New Yorker on Idiolects

ABSTRACT: ONWARD AND UPWARD WITH THE ARTS about dialect coach Tim Monich.
by Alec Wilkinson.

Tim Monich taught Brad Pitt to talk like he was from somewhere deep in the mountains of Tennessee. He taught Matt Damon to speak as if he were South African, and Hilary Swank to speak like Amelia Earhart. In early September, having nearly finished teaching Gerard Butler, who is Scottish, to speak as if he were from New York, for “The Bounty,” Monich began teaching Shia LeBeouf to speak as if he grew up on Long Island, for “Wall Street 2.” Much of Monich’s movie work involves getting Northerners to speak like Southerners, and much of his theatre work involves teaching Americans to deliver lines from Shakespeare or Shaw. Pedagogically, Monich is descended from Henry Sweet, the 19th-century philologist who was the model for Henry Higgins in “Pygmalion.” Mentions Edith Skinner. Monich is fifty-nine years old, tall, with thin, reddish-blond hair and freckles. He has worked on more than a hundred and thirty movies. Brad Pitt called him “the maestro.” Sutherland says of Monich: “He’s not a mechanic, and he doesn’t impose. He comes in from underneath and supports your instincts; he doesn’t try to define them.” The writer visited Monich in Westport, CT, where he lives with his wife, the dance writer Linda Szmyd, and their two daughters. Monich has an office in which there are shelves of books with such titles as “Swearing,” “Americanisms,” “More Stage Dialects,” and “City of Slang.” In the center of the shelves are boxes of CDs—recordings of talkers whose speech represents a particular place, period, or social milieu. Monich’s archive, assembled over thirty years, is almost surely the largest private one of its kind, with approximately six thousand entries. He also collects accents from TV. Monich begins by talking with the director about how a character should sound, then he talks to the actor about the character and decides which voices from his archive might provide a model. He usually gives an actor four or five choices, and the actor selects one, from which Monich makes tapes distilling the vowel and consonant sounds that typify the dialect. Monich and the actor then “play a word, listen to it and say it,” he said—do language lab. Monich invents rhymes and sentences using words from the script—what he calls random acting. He also writes an actor’s lines in a faux-phonetic style he made up by combining elements of actual phonetics with approximations of sounds. Diane Kamp, an agent who represents the largest number of dialect coaches (sixteen), says that Monich was a pioneering figure in establishing dialect coaches in Hollywood. Monich grew up in Corona, California. At Carnegie Mellon, he studied with Edith Skinner. He taught at Juilliard from 1975 to 1987. One night, Monich and Butler met at Butler’s loft to work on the next day’s scenes. For an hour, they spoke and whispered and shouted lines. An accent is one of the first things an actor takes up, and how it feels and sounds can influence the decisions he makes. By the time the actor stands in front of the camera, Monich has done the bulk of his teaching work. Eventually, the accent recedes as a concern.