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46 C I N E M O N T A G E F E A T U R E 'There's a certain rhythm to DeLillo's dialogue.' "Frances Ha" (2012), and "Marriage Story" (2019), "White Noise" was by far his biggest and most ambitious picture, and Hannam was brought in on the ground floor. "I was in Cleveland for about five months, and a month of that was prep time," Hannam said about the film, which was photographed in locations throughout northeast Ohio. "We went on location scouts, and I would work on little cuts of things and cutting story- boards. We had a storyboard artist, who's a good friend of mine, who came on." Throughout, Hannam immersed himself in the movies of the period — at one point, the editor sent Baumbach a bunch of scenes from Mann's "Thief" for no particular rea- son other than he felt it related in some way to what they were working on — as well as the inimitable authorial voice of DeLillo, of whom he was already an admirer. "I always had a copy of the book around, and then, during the editing, I actually just listened to a lot of DeLillo [on audiobooks] on my walk to and from work," Hannam said. "I really loved 'Mao II.' That was one that I listened to. It was interesting, because there's a certain rhythm to his dialogue and an illus- trative quality to the writing that I thought might be inspiring." Before B aumbach became involved in the project, "White Noise" had been bandied about as a possible film for years. Perhaps it even had the reputation of being un-filmable, but Hannam rejects that no- tion. He feels that Baumbach took a dense, sprawling novel and found what he calls its narrative engine: Babette's addiction to Dylar, and Jack's attempts to uncover her abuse of the drug. "One of the parts of the movie Noah and I talked about the most was [Jack's] relationship with Denise, and the sort of Nancy Drew subplot of her trying to find the Dylar," Hannam said. "That was something that was really one of the inven- tions that Noah had that made the movie really tick as a movie. . . . That was always the engine of the edit." That didn't mean that there weren't challenges to making DeLillo's work play as cinema. The author's dialogue is arch, stilted, and very self-conscious, and so are the lines in Baumbach's adaptation. For Hannam, it's a matter of being confident in the sound of DeLillo's language. "It starts with a writer who's got the guts to put it down and not shy away from it when the ac- tors show up, and about casting actors that have the ability, the chops to do it," Hannam said. "Adam and Greta were able to do that stuff." But then it's up to the editor to trust the material, he said. "Just stick to it and not cut it up too much," Hannam said. "You have to really let it be what it is and preserve the musicality of it." Yet "White Noise" isn't a film in which a great author's dialogue is treated precious- ly. Instead, Baumbach and Hannam created chaotic, cacophonous scenes in which characters chatter. In an early scene in the kitchen, parents and offspring gab at each other relentlessly. "We talked a lot about '80s Altman," Hannam said, referring to the great filmmaker's penchant for overlapping dialogue. "We wanted it to feel like you were dropped into a family that didn't really care about the movie.... They are a family, and the reality of a family is that there's no setup." The kitchen scene features Jack navi- gating two sides of the room, each engaged in their own overlapping conversations. "We moved the camera in a way that would energetically link side to side, and we had it covered in different sizes," Hannam said. "All of the shots hinged into other setups. The camera would depart one character and stick on another so the person could pass through that conversation, land in a new conversation, and pass back through." Hannam describes "White Noise" as consisting of "layers" — of image, sound, music, even TV commercials heard in the background. "We scored the movie with commercials and TV shows," Hannam said. "All the commercials were done practically on-set. I would cut TV content, and we had it cued up for every scene. We always had an idea of the media content of the scene." Also essential to the production was the music of composer Danny Elfman. "Scoring with Danny and using Danny's music is different than anyone else because it's got a buoyancy to it that lives in a cinema landscape," Hannam said. "He's just an absolute original." One of the film's most memorable scenes intercuts competing presentations by Jack and his colleague Murray (Don Cheadle) — w i t h Ja c k d i s c u s s i n g h i s a c a d e m i c specialty, Hitler; and Murray talking about the focus of his research, Elvis Presley — with the collision between a train and a truck that results in the toxic cloud that eventually sends Jack, Babette, and their kids to pack up the car and get out of town. "In the editing room, we called it the du- eling lectures," Hannam said. "The movie we looked at a lot for that sequence was [Steven Spielberg's] 'Duel.'" When it came time to shoot the class- room portion of the sequence, however, the company only had two days to work. "I was sitting on the set with Noah, next to the monitor, and we're looking at our story- boards, and it was like: We're just shooting this the best we can," Hannam said. "There is no way that we can stop these actors and these performances and be like: 'OK, can you swing your arm because it's going to match a train that we're going to shoot in two months?'" Consequently, the train col- lision was designed around the footage that was captured in the classroom. "It was just about finding footage that matched well," Hannam said. Although Baumbach and Hannam made use of storyboards — a first for both men — the editor adopted a far looser approach during post-production. As he has on a number of recent films, Hannam dispensed SEE PAGE 83