their accent

Elsie Hickham's accent was a little more deep-south than you would normally expect from West Virginia, but I suppose she might have originally been from South Carolina (remember her multiple references to Myrtle Beach).

West Virginia accents are normally more of a mix of a drawl and a twang. Gyllenhaal's and Chris Cooper's seemed pretty believable.

Natalie Canerday, the actress who plays Elsie Hickam, is from Arkansas. (So her accent was more "genuine" in Sling Blade.)

Interestingly, her first movie role was as the character "Natalie Canterday" (note the difference in the spelling of the lastname) in Biloxi Blues; She was one of Eugene Jerome's (Matthew Broderick's) USO dance partners—a very small part. Incidentally, that was filmed in Arkansas, not Biloxi. Like all of the other Arkansas locals cast as Biloxi locals, she also didn't have a "genuine Mississippian accent" in that movie either.

Another interesting fact is that a childhood friend of the real Homer Hickam, named Emily Sue Buckberry (who was portrayed in the Coalwood books but not in the movie), is a speech therapist, and he had her hired as a "dialect/dialogue consultant" for the movie:
http://www.homerhickam.com/coalwood/emily.shtml. I wonder if that meant she coached the actors on their accents.

All the accents in the movie were Virginian accent. They weren't real because the actors/actresses don't seem to have them in real life, but you couldn't tell they were fake, they pulled them off so well.

One thing that caught my ear as an East Tennessean was the way Elsie pronounced the word something: some-un. It was authentic.


Tout homme a deux pays, le sien et puis la France.