As a dialect designer and coach, School of Liberal Arts Theatre & Dance Associate Professor Amy Chaffee has honed her expertise in crafting authentic accents for film and television. In this article, Chaffee shares her experience working with actors Scarlett Johansson and Channing Tatum on major motion pictures, revealing the fascinating process of crafting believable accents for some of Hollywood's biggest stars.
My research as a dialect designer at Tulane and in greater southern Louisiana has led me to work on two major films over the past few years. I served as a coach to Scarlett Johansson in Fly Me to the Moon and Channing Tatum in Deadpool & Wolverine — researching, designing, and teaching Louisiana accents to both actors.
I have worked as a dialect designer and coach in film and television since 2007. Similarly to how a costume designer or production designer creates the “visual reality” of a film world, I help create the “auditory reality” of a film. I often say that if I did my job right, you would never know I was there.
In Fly Me to the Moon, Scarlett plays a con artist-turned-advertising executive who is recruited to promote the space exploration program for NASA. Her character slips easily in and out of accents to create affinity with her “mark.” Scarlett, in addition to starring, was also an executive producer on the film and had full reign to improvise her lines. This meant getting her sounds fit for anything she felt compelled to play. Her character is asked to sweet talk a Louisiana Senator, which required her to drop flawlessly into an accent somewhere on I-10 between New Orleans and Baton Rouge. Later, she tricks another Senator into believing she is an Atlanta native and graduate of Georgia Tech — requiring another sound palette to master. Reviews of her acting work do not mention the accents. But, again, in my line of work, if no one talks about the accents, it’s usually a good thing — the story held and the character was seamless.
Deadpool & Wolverine was more daunting. The co-writers, Deadpool star Ryan Reynolds and Director Shawn Levy were both totally down for Channing to ad-lib and improvise as “Da Gambit.” Again, the challenge of prepping him with more than just the written lines included the mastery of the sounds so he could feel as playful and easy as the tone of the movie. Channing wanted to work very faithfully to the Cajun sound, although his character was brought up in the streets of New Orleans. To find this unique blend, I sourced and recorded a few Cajun gentlemen in their 70s and 80s who had grown up in Mamou, Ville Platte, and Eunice but spent their adult lives in New Orleans. They told stories peppered with Cajun French sayings and good-hearted insults, code-switching easily and sliding in and out of French, as many Cajuns do. Channing loved the resources and asked for a list of (and translations for) all the insults they shared. He used at least three of these Cajun French phrases in the film. These lines are special easter eggs for Cajuns who see the film. The performance has been critically acclaimed for its humor and “insider baseball” appeal to the fan base.
Tulane’s multidisciplinary community has been invaluable for my work. From the published research of School of Liberal Arts Professors Thomas Klingler and Nathalie Dajko, who have written about the Creole and Cajun dialects, to the Hogan Archive of New Orleans Music and New Orleans Jazz housed within Tilton Memorial Library, I have an amazing base from which to draw. However, it is the living resources of the greater New Orleans and southern Louisiana communities that help me create my best designs.