Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1500189
86 M PS E . O R G between the strings of my Dobro guitar and swung it around to get the nice doppler-ish modulation. It's the sound of the Raven spaceship and I friggin' loved that sound. Neill is so awesome to work with and Shell and I so loved being in Vancouver for that film. MC: That's a tough one. Everything I do is unusual;-). Possibly the time Dave and I constructed a rice paper lung to record alien breaths for Arrival. It was like a papier-mâché but with rice paper. It was very gooey and gross and even though it looked ugly and made us feel very crazy, somehow it sounded amazing. Are there any filmmakers you would really desire to work with? DW: I love Luc Besson, Sofia Coppola, Doug Liman, Guillermo del Toro, and Alejandro González Iñárritu films. I would love to work with any of them, but there's a kind of unspoken etiquette in poaching someone else's directors. I'd still love to work again with Neill Blomkamp, Bong Joon Ho, Jane Campion, Peter Jackson, and Taika Waititi. We just had our baby last year and I had to turn down an Isaiah Saxon film. It was terrible timing, but I think he's pretty special as well and would love to work with him in the future. I really would love to work with any director who considers sound at the script level and who lets me come on during pre-production. It's the best way to work. I'd also love to work with a director who would want me to compose. MC: I'd love to work more with Denis Villeneuve, he's such an incredible director with such a strong and pure artistic vision. But interestingly, one of my favourite things is working with first-time directors as they are so passionate and excited to work with sound designers. I love fresh new ideas and the world is full of amazing people with concepts that have not yet been seen or heard. So I'm always excited about what is coming next. It would also be great to hear about your relationship and how it came about, as well as how you collaborate, and certainly how you manage your family life together. DW: We met at Park Road Post 13 years ago and became friends straight away. We've always had 2-3 studios at home even prior to COVID-19. We both have different sound design tool sets. Shell makes sounds I love and that often I can't figure out how she made them. I love that. We love recording the world and at some stage when we get our act together, we'll release the terabytes of sounds we haven't even managed to archive. That said, we do spend a lot of time on our archive of sounds. Great sounds are the building blocks for something special and unique. In the ideal world, we build something that we put our heart into. The past couple of years have been challenging. My 86-year-old mum, Ellen, moved in with us prior to COVID lockdowns. We had a pretty perfect house in Wellington at the time, but decided when Shell got pregnant, to move into a forest in the far north of New Zealand. Starlink was our internet and thank goodness we had it. The house was so isolated, we didn't eat out for an entire year as there was nowhere to eat out. We did three films from the house, but it was so-so isolated. On a new moon if I went out to close the gate without a torch, I could see nothing, it was so dark. However, we had kiwi's calling from down the valley and other native New Zealand birds on the property The best part was the awesome spa pool in the trees. Sound designer Chris Boyes was one of our only visitors in a year. We