Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1401019
68 I m ps e . o rg MA: Thinking about the things that aren't so loud, I found the backgrounds were dense and populated with animals and people. You always got the sense that there's someone around unless we are out of the town. This raised the tension for me feeling like there's always someone around to see if David loses it. I'd love to hear about your process with the backgrounds throughout the film. PA: Yeah, the whole thing takes place in this town Kanosh which has 300 citizens. So, it's just a really, really small town. And I remember talking with Robert about it very early on that really loving this location and then Robert actually went out with a Zoom recorder for a day or two recording lots of sounds there. And when I heard those sounds, it was like, "Whoa, there's a lot of cows mooing here. Birds, a lot of small sounds that really made this whole environment come alive and this feeling that there was like something jangling in the background or a weird creek 500 meters down the road or this whole thing about having small elements play around in the background all the time. It creates this very unique atmosphere of this town. That's a very important part of the soundscape as well for sure. or choice that you're going to make one day in your life, and it's going to be amazing. And the reality of it is more gritty like the town itself with positives and negatives, and that the houses started to feel like different elements of the marriage. I started to think about, what argument is this between Nikki and David that they have killed and they no longer can talk about it, but it's in such proximity to it. And I thought MA: Robert, what was the thought process behind Kanosh as a location for your film? Is there a specific tie you had to it? RM: In its initial concept when I started the writing, I had been down to Kanosh working on another project and I was just writing in the studio down there and I had just the kernels of The Killing of Two Lovers. I would walk my dog in the evenings to just kind of relax and I passed that red brick house and knew kind of looking at it, that that's kind of where the narrative would exist. When I was writing, I was very much aware of the locations and the time. Some of it was a matter of time. The day sequence, for example, they would be driving around the block and understanding that that was a minute and a half of time. So, in the scriptwriting, to understand that, that I couldn't write too much dialogue, but I couldn't write too little dialogue and to really kind of deal with that space. But the other aspect that I really liked about Kanosh was it has these beautiful landscapes behind it. And it started to really feel like those landscapes were kind of symbolic of what we understand marriage to be because when it's introduced to us, not everyone, but most of us have the idea that it's just an awesome, really great experience "But you can be musical in a movie by the way you edit the movie, like the rhythms of the performances, the way that the cinematography, is moving or not moving, how the edits are, how the sound is. And I think something that connects us all is this idea of thinking about the musicality of everything, even if there is no music." –Peter Albrechtsen