Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1488780
50 C I N E M O N T A G E F E A T U R E had to have a very muscular dialogue track. "Muscular" is not really the right word be- cause it's so masculine. It's not really fitting the movie, but it needed to be very strong. We wanted to guide the audience and help them understand what was happening, but we also needed to be able to pull the rug here and there, and have misdirects. Above all, we had to be clear and we had to have a really profoundly strong track to be the backbone of the whole story.... There's a lot of stuff going on, a lot of people, a lot of moving parts, so we had to have clear and concise dialogue. CineMontage: So many of the scenes are small get-togethers or chitchat among the characters, or interiors in Alice and Jack's house. There's an intimacy to the sound. What was your approach to the dialogue in those scenes? Lievsay: It was basically sort of hyper- realist, a musical term. It feels intimate. It feels like you're right there, and that was really the key sound: to make the audience feel like they're sitting at the table with [the characters]. That, of course, does so many things for the audience. But then there's also the contrast. We have scenes that are so intimate and almost like you're there, and then other things we can get away with a greater contrast. And then the contrast is more exciting and more profound. CineMontage: The ordinary sounds — the bacon frying, the egg being cracked — sound heightened. Urmson: There are also insects. We said, "Let's have these really annoying insects every time they're outside." Even though they don't necessarily have cicadas in Palm Springs, we thought, "Yeah, let's try that." We had a lot of different kinds of cicadas and things that were coming and going. There's always this very high-frequency, height- ened humming or buzzing going on. The thing about all of these sound effects was that Olivia said, "Let's try to do this ASMR thing. [ed. note: Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response: a tingling, static-like, or goosebumps sensation in response to specific triggering audio or visual stimuli.] Let's try to have it be very binaural and close to the hearing of Florence." It gives you goosebumps. CineMontage: When Florence's charac- ter, Alice, reaches the desert, the edge of the simulation, we hear a low rumble. Urmson: It really turns out to be the portal to reality, but we don't know that. We were trying to have this deep throbbing hum. Olivia loved low-frequency sounds. She loved all that range. In addition to all the very high-frequency stuff, she was really into some low rumble and lots of throbbing, pulsing sounds. We tried a lot of stuff. I think our big initial inspiration was the monolith in [Stanley Kubrick's] "2001," when we approach the monolith on the moon and the Ligeti music is coming out of it. CineMontage: One of the creepiest scenes is when Frank's wife, Shelley [Gemma Chan], enters a dance class, and we don't actually see her for a long time: Instead, we see a tracking shot that simulates her perspective as she is walking into the studio, and along with it, we hear her footsteps. You were using sound to delay a character's entrance. Ur m s o n: Th at 's O l i v i a . Th at w h o l e thing was her idea. We kind of wrestled 'Olivia loves low-frequency sounds.' Skip Lievsay. P H OT O : A D A M L E R N E R