Film work

Jeremy: I know you do a fair amount of film coaching yourself…

Paul: I do.

Jeremy: I’m curious. What’s the timetable? Do you go to the filmset, how often are you there, how long are you there for, how much time do you get with the people you are working with?

Paul: Film, you’re booked today, you’re on the set tomorrow, so it’s always that they want it yesterday. Dialect is almost invariably the very last thing on people’s minds. The actors have been cast without having been screened for their dialect ability – there’s just an assumption that it’s not important or is easily fixed. That’s great, because it keeps me employed! The most ideal show was working for Ang Lee. What a gentleman. He believed in rehearsal.

Jeremy: And what a marvellous director as well.

Paul: He booked me four months before the beginning of principal photography, I had time to work by custom CD and phone with the principal actors long before they got to the set. And then there was a two-week rehearsal period before cameras rolled. So it’s just a luxurious thing to have all of that preparation time, plus a daily presence on set. And then you go onto other films and it’s the very last thing that people have thought of. Often only when the actor gets to the set, and they discover “Oops, can’t do that. Let’s get a dialect coach for a quick fix.”

Jeremy: You’ve already mentioned two of the ways that you can help people – the CDs and the phone coaching. Tell me a bit more about the CDs.

Paul: More and more these days I never even meet the actors I coach. I never even go to the film set. It’s become a virtual world. Much cheaper than flying me business class to wherever and paying my per diem and hotel. So I work often in advance of the show by a custom CD. I will put all of the lines down, I will design the dialect for the character in consultation with the director. I’m doing that right now for a new project. I’ll design it with the director, and when that director’s pretty confident that we have the sound he wants, then I will record all the lines and talk to the actor as if they are in the same room. “you may not be able to hear this particular key sound, so let me isolate it” and I’ll isolate a key sound and talk them through it. Not so much performing the role myself but demonstrating, taking the thing apart, playing a phrase here (in piano terms), listen to how this phrase goes. And I will do that sort of isolated work with phrases in the script. And often that’s enough – with a really good actor that’s enough, and then you follow that up with phone coaching to find out if they’re getting it.

Coaching and musicals

Jeremy: I went on your website, which is a very good website [www.paulmeier.com], and was looking at the complete roles you do on CD. Particularly, because of my interest, I was looking at the musicals. I just picked out five where you see the title and you go, “Oh of course! They’re going to need dialect coaching”. Blood Brothers (Liverpool), My Fair Lady (for various reasons), Brigadoon, Fiddler on the Roof, and Guys and Dolls.

Paul: And those are the musicals I have on there right now?

Jeremy: Yes, and I thought how fascinating, because often as a musical theatre singer you don’t necessarily think of dialect in those terms. Both Gillyanne (Kayes) and I coach singing in the dialect that you are speaking. Because for me there’s nothing worse than being in character and then when you open your mouth to sing you sound completely different. That makes no sense to me. I suppose it’s a bit like the film situation you described – it’s not at the top of your mind that people are going to have to have dialect coaching for Guys and Dolls, particularly English actors.

Paul: Well it’s clearly a dialect show. I think I’m the only one – and there are lots of us out there producing and publishing dialect coaching material, but I think I’m the only one that offers show-specific CDs. I’m just looking behind me now – there’s row upon row of CD sets, master CDs of the hundreds of shows I’ve coached. And I lease those character CDs to productions who are doing the show.

Jeremy: And I’m taking it that you don’t actually give readings of the performances, you give style tips, hints, tweaks.

Paul: My preamble always says “I will not perform the role, I don’t want you to mimic my performance”. I’ll perform it a little bit flatly, a little bit under tempo, so you can make the role your own. I won’t give you line readings. Inevitably it has to be the lines, but I do try to make the actor independent of that, to give them a way to extract the sounds, the noises.

Jeremy: It was one of the most important things I learned when I switched from working with singers to working with actors. A lot of the singers I used to work with would like you to demonstrate something. As an instrumentalist you’re often asking your tutor to demonstrate something so you can hear how it goes. I got very quickly into the idea that actors don’t like that.

Paul: I think it’s a little misguided, frankly. There is this taboo, that it’s blasphemy that if the director gives ‘a line reading’ suddenly they’ve infringed on the sacred rite of an actor. I think that’s bollocks, to tell you the truth. Most actors I work with, there are very few of them that don’t deeply appreciate hearing the line in dialect, and when this whole thing of line reading comes up, I say “OK, well choreographers demonstrate the steps you’re going to dance, with a singing coach you’re very happy to hear the phrasing and musical qualities of the line you are singing, so what’s this silly taboo” And I point out that acting has been passed down from master to apprentice for centuries. And I think imitation has a real place in acting. Obviously you transcend the imitation during rehearsal and it becomes your own, but I don’t think there’s anything wrong with starting with a good, sincere imitation.

Jeremy: Well I’m very glad to hear that.

