His three daughters Director Azazel Jacobs explains the thought process behind Katie and Christina’s strange form of communication. The critically acclaimed movie has just arrived on Netflix after a successful festival debut in 2023 and is among the top movies of the weekend. It reveals the complicated relationship between three sisters (played by Carrie Coon, Elizabeth Olsen and Natasha Lyonne) as they grapple with their father’s impending death. Throughout the movie, two of the sisters, Coon’s Katie and Olsen’s Christina, talk to each other in what sounds like gibberish, but they understand each other perfectly.
spoke to IndiewireJacobs explains how and why he developed a special language for Katie and Christina. Although it only crops up a couple of times over his three daughters, It’s jarring enough that it stands out. Jacobs initially describes it as Pig Latin, a silly way of speaking that rearranges the letters of a word and adds suffixes, but then admits it’s a mix of something else. Both Kuhn and Olsen had to ask how to pronounce it, but in the end, they did so effortlessly. Jacobs says:
I didn’t speak it as a child, and I just looked up other Pig Latin languages, I wrote in the Pig Latin – I don’t know if it’s that, it’s like a childish gibberish – which seemed like the simplest way of communicating.
It was something I’d seen with siblings before but not something I ever had. I spelled it out phonetically and I remember getting a call from both Lizzie and Corey saying, ‘So how did it actually say that?’
I just wrote. I didn’t know how it was said… I let them know, I just wrote it, and I hope you figure it out, and they did, and when they showed up, they both got it Could do very quickly.
It was the first time I was hearing what that would sound like out of my mind, an instinct they used and embraced and stuck with.
What Katie and Christina’s secret language means to his three daughters
They share something that their sister does not
Taking place largely in one New York City apartment, His three daughters is an emotional character study that finds each of the eponymous women alternating between processing their father’s failing health and confronting their troubled relationships with each other. It is established that Rachel, the third daughter played by Lyonne, is actually her father’s adopted child; While Katie and Christina are biologically his, Rachel joined their family when she was young. She is closer in age to Katie, but the two are estranged and often fight.
Whether this was done on purpose is not clear, but it creates a larger gap between the siblings which only heightens the overall tension.
Katie and Christina are years apart in age, however His three daughters Shows their closeness through their interactions, which noticeably do not involve Rachel. The secret pig Latin language only hammers home the concept because they went out of their way to create a way of speaking that didn’t involve Rachel. Whether this was done on purpose is not clear, but it creates a larger gap between the siblings which only heightens the overall tension.
Our take on the secret language in his three daughters
It’s an effective way to show history
while watching His three daughtersI got tripped up initially when Christina and Katie spoke in an unintelligible language. For a second I wondered if I hadn’t paid enough attention to what they were saying. However, when I realized what was going on, I soon saw the brilliance behind the decision. As the film takes place over the course of several days, and the plot is so firmly rooted in what will happen during those days, it does not provide any flashbacks to the women’s childhoods. Because of this, we were left to put together a picture of their histories.
The language created between Kuhn and Olsen’s characters hearkens back to their upbringing. Although they didn’t really grow up together, because Katie is much older than Christina, they have a deep enough bond to form their own way of communicating. It is revealed that their mother died when Christina was quite young; It could be that, while they navigated their grief, Christina and Katie turned to each other and pushed out the outside world by talking exclusively to each other. Although His three daughters After leaving most details a mystery, this one clue goes a long way in recreating their backstories.
Source: Indiewire