According to Hollywood Elsewhere the trailer for Valkyrie is attached to Robert Redford’s Lions For Lambs and will make its online debut on Access Hollywood and Yahoo’s movie site.
I can’t wait for this movie, the script is amazing (although the ending is something of a cop out) and I’m a big fan of Cruise and, Superman Returns aside, Bryan Singer is a great director who’s been stuck playing in the franchise toy box for a bit too long.
One thing I’d been wondering about is the use of accents. Would the cast speak with German accents or go English?
H-E have the answer:-
In any event, a U.K. projectionist has watched the trailer for the WWII thriller, which concerns a German military plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler with Tom Cruise playing ringleader Col. Claus von Stauffenberg, and say it’s “fairly gripping.” He adds no one in the cast is speaking with a German accent a la Marlon Brando in The Young Lions. “All of the [mostly British] cast members use their own accents,” he says. “Kenneth Branagh sounds English. And Cruise just sounds American, although maybe he’s softened it a bit to sound more English.”
That’s a smart move if you ask me. The German accent is quite aggressive and serious and there’s nothing wrong with it, yet whenever a Brit or American actor puts it on I just can’t take them seriously at all. Comedy Nazis would definitely kill the tension in this film.
Generally an audience can accept what’s going on if the cast are all uniform in dialect and English is probably the best way to go. Exceptions to the rule are Oliver Stone’s Alexander cast, who all seemed to be Irish, and Kevin Costner’s Robin Hood who was…. well I don’t what he was trying to do!



One Comment
Oooh, “how do we present the accents” – that old can of worms. To be honest, I wouldn’t have minded German accents for authenticity, but I can see why the filmmakers would have gone with a bog-standard ‘bring your own accent’ ethos.
Whether Tom Cruise’s American tones end up giving off a sense of the archetypal ‘American great and good’ (usual Hollywood practise to proclaim the USA as the absolute heroes of historical conflicts) will be the issue for me. I’ll hold out hope though that the accents don’t distract from what sounds like an excellent story and an exciting, intriguing film.
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