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HAL 9000's voice sounds unsettling because it's Canadian
April 10th, 2018
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I saw this post on BB earlier, I found it entertaining, so I'm posting
it here.
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| Full repost from BoingBoing.net |
| By Clive Thompson, originally published 4:27 AM, 9 April 2018 |
| License: CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 |
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HAL's voice sounds unsettling because it's Canadian
Stanley Kubrick had a lot of trouble getting the right voice for HAL in
2001: A Space Odyssey. He initially used the Oscar-winning actor Martin
Balsam, but his Bronx accent wound up making HAL sound "a little bit
too colloquially American," as Kubrick later decided.
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| So Kubrick turned instead to Douglas Rain, a Canadian stage actor who |
| was a veteran of dozens of plays. It worked -- Kubrick got the weird,
calm, eerie affect that made HAL so unsettling.
|
| Part of what made things work? Apparently it was Rain's Canadian |
| tonalities:
Kubrick was attracted to Mr. Rain for the role partly because the
actor “had the kind of bland mid-Atlantic accent we felt was right
for the part,” he said in the 1969 interview with Mr. Gelmis. But
Mr. Rain’s accent isn’t mid-Atlantic at all; it’s Standard
Canadian English.
As the University of Toronto linguistics professor Jack Chambers
explained: “You have to have a computer that sounds like he’s from
nowhere, or, rather, from no specific place. Standard Canadian
English sounds ‘normal’ — that’s why Canadians are well received
in the United States as anchormen and reporters, because the
vowels don’t give away the region they come from.”
As a Canadian myself, this tickles me to no end.
There are plenteous other trippy details in that piece, including the
fact that since HAL's performance was recorded after all the other
scenes were in the can, Kubrick got Stefanie Powers to read HAL's lines |
| during the shoots! And then this ... |
|
Anthony Hopkins has said it influenced his performance as the
serial killer Hannibal Lecter in “The Silence of the Lambs.”
Douglas Rain himself has never seen “2001: A Space Odyssey.” For
the retired actor who spent decades at the Stratford Festival and
turns 90 in May, the performance was simply a job.
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