IBC
Ethan Van der Ryn and Erik Aadahl, the supervising sound
editors of Oscar-nominated A Quiet Place, on establishing the rules
of silence and the shock of what happens if you break it.
It’s the goal of any suspense movie to have audiences on the
edge of their seat but the breakout horror hit of last year is so tense it has
literally achieved this.
The premise of A Quiet Place, directed, co-written and
starring John Krasinski, is that any noise leads to certain death on-screen but
the sound design is executed so expertly that audiences found themselves
complicit in the conceit.
“It’s almost as if they’re afraid to breathe. They are
certainly not rustling the popcorn,” observes Ethan Van der Ryn, supervising
sound editor with Erik Aadahl.
“What’s most pleasing is that this film forces people to
change the way they perceive cinema. Many modern films, visual effects or
action-dramas in particular, will tend to have a bombastic soundtrack which
naturally pushes the audience to recline in their seats but what happens when
you strip out the sound is that you remove this comfort blanket.
“If you can tie that silence to the jeopardy on screen, then
people start to lean forward. They become aware of the sound they are making
and hold their breath just like the characters. In a way, the audience becomes
an active participant in the story.”
This psychoacoustic effect didn’t come about by accident.
Van der Ryn and Aadhal are two of the most accomplished sound designers in
Hollywood, teaming for the last decade on some of the biggest action, VFX and
creature movies like Godzilla, Monsters vs Aliens, The Meg, Bumblebee and
every Transformers movie. Before partnering with Aadhal, Van der Ryn had worked
on The Godfather: Part III, Terminator 2: Judgement Day, Titanic, Saving
Private Ryan, Pearl Harbor, The Lord of the Rings trilogy and King
Kong, while Aadahl’s credits include I, Robot, Superman Returns, Argo and The
Tree of Life.
“When John sent us the script we knew this would be
different from anything we’d done before,” says Van der Ryn. “Even in movies
where there’s a lot going on visually we’ve found that the story often worked
best if we pared back the number of sounds to focus attention on the central
character or key action within a scene. A Quiet Place took this to a
completely other level. We stripped everything back to the bone and forced the
audience to focus on very specific sounds.
Aadhal has a shorthand for their craft. “Where the
cinematographer is concerned with the contrast between light and dark, our job
is to contrast loud with quiet – or in this case quiet and quieter.”
The film depicts a family in a world terrorised by strange
creatures, blind but with such hyper-sensitive hearing that any slight noise
will lead them to kill you. Spoken dialogue is minimal although the main
characters communicate in sign language, which is subtitled.
“Sound and picture always evolve together but in this case
sound was so integral to the storytelling we had to conceive the philosophical
brush strokes before anything was shot,” says Aadhal, who with Van der Ryn was
hired in pre-production to conceptualise the film’s universe.
“The most difficult scene was therefore going to be the
opening one since the film’s narrative would depend on how well we laid down
the ground rules. An obvious point is that there’s not a lot of words so that
the sound design has to help describe the situation.
”Some of this is subtle ambience building to help relay the
idea that basically nothing would live very long if it made too much sound. For
instance, we use the ambience of crickets but the sound is very even - no
single insect stands out from the background. By the same token there are no
single birds heard although you see some single crows way up in the sky. Lots
of subtle cues like this in the sound design help establish the set-up.
“At the same time, it’s all contextual. You could make a
louder sound if a background sound masks your own, as is the case later in the
film at a waterfall. So, at the start of the film we emphasise atmospheric
sounds outside the drug store which provide cover, to an extent, for the
characters inside.”
The sound designers next developed a set of aural
identifiers, or “sonic envelopes” in their terms, to tell the story from
different perspectives. These included the mother and father (played by
Krasinski and Emily Blunt), the stethoscope to listen to the heartbeat of the
baby she is carrying, listening to shortwave radio and of Regan, their deaf
daughter (played by Millicent Simmonds who also happens to be deaf).
“With Regan we made two envelopes, one when she has her
cochlear implant turned on, and another when it’s off,” Van der Ryn explains.
“Millicent and her mother were a great help in designing this since they were
able to explain that when the implant is on she can hear albeit in very muffled
tones. When it is off, she is in complete silence, something we built into the
script at three moments.”
Going to this “digital zero” was not something either of
them had done on a project before.
“We didn’t want this to feel like a sound experiment but I
think it says a lot about the bravery of the filmmakers and the studio to go
with this idea,” says Aadhal. “We had to judge how far to stretch it.”
What’s more, the film only has one musical cue, Neil Young’s
‘Harvest Moon’ heard over the radio, and a spare if menacing score from Marco
Beltrami that had to blend into the naturalistic details.
“Too much music and it would pull the audience back into the
cinema and away from feeling like they are participating in the story world,”
he adds.
Creating the creature itself meant solving a paradox. How
could one compose a signature style for a creature which is violently disturbed
by sound?
“The main direction we got from John was that it’s got to be
terrifying and scary,” explains Van der Ryn.
“We got to a point early in design when we had too much
sound for them and we realised that it’s scarier when they made less noise.
These are creatures whose sense of hearing is amplified beyond what a human
would hear, so we started to pull it back. It’s a bit like Jaws. The less you
see or hear, the scarier it is.”
They were also working in the dark, since the VFX team had
yet to devise what the creature would look like or how it would move.
“While sound is painful for the creatures they rely on sound
to navigate. So, using the concept of echolocation and sonar we played around
with the real-life clicks and squeaks of animals like Beluga whales, dolphins
and bats.”
When these sounds were found to be “too relatable” they
decided to create something that no-one had heard before. To the patterns of
echolocation they added an electrical component, taken from a story plot point
involving static, interference and feedback from TVs and Regan’s implant.
“In any project we treat ourselves as the first audience,”
says Van der Ryn. “Our decisions are often about how we respond on a gut level.
A lot of A Quiet Place is based on that emotion. Do we feel
goosebumps? If so, we’re onto something.”
While the film is primed for the hermetically sealed world
of cinema, injected with a Dolby Atmos mix in the best theatres, how will the
film play in the more hectic living room?
“Turn off the dishwasher,” is Aadhal’s advice. “And the
washing machine. Close the door. Turn off the lights. Ideally wear headphones.
We’re all multi-tasking everywhere, even watching TV, that we rarely get the
chance to just focus and listen.”
