On making QUIET
Marshall McAuley and I were impressed with Michael Gilvary's DUST DEVIL, and we wanted to do something along similar lines - tense and frightening, while working with the assets we had at our disposal.
At first we thought we would do a horror movie, and we spent some time talking about what made horror movies effective. Horror movies usually create their visceral scares by limiting the audience's perceptions, to give them a sense of unease because they don't know where the danger is going to come from.
Unless you're a big fan of smellovision, movies only utilize two senses - hearing and seeing. And for some reason, horror movies focus almost exclusively on manipulating the sense of sight - scenes are dimly lit or out of focus, things jump out at the viewer, and monsters might always be just out of frame.
The trouble is, makers of horror movies have played games with the audience's sense of sight so often, the audience has become desensitized to visual tricks. We have been trained to not believe our own eyes.
On the other hand, most filmmakers use sound to tell what's really happening, and we decided to take advantage of that. We decided we would do a movie that would be brightly lit and not play most of the visual tricks audiences are used to. Instead, we'd try to create strong visceral reactions by playing games with the only other sense that movie audiences have at their disposal - their sense of hearing.
This quickly led us to the central premise of our movie - our protagonist would go deaf, and the audience would go deaf at the same time. The only things we would be able to hear would be Lindsay's breathing and heartbeat, and other "sounds" that are as much tactile as they are aural.
We spent several months working on the narrative framework in which we could exploit that premise, and some of the stories we came up with were pretty damn complex. But eventually we realized that simpler was better in this case, and we created a simple structure that would give us plenty of time to get to know our heroine, and then beat her up.
We shot the whole movie in about six days (four of which were in a house with one bathroom and one pregnant lady, which unfortunately didn't get to interact as much as they would have liked). The sound design process, on the other hand, took roughly 20 times as long as principal production.
The first major screening of QUIET was at the Arclight as part of the Silver Lake Film Festival. It was a great pleasure watch the people in the audience gasp and cringe and squirm in their seats -- because if audiences have been trained to not believe their own eyes, they still think they can believe their own ears.
1 Comments:
To my senses, sound design is the single most important immersive element any film can achieve and probably the most underrated.
In a film, indie or otherwise, the sound of the story's tale is key to the believability of the world the characters inhabit. If this element of a movie succeeds, then you've won most of the battle to engage the audience into the world depicted in the film. The rest is left up to your director's and cinematographer's vision of how the film meshes with the sound.
Great sound design in any film provides the crucial texture to a film's environment and "reality."
For example, it's very telling the very first person hired by Lucas for Star Wars was Ben Burtt, the sound designer-genius, well before the film had been green-lighted for production. Without the sound design Burtt created, including Darth's trademark exhale-of-evil, the film may not have worked and come off very cheesy.
Films I believe that exhibit the standard to great sound design would include 2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange, Barry Lyndon (gee, see a pattern here?), The Conversation, Star Wars, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T., Die Hard, Blue Velvet, The Abyss, Miller's Crossing, Magnolia, etc.
Can't wait to see (hear) QUIET when you guys are done with the film festival circuit and post it online!
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