Authentic dialogue, with accents.

A question came up in class the other day about accents in theater. I mentioned something about striving for authenticity as opposed to parody or stereotype. That night I came across a New Yorker article on the broader subject of authentic speech in films and theater. Below is the first paragraph. Read the full article here: "Talk This Way".

Tim Monich taught Brad Pitt to talk like he was from somewhere deep in the mountains of Tennessee. He taught Matt Damon to speak as if he were South African, and Hilary Swank to speak like Amelia Earhart. In early September, having nearly finished teaching Gerard Butler, who is Scottish, to speak as if he were from New York, for “The Bounty,” Monich began teaching Shia LeBeouf to speak as if he grew up on Long Island, for Wall Street 2.” Much of Monich’s movie work involves getting Northerners to speak like Southerners, and much of his theatre work involves teaching Americans to deliver lines from Shakespeare or Shaw.