Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1448505
M OT I O N P I CTU R E S O U N D E D I TO R S I 45 event. It's not necessarily about the mechanics. Personally, I don't give a damn what kind of gun the character is using other than what that represents to the audience. I'm not a purist. To me, it's about getting the emotional trueness of that weapon as a character to the audience. EM: Prior to The Matrix, you worked on Bound with the Wachowskis. What was your collaboration with them like on Bound? DD: They were very interested in sound, and they didn't know anything about it, technically. They'd never directed a movie. They were carpenters in Chicago, and they had done some work in graphic novels, but they wrote these four scripts and they all got made. Part of the deal was they got to direct the fourth script, which was Bound. Zach Staenberg was the picture editor of that film too, and he called me up and said, "I've just started this movie with these two young carpenters from Chicago, and in the dailies you can hear them making the sound of the camera moving through the scene. You've got to meet them." So I went to a screening and they were just amazing people. So creative and passionate and warm. The four of us really bonded. They were hearing the movie in their head. I could tell that in their "movie theater," the camera made a sound as it was moving. Those are filmmakers I want to work with. After meeting them and watching the first cut of Bound, I was in. The budget was crappy, but I just had to do it. Once we started working together, I would pitch ideas about playing with the aural storytelling in ways that were not literal interpretations of the script. Starting the sound design, my audition as an artist, and the beginning of my creative relationship with the Wachowskis, was "bringing the wet and steamy world of Corky and Violet to life" (as Lana recently described my work to me) in the moment Corky sensuously disassembles Violet's leaking sink drain pipe to retrieve a piece of jewelry. To shape water and metal sounds into a living, moaning erotic duet that also worked literally, was a wonderful creative challenge. It worked and I was creative family after that! In Bound, there's another scene where Gina Gershon is listening to Jennifer Tilly having sex with Joey Pantoliano in another room, and then later he catches her on the phone and hits the redial button. We hear rings through that same wall, and that's what gives the whole thing away—Joey hears her phone ringing. I pitched the idea of expanding and contracting time there. So every time the phone rings and they're tuning into it, less time has gone by. It had to work with the picture cut in a particular way. I think Zach made tiny adjustments based on this and it really worked! They were so excited. Very subtle but it adds to the tension. It was integral enough to the storytelling, and that's something I learned from them. They were totally open to stretching the way the audience hears the way the character hears. I also had to come up with that sound of the camera moving because the camera was a character, yet it's not 100% subjective. When the camera moves, it's the Gina Gershon character's emotional point of view. I experimented with different kinds of whooshy sounds, slowing them down and integrating a gunshot, like she senses danger ahead. In a way, the camera moving sound in Bound was a precursor to bullet time. We all fell in love with the possibilities of giving the audience more than they expected. EM: What was your initial reaction to reading The Matrix script for the first time? DD: Oh my God… we were all working on Bound—me, the Wachowskis, Zach Staenberg and Don Davis was the composer. The Wachowskis had this script they had written when they were really young, I think teenagers, and it had been circulating around town. My understanding was that no one was willing to make it for the budget. We were talking about it on the mix stage while finishing Bound. I loved everything about The Matrix script, as did everybody, Gina Gershon's character has bigger plans in Bound, 1996, NBCUniversal