It's Terry Gilliam, I've learned to not try to make too much sense out any one thing.

I find it amusing that many movies set in the ancient world (Gladiator, I'm looking at you) have posh BBC accents for their characters. Never mind that the leads of Gladiator were Australian, American, and Danish, and it was a US production. Everyone knows the Romans talked like Olivier, right?

I was watching Rome last night and it appeared to me, at times, that James Purefoy's Mark Antony was lapsing almost into an Italian accent. It was very cute. But mostly, they're all British. Oh, and last night's ep *WAAAAY more sex. Lots of explicit sex. I'm enjoying the show very much. And not just for reasons whitefonted.

Everyone knows the Romans talked like Olivier, right?

I don't know how that works for the Brits (maybe it's just "fine -- they talk like some of us, that makes sense, doesn't everyone?"), but I think it serves to give a sense of alienness to non-Brits without making it too foreign.

It's been insisted in the Great Write Way thread that if you write the book's whole dialogue and reflect the regional pronunciation, people will go batty. I understand that when it's spoken, it's different, but there's a coded level of inaccuracy that is part of the entertainment contract, I'm guessing.

How should they sound, anyway?

Actually, this is an issue I have in general -- if people are supposed to be speaking their native language in an English-language movie, they shouldn't have a "foreign" accent anyway, so American or British accents make as much sense as anything else to me.

I've always had a bug about this one too. If someone is playing a Russian historical figure, why is it more authentic and critically praise worthy to have them speak English with an OMG IT'S A REAL RUSSIAN ACCENT than it is to have them just speak English?

The worst that I can remember (okay, other than Mme Giry in Phantom), was in The Messenger, when the French characters were given the default BBC-accents-of-poshness, but when the English turned up, they all had Scottish accents. It was maddeningly stupid. Much like the rest of the film.

I think, in the case of drama set in the ancient world, that it doesn't matter too much what accent one uses, as long as it's consistent. I find the slight Italian accent Cashmere mentioned kind of cute, and probably as close to the Latin as anything might be. But I, for one, would be fine with a generic American accent - I think there's enough foreign-ness in a period drama (setting, clothes, the way people behave) that you don't need a "foreign" accent to signify "these people are not from your space-time location." I think in period drama, the British accent is generally signifying "the Romans were all upscale and shit, you know that 'cause only high class people study Latin, and the British are all upscale and shit too, everyone knows that, they all grow up studying Latin, so (to sum up) this is one real high-class movie." Which amuses me. (Not least because I know enough of Britain to know it's not all upper-class posh twits - but the assumption is, most Americans don't.)

The best solution is to choose accents and stick to them; all Romans speak BBC English, German tribes speak in Lancastrian accents, Phoenicians are all Valley Girls, etc.

Array

The worst that I can remember (okay, other than Mme Giry in Phantom), was in The Messenger, when the French characters were given the default BBC-accents-of-poshness, but when the English turned up, they all had Scottish accents. It was maddeningly stupid. Much like the rest of the film.

Mightn't the Scottishness be historically accurate, though? I know that recreations I've heard of Elizabethan speech sound weirdly Cockney with a Scottish tinge. I'm wondering if 170 years earlier the latter could be much more pronounced.