Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1448505
50 I M PS E . O R G visual. I thought, wouldn't it be cool if I took pictures of code from the original movie, and put them into Photosounder? In Resurrections the new code had to be a different sound, but very closely related. So I took a screen frame of Neo and two agents in code when he's confronting them all in the original film. I put that into Photosounder, twiddled a lot, and it produced little pieces of beautiful, elegant sounds. That became the new code. There's something really lovely about that, using a picture of the old code to make the new code. EM: You've worked with so many filmmakers over the years. Looking back on it all, what's contributed to your growth as a sound designer? DD: Well, Drugstore Cowboy with Gus Van Zandt was super fun because Gus was totally into finding the medium of the speakers for that movie, and we developed a language using the perception of ambient, extraneous sounds to describe how stoned the characters were. It's one of the best movies I've ever worked on. Gus wanted to make a movie that was the inner truth of those characters and their universe. The characters were always on the road, so every place they went had to have a new vocabulary. There was a highway with trucks going by all day and night. In another location, somebody was practicing trumpet arpeggios outside. But as soon as they would score the drugs and shoot up, the external world evaporated for the characters. For me, it's about defining dynamics. The perceptions of the characters is a dynamic. Either the characters are strung out and everything is assaulting, intrusive and Top: Matt Dillon's character itching for drugs in Drugstore Cowboy, 1989, Lions Gate Entertainment. Center: Gary Oldman in Romeo Is Bleeding, 1993, NBCUniversal. Bottom: Director Lana Wachowski with members of The Matrix Resurrections sound team—supervising sound editors Dane Davis and Steph Flack, dialog and music mixer Matthias Lempert, and SFX mixer Lars Ginzel.