Rather than spending my Holiday vacation doing productive 3D, VFX, or programming projects I lazed around and watched movies. I'd like to think this in some way qualifies as research for making better Maya renders and ZBrush sculpts - and in fact I may start thinking that from here on out. Anyway, among the films I viewed was The Dark Knight Rises. This is mainly because I gave the entire Christopher Nolan Batman Trilogy as a gift to my family with the express intent of making them view it while I tormented them with Bane impersonations. And so as my family sat and watched Batman, we inevitably began discussing Bane's accent. My initial supposition was that he sounded kind of like an evil Yoda due to the strange delivery and odd voice inflection. My brother in law, John, decided it was better described as a proportion of various accents, including random British stage actor, Darth Vader, Foghorn Leghorn (of Looney Tunes "Boy, I say boy..." fame), and yes even Tom Hardy, the actor who played Bane in The Dark Knight Rises. To get more information I ran to Google and I looked up "Bane's Accent" in an attempt to discover what Hardy was trying to portray. The top hit is the following from Josh Wildings blog on Comicbookmovie.com which summarises a Hollywood Reporter article and video (yes, two degrees of citation):
Tom Hardy has finally revealed where his inspiration for Bane's accent in The Dark Knight Rises came from. For those of you who may not know, Bartley Gorman (1944 - 2002) was an Irish Traveller who was the undefeated Bare-knuckle boxing champion of the United Kingdom and Ireland, often referred to as the, "King of the Gypsies". He tells the site:
"The choice of the accent is actually a man called Bartley Gorman, who was a bare knuckle fighter. A Romani gypsy. Which I wanted to underpin the Latin, but a Romani Latin opposed to Latino. His particular accent is very specific, which was a gypsy accent. So that's why it was difficult to understand. But once you tune into it, you get it. I hope."
That's all well and good, but I prefer John's idea of thinking of the accent in terms of other famous accents. To this end, Laura and I crafted the perfect proportion of accents that define Bane, while also killing time, on our New Year's Day drive back from Washington, DC. Below are these proportions congealed via Photoshop magic into easy-to-swallow infographic format:
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For more Bane hilarity, or perhaps the first bit of Bane hilarity as the infographic is just so-so, check out this video from CollegeHumor.com:
And in case you were wondering, yes, only when Soule Designs is in ashes do I have my permission to stop doing Bane impersonations!