Pan's
Labyrinth is a Spanish language film with all Spanish speaking
actors, except for one. Director Guillermo Del Toro tapped his friend Doug
Jones to play the film's key monsters, without telling him about the language
barrier.
Interview: Doug Jones on Pan's Labyrinth
"I'd already worked with him twice before, once on Mimic
and once on Hellboy, so we had a relationship established,"
said Jones. "And when he sends me an e-mail saying, 'You must be in
this film. No one else can play this part but you,' you tend to perk up
your ears and listen. Okay, what's the script? So I read it within hours
of getting it and I couldn't put it down. I turned the last page closed,
wiped a tear and said, 'I do have to be in this movie.' I read an English
translation of it, so I wasn't in the Spanish mode yet. I was like, 'Oh,
what a great story. What great characters. Ah.' Then I went back to the
e-mail where he was like 'da da da da it's going to be in Spanish.' IT'S
GONNA BE IN SPANISH??? Oh no. So I'm telling him, 'What do you mean no one
else can play this but me? There's a ton of Spanish actors who know Spanish.'"
Del Toro had planned for that. He was prepared to dub Jones in Spanish later.
"I was terrified and he assured me that everyone would be fine, we'll
get a voice over actor if you just want to count to 10, just do it in the
right pausing, in the right mode and move, give me the right feeling. I
can't count to 10. I can't do that to him. So he also talked about learning
Spanish phonetically. I'm like what does that mean, phonetically? So he
put together, he said, 'For instance, if you want to se blah blah blah blah
blah in Spanish, you might say the cheese cup fart.' It's a sounds like
game, the phonetic thing, a string of English words together that are nonsensical
but you at least know the English words and can remember them, and then
it forms a sentence in Spanish that makes sense. Well, to me, that form
of memorization was even harder than just going to the page and learning
the Spanish which is what I did. It's an ancient form of Spanish. Is that
more difficult than the contemporary? I don't know, I don't know either
one. It doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter."
Pan's Labyrinth
What happens when you never, ever where sunscreen
Jones had plenty of time to learn a new language
waiting around in the makeup chair. "I really, really buckled down
and committed myself to learning that word for word and I got the pronunciation
semi right before I even went in. They offered me a dialect coach that could
help me form my words and I said, 'No, let me try this on my own.' I got
proud about it, you know. I had five hours of time every day getting into
the Pan makeup and costume and mechanics. It was quite a multi-faceted process
to become Pan from head to toe. So they would hear my dialogue over and
over. We had five hours for me to practice the scene today so one of them
would pick up the script while they weren't doing something and read the
other lines with me. And if I was pronouncing something horribly wrong,
they would correct me. Some words in Spanish are like seven syllables long
for one word. I went golly. So knowing where to put the punch or the accent
on that was like please help me, please help me, please help me."
Pan's Labyrinth will have a limited release on December
29th.
For more movie info, movie stills, posters, clips, early reviews and trailers,
go to the Pan's Labyrinth
Movie Page.
Stay tuned for updates.
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