‘Nude Tuesday’: Comedy Veteran Julia Davis on Craft of Subtitling Made-Up Language Film

variety.com:

Amon Warmann Guest ContributorComedies don’t come much more unconventional than “Nude Tuesday.”The brainchild of Armağan Ballantyne and Jackie van Beek — who also stars as Laura, one half of a couple who attend a new-age retreat run by sex-guru Bjorg Rassmussen (Jemaine Clement) to rekindle their marriage — it was filmed in a made-up language and then subtitled after the fact by Julia Davis.

The cult comedy veteran’s prose is a frequently hilarious interpretation of the cast’s performances.Speaking with Variety ahead of the film’s U.K.

premiere at the Edinburgh International Film Festival (EIFF), Davis recalls why she agreed to the subtitling gig before she even saw the movie.“I was a big fan of Jackie’s from a film she did called ‘The Breaker Upperers.’ We had a mutual fan type of thing going between us where we were emailing each other,” says Davis. “But then Jackie just emailed me and said, ‘how would you feel about writing subtitles for a film that’s completely in a made-up language?’ And I just said, ‘Yeah, sounds good.’” Once Davis started working in earnest, she quickly learned about the technical learning curve she would have to surmount. “Because you’re limited by the amount of time anyone’s speaking, you’ve got a lot of technical issues with time codes and things,” says Davis. “And so initially it felt a bit like an exam that I wasn’t sure I could do.”Indeed, the subtitling process is curiously precise; viewers need to read all the text and grasp their meaning while also taking in the visuals in just a few seconds.

If the balance is off, the impact of any given scene is dulled. “There was a point where I think Jackie especially was saying if audiences are watching something with subtitles, they don’t really.