Kyle Jepson’s Post

Transcript

In this episode of Joan deserves a musical, I wanna talk about what it means for a a historical story to be true or accurate or historical. This is a this is a tricky point and the the more I I work on Joan and think about it, the harder it is for me to just define exactly what it means for something to be accurate. Because on the one hand, I'm talking about making an animated musical, right? One thing we know from Jones childhood is she refused to join in. Chances. A couple of her childhood friends testified she did not like to dance. And here I am turning her into the lead role of of a musical. And so I hope she dances a lot. I hope she sings, which not Joan at all, right. And yet in some ways, I feel like what I'm doing could be the most historically accurate portrayal of Joan so far, because I'm really trying to understand her as a person and portray her accurately. And we don't know. You know, we can't. Know exactly what she said, or how she said it, or or or what people look like or how they responded. Because we we only know what what the historical record tells us. But it we it's pretty clear to me as I've researched Joan that she was a feisty, funny teenage girl and she's never portrayed that way. She's always portrayed as this super serious, super somber character, and there's no way someone like that could have had enough charisma to do the sorts of things she did. And so I feel like. Having her sing upbeat numbers, potentially dancing, captures her spirit more accurately than dialogue ever could, and the whole idea of telling a story is to get people to come along with it emotionally and to have it resonate. And so in some ways, even though literally it is inaccurate to have her singing and dancing figuratively, I feel like it could be truer to the the the real story of what actually happened and help us experience it more like. It actually happened then a literal telling could but then I mean this opens up a whole world of artistic license and not telling the story in a truthful way. And it is sometimes very tempting to have Joan do something really cool or exciting that isn't in the record and and there's a necessity to sometimes take things that are in the record and leave them out because they they don't fit 11 account I I found of Joan that I thought was really interesting. When she first comes to I believe that you know where where Charles was some soldier some me too sort of guy was like yeah ohh you're the the famous maiden one night with me and I can I can fix that for you and she said to him Sir you are you are closer to death than you know or something like that and he died with it like a week and I think that's I think there's there's that's really interesting. Story right. And I tried to fit it into the script at various points. It didn't really fit in the Chinon scene, and so I put it in a later war scene. But the fact of the matter is I'm telling a family friendly like a children's story, right. We don't have space for lecherous soldiers there. So that ultimately got edited out. And this is, this is the challenge of telling a historical story. You have to choose which parts to keep. You have to choose which parts to leave out. You have to choose when to insert things that are are purely. Speculative or are figurative to convey the story in the way you want. And so I don't know historical accuracy, I don't. I don't know that there's a clear, objective benchmark for measuring that. But one thing that I'm I'm ringing my hands over more than anything else is the names. One of the books I read about Joan of Arc had a long introductory note, just about names and and this person, it was a it was an English translation. Of a French text about Joan and the translator wrote this forward saying translating names is the hardest part. Because The funny thing, I really wanted to have a joke calling this out. I haven't been able to fit it in. Almost everyone is named Jean, it seems 15th century France, that's what everybody's name. There's like 4 different guys named Jean. And then Joan herself is Jeon, which is a variation of the name and one of the guys that's married to a a a woman named John, which is the. Feminine form of Jean. And so everybody has this name but the the translator was talking about in a contemporary English historic history or whatever. When historians write about French history in English some there, there are these conventions that have come around where some of these characters some of these people are called Jean and some of them are called John right. And and there's this there's this sense in which however. That happens. Tradition takes hold and some people keep their French names and some people like Joan get English names. But her name was not Joan and in fact her name was not even of art. When she was when she was on trial she was asked what's your name and she said Jean and and some of my friends called me Jeanette and they said what's your surname? And she says as far as I know I don't have one. And yet everyone knows her It either in English as Joan of Arc or in French, as you know, Jean Jean Dark. And this comes from her, her father. Apparently his last name was Dark, but it sometimes spelled with an apostrophe, sometimes not. We don't know where that name came from. There's nowhere in France called Arc, so it cannot be of Arc. That can't be. What it means. Whatever it means, we don't know. But there's no no sense in which. That her father gave this her name to her. And for me, there's so much baggage around the name Joan of Arc, right? As soon as you say Joan of Arc, people are picturing a young girl tied to the steak and on fire, right? And if you're going to tell a family friendly musical, that's not the story you want in people's minds. So I would really love to call her Jay on if you if you look at a Wikipedia page, we have her signature, right? She was mostly illiterate. She dictated most of her letters, but she did at some point learn to sign her name and she actually spells it. With an X in it JEHAN mean and so this is interesting because in France she's she's she's run with no HI don't know where where I don't know the history of this but I really love to call her Jay on it. That's how I have it currently written in the script. I would love to do it that way and to maybe even call the movie Jeon right. And I would love for everyone to just have their friends James Jean and and and all these. But it sounds weird, right? It's always to me a little jarring when you're watching a movie in English. But there's like another language sprinkled in, right? It it it takes you out of the moment you you realize, ohh yeah, these people are theoretically in some sense speaking French, but they're speaking English, and this is confusing. And so if you're translating most of the text into into English, why not translate it all into English? But you run into trouble, especially with place names, right? Chinul. There is no English equivalent. You could call it chin, I guess, because that's how it's spelled. But a lot of these places, Jargo and and rems and stuff like there's there's no, it's not as simple as like Perry we call Paris, right? And like Charles, that's an easy one. But there's one guy named Layer, it's spelled La Hire. And like do we say Lahire? Do we try to translate it into something else? It's very difficult. So my inclination is just to use the French names for all the people and all the places, even though I don't know if like English speaking kids will actually be able to pronounce these names. That'll be confusing and off putting for them to have French names for these characters. And so these are the kinds of decisions I'm trying to make all the time. But for now, it's going to be a musical and it's gonna have all the artistic license that that demands. But we're going to stick with the pure French names. I don't know if this is a good decision or not, and if anyone has strong opinions, I would love you to weigh in because these are the kinds of decisions I'm just kind of arbitrarily making on my own and I don't know if I'm doing it right.