Mads Hedegaard Had to Invent New Languages for Stone Age Epic ‘Stranger’: ‘This Is Where It All Started’ (EXCLUSIVE)
variety.comMarta Balaga Danish director Mads Hedegaard had to invent new languages for the Stone Age epic “Stranger.” “I have a background in documentaries [‘Cannon Arm and the Arcade Quest’], so it had to feel real to the audience.
I was like: ‘We’re not going to buy it if the actors talk in Danish or English,’” he explained to Variety before the film’s world-premiere at Sweden’s Goteborg, where it is the festival’s closing film. “There was a guy I knew; he has a PhD in Proto-Indo-European languages.
But even those are 2,000 years older than those in our story. We asked him: ‘Can you come up with new ones?’ Tobias [Søborg] took an old Siberian tribal language and merged it with ancient Mayan.
Then he did the same thing again, this time using dialects from the area around Turkey. We had a dictionary and a set of grammatical rules.
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