A 2016 documentary on the voice actors who dub American movie stars into other languages for their local releases of films. The film focuses on about six men who do Clooney in Italian, German, Turkish, Portuguese, French and Polish. In many cases, the same actor has dubbed Clooney in his country throughout the years, for all his films. For instance the Italian audience has learned to associate one voice with Clooney's face, and it is jarring if a dubbing director tries to use a different voice.
Often these actors do several stars: Clooney, DeNiro, Duvall, Woody Allen.... Several actresses who each do several American actresses are also featured.
These voice actors not only have to learn the entire script (translated) of the movies they dub, but in most cases, they have to alter their delivery to match the actor's lip movements, and express all of the emotion (shouting, whispering, breathing, crying) that's on the original voice track. It's quite an art.
And they feel passionately about it. They see themselves as very important to the marketing of films in their countries, as integral to their success. And they probably are.
Yet most of them make only a few hundred, rarely up to a thousand, dollars per film. In many cases, American big budget films don't make back their production costs on the domestic American market. It isn't until the film is released overseas that the global market can double, triple what the film makes in the U.S. Tens of millions, sometimes hundreds of millions of dollars made on foreign releases.
Yet these voice actors are essentially paid peanuts.
The documentary itself was odd, because several of the foreign actors (and "voice actors" who certainly don't LOOK like actors...) speak no English. Extensive interviews with them, in Italian, Portuguese, French etc. are allowed to play out, without subtitles. You can go for a couple minutes not understanding a word that is said. Apparently the documentary makers assumed their audience would be septi-lingual.
Home 