Paul: I get very impatient with that superstition. I had a guy quit a show years ago, I was directing Shakespeare and I’m a big fan of the verse speaking. I’ve got an ebook coming out as you know on Shakespeare that concentrates on teaching good actors how to be better actors in Shakespeare. And a lot of it is highly technical. What do you do with a caesura, what do you do with a run-on line, what is iambic pentameter, what are the exceptions to iambic rhythm? It’s all technical, musical stuff. And the book will have 60 or 70 demonstrations of how a particular speech works, starting with the scansion of the verse – it’s a metrical analysis. I was demonstrating that in this production I was directing. And this actor was livid and quit, because I’d infringed some holy right of his to create the role himself. The fact is he didn’t know how to speak verse.

Crossing the Atlantic

Jeremy: That takes me onto the next question quite neatly. Have you noticed any changes recently in the way actors respond to the work that you do over the years.

Paul: Let’s think. Gosh. I know that there’s been a growing respect for dialect work. There were very few dialect coaches 40 years ago. And American actors particularly could get away with very bad or non-existent dialects. I suppose as a symptom of our growing global culture, you can’t do that any more. There’s a growing realisation that you’ve got to do it right. That’s about all I can think of. What were you thinking of?

Jeremy: I was just curious about trends and the idea first and foremost that dialect and accuracy is becoming more important. Hurray! I find it very strange when we see films where, let’s say, Americans cast as English, and English cast as American, where they’re so patently not doing what’s required. And I think that’s fascinating – and irritating!

Paul: And people work internationally, so you’ve got to have a pretty good reason for casting out of dialect – an American show can get an English actor (and usually cheaper)…

Jeremy: Just as a matter of interest have you ever seen the show House? It’s an English actor playing an American,

Paul: Oh, you’re talking about Hugh Laurie. I haven’t seen it but I understand he’s astonishingly good.

Jeremy: He is very very good. And the thing that interests me the most is the extreme change of pitch range that he’s now using. He’s now right at the bottom of his range.

Paul: In his singing?

Jeremy: In his speaking. Because if you compare his performances in House where he stays on about three notes right at the bottom of his range, and then you put it against Blackadder where he was playing the Prince Regent where he had an enormously wide pitch range. Octave and a half. And I thought that was absolutely fascinating that as part of the character and part of the dialect he was using that he decided to keep his vocal pitch so low and so on one tone.

Paul: He’s playing an American, yes?

Jeremy: He is, yes.

Paul: That’s one of the pretty famous differences between the English and the American – fewer notes, lower notes, less inflection and stress everything. And use a harder tone. That’s what my books say – going down the list. Change English prosody to American prosody – that’s what you have to do.

Jeremy: The people who haven’t come across this are going to be fascinated. Can you give me a demonstration of changing what you just said.

[This next section is available as an audio file - click here to listen to how Paul moves from Standard British to Standard American]

Paul: There’s a little practice sentence in the book – I think it’s something like “I can’t believe that Harry would give up his job and walk away”. Now an Englishman saying that will do several things. He’ll use a great deal more range than the American, he will delay the strong stresses until the end of the sentence, he will stress fewer words, and pitch the whole thing on average higher. [demonstrates]

So throwing away the beginning of the sentence in favour of the end of the sentence – a sort of delayed payoff trick. “-----and WALK AWAY!” And the American will do precisely the reverse. Stress everything, start heavily and trail off, use fewer notes, pitch them lower, and a harder tone. So you’ve got [demonstrates] “I CAN’T BELieve ------“. And I'm not even dealing with the pronunciation of the words, but just in terms of its music, the American blows a lot of energy completely on the first few words and trails away, and bears down on the vocal cords. I mean this is stereotypical stuff that I’m doing…

Jeremy: But still very revealing.

Paul: They are inverted images of each other. Completely opposite – turn the prosody inside out and that’s what you have.

Jeremy: The first time I read that was in your CD books, and it really made me pay attention to how wide a pitch range I have, that I speak over more than an octave and a half, which I think is fairly wide.

Paul: So getting my American actors to embrace the two and a half octaves that you need to describe that architecture of a complex Shakespearean argument, you need that tremendous range in order to pitch the various parts of the argument into relief against each other. For the architecture of the argument to be revealed.

Jeremy: How do they cope if they’ve not come across that before?

Paul: A little bit reluctantly. But you cannot do Shakespeare on three notes. You have to have a wide range of dynamic shifts to accomplish it.

Jeremy: Do you think that’s implicit in the writing?

Paul: Absolutely. Absolutely. Long, long sentences with parentheses within parentheses, subordinate clauses, sentences going on for seven or eight verse lines… I mean if you’re going to follow that journey across eight verse lines, then the actor must reveal the architecture of that argument vocally. And that’s what the new book will spend a lot of time describing and demonstrating.

Jeremy: The new book’s going to be an ebook?

Paul: Yes

Jeremy: Excellent. As you know, I like ebooks.

Paul: I know – you’ve made a Skyper and ebooker of me.


Click here to read page 3 of Paul's interview