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www.postmagazine.com 34 POST NOV/DEC 2019 Oscar BUZZ I t was late '70s/early '80s and Gotham City was in turmoil. The city was on the edge of crumbling, from widespread crime and corruption, littered with graffiti and garbage; the result of a sanitation strike. Similarly, Arthur Fleck, one of the fictional city's residents, was struggling to find his way through a society that was greatly divided between the haves and the havenots. For Fleck, a career clown by day and sole caretaker for a frail mother by night, his turbulent and heartbreaking childhood has deeply affected his mental stability while more recent incidents of bullying and physical attacks all are contributing to his complete emotional and moral collapse. Audiences watch Fleck's decline play out on-screen, as he loses his final grip on reality and heads com- pletely into darkness, giving rise to one of Gotham's most infamous villains and one of Batman's most notable arch enemies — the Joker. Director Todd Phillips leads three-time Oscar- nominee Joaquin Phoenix as the title character through the Warner Bros. origin story, Joker. Through picture and sound, audiences are on edge, watching Joker on the path into complete madness. "I love the complexity of Joker and felt his origin would be worth exploring on film, since nobody's done that and even in the canon he has no formal- ized beginning," says Phillips. "So, Scott Silver and I wrote a version of a complex and complicated char- acter, and how he might evolve...and then devolve. That is what interested me — not a Joker story, but the story of becoming Joker." Phillips put together a stellar crafts team, which included DP Lawrence Sher (Godzilla: King of the Monsters and Hangover trilogy), film editor Jeff Groth (War Dogs, Hangover Part III), composer Hildur Guonadottir (HBO's Chernobyl, Sicario: Day of the Soldado), and two-time Oscar winner (American Sniper and Letter From Iwo Jima) Alan Robert Murray who, as supervising sound editor, was charged with helping bring the dark and gritty city of Gotham to life. "Todd and Jeff Groth had a very extensive plan for the sound on this movie," says Murray. "We went through it and the direction was, make Gotham gritty, nasty, loud and threatening. We tried to do that throughout the opening scene by using big V8 engines and car mufflers that reflected the time period the movie is set in, threatening horns, different types of police sirens which always keep the city alive and on edge. That was the initial direc- tion. Then we went through an extensive preview period where everything we put into this movie was examined, looked at, talked about, so it was a very well-perceived plan of what we were going to do with the sound on this film." Murray explains that as the film's scenes play out, the soundscape changes accordingly. For instance, he points to one of the film's key sequences — a subway ride which, for Fleck, starts off innocent- Joker CREATING THE DARK AND GRITTY SOUNDS OF GOTHAM CITY BY LINDA ROMANELLO Sound helps keep audiences on-edge.