I was reading an interview with Sienna Miller in which she said the director of a movie she was shooting would always say “Halt!” instead of “Cut!” to end a scene. The explanation was that a lot of the crew were Dutch, and “cut” means something bad in Dutch. What is she referring to?
(Of course, I assume it’s not actually c-u-t, but something very similar.)
Looking at a picture of Sienna Miller, I can see how one might make such a Freudian slip.
Virtually all Dutch people, at least in the urban areas, speak English as a second language I am told so it is probably just being courteous rather than having someone misunderstand what is being said.
“Halt!” is just a way to say “stop!” in Dutch, as well as in English. If you’re lucky enough to have a word for an important command that means the same thing in both the native languages of your bi-national crew, why not use it?
As you can hear if you listen to the audio version on the “Say” button in Q.E.D.'s link, Dutch kut = “pussy” doesn’t sound much like English “cut”; rather, it more or less rhymes with English “foot” or “put”. The Dutch tend to be a bit fussy about vowel pronunciation, and are unlikely to mix up such distinct sounds. I somehow doubt that a Dutch film crew would be driven to disruptive extremes of hilarity and/or embarrassment by the fairly marginal phonetic resemblance between kut and “cut”.