MovieChat Forums > Under the Skin (2014) Discussion > Scottish accents

Scottish accents

posted 9 years ago by russalex86
23 replies | jump to latest

How did non-Scots cope with the accents in this? English director Glazer said Johansson "was far better than me at understanding a broad Scottish accent. She would be having entire dialogues with people when I didn't understand a word." I thought the hidden camera scenes were great and it made me laugh thinking how little foreigners would understand. It's rare to hear these accents not watered down.

Side note: not all the men are Scottish. The deformed man and the logger are English.

[–] Filler_Killer 9 years ago

I'm not from an English-speaking country but to be honest, I usually have no issues with English-speaking films. However there are two movies that I had to stop and put on subtitles: Under the Skin and A Clockwork Orange (because of the Nadsat in the beginning). I also had some trouble with Hunger, but since I watched it in a theatre, I just had to try my best and see what I could take from it. I think I got around 60% or 70% of the dialogues.

In any case, UTS is a modern masterpiece for me. I respect Jonathan Glazer immensely for his bravery. You got to have massive titanium balls to make a movie nowadays that doesn't spoon feed the audience, doesn't have cardboard characters, overacting and many other common clichés. Also the soundtrack is one of the best ever, huge congrats to Mica Levi.

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-You won't forget me now?

-No. I've got nobody else to remember.

[–] bigBang8 9 years ago

Not a native english speaker.. i got the general idea of what is being said but really they're just talking some form of gibberish worse than broken english.

The increase in human knowledge is the cause of the decline of religions.

[–] 9 years ago

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[–] leotard22 9 years ago

This was my favourite film of 2013. I left Scotland when I was nine years old, moving to England. An awful lot of my fellow pupils at school could not understand my accent when I first arrived. Subconsciously my accent changed over the next few years and eventually I lost it. The same for my brother and sister. Nobody would suspect now that we are Scottish unless we mention it. I had no problem understanding the accents in this film.

As for American accents I could not understand a word that was said but Tom Hardy in Revenant. But then again he was A Brit trying to do an American accent.

[–] Stirchley 8 years ago

I watch every movie & TV show with subtitles so scents are no problem.

[–] KutWrite 8 years ago

I actually got a kick out of the accents, exp. the one with the scarf.

I thought "Gee, I'm having trouble understanding that guy, how much trouble would an alien have?"

So it was kind of a funny challenge, to me.

I had subtitles turned on, though. I had to watch it with the volume down due to a sleeping housemate.

[–] YuunofYork 8 years ago

I frankly don't see how any native English speaker could have had a problem with any of the dialogue in this. They aren't speaking Scots, they're speaking English.

It sounds like the director was referring to conversations on set, and not in the film, which may well have been more vernacular.

Native English speaker from New York.