HIS client list reads like a roll call of Oscar nominees: Daniel Day Lewis, Liam Neeson, Julia Roberts, Brad Pitt, Richard Gere. His own career path - from the ivory towers of academia to the cradle of movie-making - has a touch of Hollywood "rags to riches" about it. Belfast-born Brendan Gunn is the dialogue coach who helped turn Alan Rickman into Eamon De Valera in Michael Collins, Sean Bean into a west of Ireland farmer's son in The Field and Chris O'Donnell into a rugby-playing medical student in Circle Of Friends.
For each part he coaches, he tutors the actors not only in the nuts and bolts of their characters' accents, but also in the social and political nuances of their voices. If an actor is confident with his or her voice and knows what it is saying about them, then usually the performance is more comfortable - so in that way I'm actually linking into the performance," he says.
When Gunn began studying linguistics he didn't know that jobs like this existed. And when he got his first break in a Hollywood film, coaching Mickey Rourke as an ex-IRA man in A Prayer for the Dying in 1986, it was unheard-of for an Irish dialogue coach to make a living working on films. Before that, he had been teaching on a speech therapy course at the University of Ulster in Jordanstown.
On a recent interlude between jobs, the soft-spoken and down-to-earth 41-year-old talked in his comfortable south Belfast home about his work. The five months he spent in Los Angeles, New York and London teaching Rourke his "hard-core" accent was, he says, a "baptism of fire". It was his first visit to America, and he found himself driving around Beverly Hills in an open-top jeep. "It was better than driving out the Jordanstown Road every morning," he says.
Gunn's film credits include The Lonely Passion Of Judith Hearne (1987), December Bride (1989) and Into The West (1991). He has also done theatre work and over 19 films and plays for television. His first really big film project was Jim Sheridan's In The Name Of The Father in 1993. Then came Michael Collins, Trojan Eddie, the yet-to-be-released The Day Of The Jackal starring Richard Gere and The Devil's Own starring Brad Pitt. His next film project, The Boxer, starring Daniel Day Lewis, begins filming in Dublin next Tuesday.
Gunn, who has an MA and a PhD in speech studies, uses a simple computer analogy to describe how he translates his phonetic theory into lay language for actors: the hardware, he says, is the body's speech physiology and it is his job is to feed in different software, or programmes, to make it is his job to feed in different software, or programmes, to make this machinery work in different ways.
"If you're playing football, before you can dribble from your toe to your knee to your head and back down again you've got to be able to give the ball a belt up the field. So it's the same thing with speech. You start off belting it up the field, by sounding gross and exaggerated. It's like gross motor to fine motor function, which is a speech therapy concept."
Starting with consonants and then moving on to the more difficult vowel sounds, Gunn works with actors to gradually build up layers of subtlety out of which the "tune" emerges.
He generally works with actors for between two weeks and a month before filming begins. These coaching sessions progress from him sitting chatting with the actors and having them write down words as they will pronounce them to reading books or scripts in character. Once an actor gets to the stage where he or she can self-correct, Gunn says he is satisfied that he or she will be able to confidently ad-lib during filming.
While he has coached many Irish accents, Gunn is keen not to be pigeon-holed as an Irish dialogue coach. He has coached about a dozen other accents, including Russian, Italian, French and Bulgarian.
Like all dialogue coaches, Gunn has an archive of voices garnered from television, linguist friends and real-life characters. In Moll Flanders he modelled Robin Wright's voice on a composite of one of her friends in north London and the women from the Philadelphia cheese ads. Stockard Channing's character in the film was based on the husky-voiced comedienne, Jo Brand.
During filming Gunn is attached to the sound trolley and competes for the actor's time with make-up, wardrobe and the director. He runs through the dialogue each day, and before every take he goes over again with the actor how he would like to hear the words delivered. While he can interrupt between takes with advice, he says he is very conscious that dialogue is only one ingredient in a successful scene. Any words which are mispronounced can be dubbed later in studio.
"There's a lot of psychology and a lot of sensitivity involved," he says. If there's an emotional scene where somebody is screaming and their life's passing before them, they're not really interested that their tongue was one millimetre out. If it's during sex scenes sometimes actors or actresses say just `Give me a break. I don't want to know. I'll do it in studio'. You've just got to play it by ear."
He cites a scene in In The Name Of The Father where Day Lewis "kind of cracks up" when his father joins him in his prison cell. "That scene was ad-libbed. There was an outline for it but it all came out of him [Day Lewis] and it was highly charged ... We actually ended up putting in a few words and taking a bit out in a studio in Los Angeles six months later. `Fouled the ball' was a very famous phrase in that scene. It was replaced in the studio."
But there have been other times when the accent has been just too perfect. In A Prayer For The Dying Mickey Rourke speaks with a Northern accent in which he drops the "th" sound from words like brother, mother and father.
"So you ended up with a line in the confession box when he [Rourke] says to the priest: `My mo'rr's a wonderful women. You should have known my mo'rr, fa'rr.' And the director said,
`What is that line? I haven't a clue what he said.'"
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