Texture is very important. Just the feel of everything. It's not always about recording everything in pristine quality and having everything mixed where it's absolutely perfect. It's more about a vibe.
Obviously for some people there is a big connection between music and the way you can create a space.
One of the rules of the road is that if you want to create the sense of silence, it frequently has more pungency if you include the tiniest of sounds. By manipulating what you hear and how you hear it and what other things you don't hear, you can not only help tell the story, you can help the audience get into the mind of the character.
I like those older theaters - the acoustics are perfect, I mean, you just have that feel of there's been a thousand shows in there and now you get to be one.
I have a brilliant sound design team who's been working with me since 'Mr. Robot,' and one of the things we always think about - and it's also something we think about with cinematography - is how we get inside the characters' heads and how do we place the audience where we want them to be or how we want them to feel at any given moment.
There are certain sounds that I've found work well in nearly any context. Their function is not so much musical as spatial: they define the edges of the territory of the music.
Music is the subliminal connecting adhesive in film, or at least in narrative feature films.
For each film, you try to create a whole world sonically, having a sense of identity through instruments used, or recording techniques.
If you listen to really deep ambient records that don't move too much, very still records, long after those records are finished, you might find yourself listening for hours to the sound of the room.
The Sadies have the ability to create soundscapes, and to put you in places.
When we were making KONG, I went into the sound room and made an aria of horror sounds. I was in charge of it; there was no one there to listen to me. I was totally in charge of what I wanted to do.
If you use music boldly at the front of a scene, it creates another level.
I love to hear a cool ambient sound at runway shows. It creates a good energy.
I can't work without music.
The sound world that I created for 'Avatar' had to be very different, really, than anything I ever created before. There is also three hours of music.
The music aids the message, it's there to punctuate and abbreviate and shape the silence.
Each environment has its own signature. Sound tells a story: You make choices about what you're hearing, where to look, how you want to feel about what's going on.
To me, sound is a crucial component to, really, any moviegoing experience, but particularly with suspense films or thrillers. I think you need the audience to become subtly really attuned to the soundscape in, like, this uncomfortable way.
I also used these realistic sounds in a psychological way. With The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, I used animal sounds - as you say, the coyote sound - so the sound of the animal became the main theme of the movie.
That's what I love - on 'The Farewell,' we played with a lot of silence and a lot of negative space, and I really worked with the composer to create those juxtapositions of like, those awkward silences and when something comes in.
My stepfather was quite into opera, but he'd play it when he was in a bad mood, so you'd hear this boom through the floor, Wagner, and you'd feel nervous.
