The Playlist‘s Gregg Ellwood on a recently-viewed Cinemacon clip of Ridley Scott‘s Napoleon: “The scenes featured hundreds (a thousand?) extras on horseback (Kingdom of Heaven vibes) and almost entirely in-camera visual effects (lots of on-the-ground explosions). There were at least three or four individual shots that anyone in the room will still remember weeks from now, which obviously a very good thing.
“The only concern is [that] Scott has allowed all the actors to speak in their native accents which in this case means Napoleon sounds American. Scott got away with it on his last film, The Last Duel, but we’re a bit concerned [that] it won’t work in this particular historical context.”
HE comment: Inauthentic foreign “accents” are usually avoided when American or British actors are playing European-continent characters (French, German, Italian, Russian). The general rule, however, is that everyone of a certain class or station has to more or less sound the same. Varying accents generally don’t work, as Valkyrie director Bryan Singer discovered when he had Tom Cruise‘s Col. Claus von Stauffenberg speak with an American accent while the mostly British cast members (i.e., Kenneth Branagh) used their own native accents.
Example: The rebellious slaves in Spartacus all spoke like working-class Americans while the Romans spoke with rarified mid-Atlantic accents.
Question for HE community: How would you play it if you were directing Napoleon? I personally wouldn’t have minded if Joaquin Phoenix and every other French character had spoken with French-accented English (i.e., Charles Boyer). The important thing is that everyone needs to sound the same. Didn’t Marlon Brando play Napoleon in Desiree with a French accent? Or am I misremembering?
