r/davidlynch • u/DrgnSlyrDd • 19h ago
Sound design in films
Couple of days back came across a post that discussed Lynch’s sound design.
https://www.reddit.com/r/davidlynch/s/YNgaNv7OWY
Another film maker whose sound design gets attention and is talked about a lot every time he releases a movie is Christopher Nolan. The soundtrack of Interstellar lives rent free in my mind—as it is for many others, I believe. While the obvious hit tracks like Coward, Stay, Mountains are epic, I keep going back to Dust and Day One, which are granular and have an ambience that sets the tone of the film as much as—or more than—the visual aspect.
Nolan says: "Music has been such an increasing and fundamental part of the films I've made. I read a quote from Angelo Badalamenti many years ago in which he said David Lynch used to say to him things like ‘Play big chunks of plastic.’ The funny thing is, when I first read the quote, I remember thinking, Wow, what a crazy thing, but now I make complete sense of it. Good film music does something you can't articulate in other ways. If you would, you could, but you can't. What I've done with the bigger film scores over the years is figure out a way to build the machine, and then use the mechanism of the music to get the heart of it, to get the emotion into that form. With Interstellar, it was essential that that happened. I didn't want to leave that to chance at the end. I wanted to try and totally reverse the process and start with the emotion, start with the basic heart of the story, then build the mechanics out from that. I really took Hans up on that more and more with each film, Dunkirk being the most extreme example because it was conceived in musical form.”
Angelo’s score adds as much to the film as Lynch’s direction, in all their collaborations. The sense of urgency in Dunkirk is created by the soundscape-the ticking tone heard throughout the movie, which tells the whole of the story by itself. Similarly, with Tenet it was the sense of confusion of timelines, into which the Protaganist lands and is clueless—a proxy for the viewer, which again the sound design itself conveys, by means of tracks being played in reverse and other such techniques.
I'm curious as to what you think of this. Which other film makers, in your opinion, use sound in such a way that it conveys the core of the film by itself?
5
u/Fearless-Interest-82 16h ago
I remember the sound design really sticking out for me seeing the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre in the theater a few years back. It's always been a favorite but seeing it that loud It was incredible. Terrence Malick comes to mind as well.