Leith McPherson, in the new AmazonPrime series "The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power" you were responsible as language trainer for teaching the ensemble Elvish, Dwarven or Orcish. How do you become an expert in languages that don't really exist?
It came about because various aspects of my professional career made it suitable.
On the one hand, I have acting experience myself and work as a language and dialect coach a lot in the theater, with Shakespeare, poetry and other forms of exaggerated language.
That helps when entering a fantasy world like this.
I also have a linguistic background, which made it easier for me to relate to Professor Tolkien's passion for language and its impact.
You have to be quite a language nerd to think up your own languages in such detail and to create entire worlds around them.
I'm a bit like that too, which is why I love spending time in his thoughts and in Middle-earth.
Then how do you bring a language to life on camera that actually only exists in written form?
In the appendices Tolkien added to the Lord of the Rings books, one can find fairly detailed notes on how his languages sound.
For some languages more than others, but for Elvish, for example, there is even a pronunciation guide in which he describes which syllables are stressed and which are not.
You also get a pretty good insight into the intellectual development process of the language.
And as with many aspects of Tolkien's work, the languages have been the subject of intense study and research by many people, so I have a lot of material to build upon in my work.
You can't just think of something?
No, it actually runs according to very clear guidelines and rules.
The screenwriters' dialogues are translated into Elvish and other languages by translators authorized by Tolkien's estate.
You have access to literally everything Tolkien wrote, some of which no one else has ever seen.
Sometimes there are also cases in which the experts come to the conclusion that a sentence in the script would never have been said by an elf.
And how do you come to that conclusion?
Because otherwise Tolkien would have written down the appropriate vocabulary.
There is a reason there are no swear words in Elvish.
In such cases, everyone works together to find a solution.
In the end it's up to me to help the actors feel comfortable in this language and to speak the sentences as confidently as if it were their own.
That's complicated enough, so I'm glad I don't have to come up with something myself.
They had the same task in Peter Jackson's The Hobbit trilogy. Did you take a similar approach when you returned to Middle-earth?