Posted on : Aug.8,2006 11:00 KST

Darcy Paquet, Variety Magazine

There are certain events that, when they appear in a film, always make me feel nervous. When watching films from China, I get nervous when the police appear onscreen. What had been an intelligent film up to that point suddenly transforms into propaganda about the supreme effectiveness of the Chinese police force. It is almost as if the police have come to ’arrest’ the movie.

When watching Korean films, I get nervous when characters start talking in English. The sophisticated, top-class production suddenly starts to feel painfully awkward, like watching a high school play. The viewer’s trust in the film is broken.

My point is not that Koreans should study English harder. Inserting foreign dialogue into a film without making it sound awkward or unnatural is a technical challenge, not unlike working with stunt men. The problem seems to be one of strategy and technique, not of competence.


There are two sides to this issue: working with foreign actors, and having Korean actors recite lines in a foreign language. The former is perhaps the greater challenge, but at least the solution is fairly straightforward: try to find talented actors, and have a native speaker on the set who can judge how naturally they are delivering their lines. The world is filled with cash-strapped but talented film students: surely any Korean mega-production could afford to fly in a young director from New York or L.A. to act as a sort of dialogue coach. I’m sorry to say it, but over 80 percent of the foreign actors who appear in Korean films are such poor actors, they give you goosebumps, and not in a good way. This surely affects a film’s ability to be sold abroad. ’The Host,’ at least, is a successful counterexample - the foreign actors in this film are quite good.

The other challenge is when Korean actors are called upon to speak in English (or another foreign language). The solution here might seem obvious: (a) when writing the screenplay, have a native speaker compose the English dialogue; (b) have the actor memorize the lines and try to deliver them without making any mistakes.

However, this can often be the worst strategy available, unless the actor is highly proficient in English. Not even the most highly paid dialogue coach can make a beginning level speaker sound like a native (see, for example, ’Memoirs of a Geisha’). The biggest problem is when complex sentences composed by native speakers are placed into the mouths of beginning-level actors. All notions of reality are shattered when an actor, struggling even to pronounce the words, let alone use proper intonation, speaks perfectly formed, complicated sentences. It’s the gap between the true ability of the actor and the dialogue itself that creates the greatest awkwardness.

Yet if such a non-native actor speaks in short, simple sentences, it sounds quite natural. As long as the accent is not too strong, the dialogue will be easy to understand. The Thai film ’Last Life in the Universe’ contains long stretches of dialogue between a Japanese man and a Thai woman, in a mixture of languages. The English they speak is simple and filled with grammatical errors, but it sounds beautiful. It is living, breathing dialogue that is not ashamed of sounding foreign. Korean actors too would sound much more natural if, instead of memorizing their English dialogue, they composed it or improvised it themselves.



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