Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1488780
49 W I N T E R Q 4 I S S U E F E A T U R E 'It feels intimate, like you're right there.' oddly unsettling. And something doesn't sound quite right, either: Wine glasses clink with too much sharpness, bacon is fried with too much ferociousness, dialogue sounds unusually intimate — and plastic wrap sounds way screechier than usual. Of course, all of these uncomfortable auditory choices are entirely intentional: Supervising sound editors and re-record- ing mixers Skip Lievsay, CAS, and Paul U r m s o n c re a te d a h e i g h te n e d , s u b t l y synthetic-sounding world that is appro- priate to one of the most widely discussed movies of the year. In the Warner Bros. Pictures release, Florence Pugh stars as Alice, a woman married to her clean-cut, inscrutable husband Jack (Harry Styles). Their desert community is made up of other attractive and charming couples, including Bunny (Wilde) and Dean (Nick Kroll), as well as an enigmatic, guru-like figure, Frank (Chris Pine). ( B e w a r e : m u l t i p l e s p o i l e r s f o l l o w throughout.) In fact, Alice and her fellow wives don't actually inhabit this "Stepford Wives"-like world but are the mostly unwit- ting participants in a simulation imagined b y t h e i r m a l e s p o u s e s. T h e m e n h av e signed up for a program that allows them to transport themselves to a kind of "Mad Men"-style alternate universe, and their wives are trapped there with them. The reason that the dialogue sounds so up-close, and objects sound so sharp, is because the sounds don't exist in reality but in virtual reality. Lievsay, who works in dialogue and music editing, and Urmson, who handles sound effects editing, joined "Don't Worry Darling" after working on Wilde's directo- rial debut, "Booksmart" (2019). In a recent conversation with CineMontage, the highly respected longtime collaborators spoke about their work on what was a uniquely creative project — one befitting a story as memorably strange as this one. CineMontage: Did you recognize the sound possibilities of "Don't Worry Darling" when you read the script? Paul Urmson: The whole thing was very top secret, because obviously it has a twist ending. They shot it with a tiny crew during COVID in the fall of 2020, so it was very tightly wrapped. We only got hints about what it was going to be. We got a script maybe in early 2021, but then we got to see a cut. It was radically different than the film now, as they always are.... [Wilde] was trying to create this sort of male fantasy world that's really a nightmare for women in the same world. Skip Lievsay: There are a lot of things happening, and a lot of characters, and we Florence Pugh as Alice in "Don't Worry Darling." P H OT O : WA R N E R B R O S .