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Exerpted from an interview with Don Hahn, Producer of Atlantis: The Lost Empire
Author: Smilin` Jack Ruby
Found at www.animagic.hpg.ig.com.br/donhahn.htm
Don : Well, no, because I suppose in our reading and certainly what the directors and I wanted to do with the movie was create an Atlantis that was a mother civilization both in terms of its language and its architecture. We wanted to create a civilization that really felt like it was the wellspring of all other civilizations and that's how it's described in a lot of mythology. So, we went around for architecture, for example, and looked at Cambodian ruins and Tibetan, Balinese, Nepalese, Indian architecture and tried to mould that all together into one common language where you could believe Atlantis was a mother civilization because you can see elements of other civilizations in the architecture on the screen. The same is true of the language we created for the screen. Mark Okrand who did the Klingon language for Star Trek came in and helped us develop a spoken dialect for the Atlanteans that was the same thing, kind of a primitive dialect that you could imagine was like the dialects people spoke before the Tower of Babel - a "root" dialect. I think that was kind of fascinating trying to recreate those core traits of what a civilization might have been.
S.J.R. : Does that mean the lettering you're using is some kind of early transliteration of any kind of Greek lettering or where did that come from?
Don: We made it up (laughs ). We looked at a lot of early typefaces, Phoenician, Greek, a lot of different cultures even Asian typefaces and then just tried to come up with something you couldn't quite put your finger on. It wasn't Arabic, it wasn't Chinese, it wasn't Phoenician or Sanskrit or something, it was just something that was uniquely "Atlantean," but again was reminiscent of all of those cultures.
S.J.R.: You have both Leonard Nimoy and Mark Okrand from the Star Trek world. Were you using them to go for the otherworldly thing or was that more of a coincidence?
Don: It was honestly by chance. We hired Leonard Nimoy first. Mark came in and they knew each other from the Star Trek series, obviously, but we had found Mark's name much earlier and had toyed around with developing a language and it just seemed to make sense. Some of our actors took to it better than others. Nimoy could like sight-read the stuff and was immediately there and knew exactly how to pronounce it. Michael J. Fox hated the language and really had to labor over it and in the end did a great job in delivering it. It was just a happy circumstance that Nimoy was in the cast, because he could just nail the Atlantean language as though he'd spoke it since birth.
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