at the end of a word. The danger here, of course, was that someone might go overboard into self-parody and caricature: “Vee haf orders zat must be obeyt…”

One letter that gave us huge trouble was “r.” Everybody rolled their “rs,” either naturally as Germans, Russians, Ukrainians, Lithuanians, etc., or because they thought they should, i.e. all the Brits, in order to sound “authentic.” I declared war on “r.”

“In this film,” I ordered in my most authoritative manner as the Stalin of Pronunciation, “Only ‘Germans’ can – and must – roll their ‘rs.’ Russians will soften or swallow their ‘rs.’ For example, ‘Germans’ will call their colleague Max Borrt, while ‘Russians’ will call him Max Bought.” And thus it came about that when the film’s Big Star, John Malkovich, arrived on set, I was able to tell him – very sweetly – to try to swallow his *rs*, to which request he – equally sweetly – promised to try. I cannot claim to have gotten to know John Malkovich well, although my first exchange with him was not a conventional opening for a new acquaintance:

“Mr. Malkovich, do you think you could say ‘bra-sierre’ in this scene, rather than bra-zeer.”

“Oh my, why certainly – I’ll do my best.”

He got about halfway there.

Finally, I prepared a list of words that can be pronounced correctly in English in more than one way and arbitrarily allocated one version to the “Germans” and another to the “Russians.” Thus, “Russians” would say “leftenant,” “komrade,” “trarnsit,” etc, while “Germans” would say “lootenant,” “komrad,” “transit”…

Armed with these ad hoc “rules,” I trotted around to all the minor characters, rehearsing them before their scenes and thoroughly enjoying myself. Gradually, over the days, I noticed that, one by one, the more important actors and actresses would start asking me for my opinion until I was working with everybody except Thomas Kretschmann (apart from “How did I sound?” “You were perfect,” exchanges) and the second leading lady, Ingeborga Dapkunaite, who is Lithuanian but lives with her British husband in the UK, and who needed no coaching. But the others, including the first leading lady, Vera Farmiga, a Ukrainian living in the U.S., and a Dutch actress, Thekla Reuten, who is big in Holland but hasn’t done that much abroad, all asked for my advice.

All in all, it was a fascinating experience. One thing that puzzles me, though, is that there doesn’t seem to be an Oscar for dialog coaches. Pity…