Sound in film: The ‘uber geniuses’ of the invisible art you just can’t cheat
Oscar-nominated actors like Cillian Murphy and Carey Mulligan might be the headline-grabbing stars you’ll hear mentioned everywhere ahead of this Sunday’s ceremony.
Lesser known are the names of the “uber geniuses” who’ve made audiences sit-up and listen in what’s been a stand-out year for sound in film.
Cillian Murphy in Oppenheimer. Pic: Universal Pictures
From the small matter of recreating the noise of an atomic bomb going off for Oppenheimer, to the subtle but menacing churning of the concentration camp crematorium in The Zone Of Interest.
Sound is typically one of the least discussed categories at the Academy Awards, but this year there’s plenty to talk about.
On paper the nominees couldn’t be more different, there’s the team who had to work out how noisy Tom Cruise‘s death-defying Mission Impossible stunts should be, those tasked with setting the right tempo for Bradley Cooper’s Maestro mood swings, not forgetting the nominees who somehow conjured up what a future war with robots might sound like in The Creator.
But sound designer Johnnie Burn is arguably the one to watch having already won a BAFTA for his work The Zone Of Interest.
“This reaction to me is surprising,” Burn told Sky News on the red carpet before his win.
“We are a small team of people who worked together for a year and a half, and I wasn’t really aware that sound was doing such an enormous load.”
The concept was director Jonathan Glazer’s idea to use sound to show the banality of evil unfolding through what we hear, challenging viewers to really listen to scenes of domestic bliss set against the muted sound of execution gunshots in the distance.
Sandra Huller in The Zone Of Interest. Pic: A24
As Burn explained: “It was a lot of research, it was reading witness testimony and understanding what happened to Auschwitz in 1943.
“Understanding what the motorbikes and the guns sounded like… Reading events of torture and murder that I could imagine would have a sound attributed to them, then going and re-enacting that as best as possible using sometimes actors but more so trying to find sound in the real world that’s similar and repurposing that, because that’s more credible than having an actor pretend.”
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Not only did his team have to meticulously research the details of what the concentration camp would have sounded like, they also had to contend with a cast whose performances were being recorded on hidden cameras.
Unable to use booms they had to wire the house that’s at the centre of the film with three-quarters of a mile of microphone cable to capture their dialogue.
Johnnie Burn. Pic: Reuters
While there is a quiet power to how and when sound is used in The Zone Of Interest, cinematically at the other end of the spectrum, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One, is packed full of action and noise.
Sound engineer Chris Burdon – who won the Oscar last year for Top Gun: Maverick and was nominated for Banshees Of Inisherin before that – had a massive task on his hands.
“On a car chase in Rome you’ve got 450 elements over a series of minutes, then you’ve got music with all the layers,” he said.
“It’s a kind of layering process… even a simple scene would have 20 layers of sound effects, whether it’s birds, footsteps, a door… Often you speak to family members or friends and they’re surprised that what they hear or see isn’t just recorded on location.”
Chris Burdon. Pic: PA
When cinema transitioned from silent movies to talkies, filmmaking was transformed by the addition of sound. Cinema-goers quickly developed an insatiable appetite for musicals and gangster films.
The entire experience was a brand-new sensation – from hearing the mobster machine guns ring out across the cinema seats to the screeching tyres in a car chase.
Nowadays the addition of sound is something most of us take for granted but it remains an invisible art. And while a filmmaker can actually quite easily swap out a dodgy actor, they can’t cheat bad sound.
Bradley Cooper and Carey Mulligan in Maestro. Pic: Jason McDonald/Netflix
According to The Creator director Gareth Edwards, experts in the field are “worth their weight in gold”.
“Tom [Ozanich] and Dean [Zupancic] who did our sound mix for The Creator are also nominated for Maestro, that’s no accident… These people are these uber geniuses of the industry.”
It is perhaps more obvious that a film about composer Leonard Bernstein had to be note perfect in terms of its audio, but how did the same duo set about figuring out what a war between humans and robots with artificial intelligence would sound like?
Gareth Edwards. Pic: Europa Press/AP
Edwards said: “The tricky thing about doing sound design for a sci-fi movie… is that if you go too far you don’t even know what you’re listening to.
“You’ve got to try to find sounds that are one step away from what we know those sounds to be now.”
Whoever wins, while few watching this Sunday’s ceremony at home will recognise their faces, it’s highly likely you will have heard their work.
Instinctively while we may see filmmaking as a visual medium, this year’s brilliantly diverse range of films nominated for their sound demonstrate the transfixing and transporting hold it can have over an audience, often without us even realising it.
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Joy star James Norton on the ‘postcode lottery’ of IVF – and playing the scientist who was part of creating the first ‘test-tube baby’
Actor James Norton, who stars in a new film telling the story of the world’s first “test-tube baby”, has criticised how “prohibitively expensive” IVF can be in the UK.
In Joy, the star portrays the real-life scientist Bob Edwards, who – along with obstetrician Patrick Steptoe and embryologist Jean Purdy – spent a decade tirelessly working on medical ways to help infertility.
The film charts the 10 years leading up to the birth of Louise Joy Brown, who was dubbed the world’s first test-tube baby, in 1978.
In the UK, statistics show the proportion of IVF cycles paid for by the NHS has dropped from 40% to 27% in the last decade
Norton, who is best known for playing Tommy Lee Royce in the BAFTA-winning series Happy Valley, told Sky News he has friends who were IVF babies and other friends who have had their own children thanks to the fertility treatment.
“But I didn’t know about these three scientists and their sacrifice, tenacity and skill,” he said. The star hopes the film will be “a catalyst for conversation” about the treatment and its availability.
“We know for a fact that Jean, Bob and Patrick would not have liked the fact that IVF is now so means based,” he said. “It’s prohibitively expensive for some… and there is a postcode lottery which means that some people are precluded from that opportunity.”
Bill Nighy, Thomasin McKenzie and James Norton star in Joy. All pics: Netflix/ Kerry Brown
Now, IVF is considered a wonder of modern medicine. More than 12 million people owe their existence today to the treatment Edwards, Steptoe and Purdy worked so hard to devise.
But Joy shows how public backlash in the years leading up to Louise’s birth saw the team vilified – accused of playing God and creating “Frankenstein babies”.
Bill Nighy and Thomasin McKenzie star alongside Norton, with the script written by acclaimed screenwriter Jack Thorne and his wife Rachel Mason.
The couple went through seven rounds of IVF themselves to conceive their son.
Norton portrays scientist Bob Edwards, while McKenzie plays embryologist Jean Purdy
While the film is set in the 1970s, the reality is that societal pressures haven’t changed all that much for many going through IVF today – with the costs now both emotional and financial.
“IVF is still seen as a luxury product, as something that some people get access to and others don’t,” said Thorne, speaking about their experiences in the UK.
“Louise was a working-class girl with working-class parents. Working class IVF babies are very, very rare now.”
In the run-up to the US election, Donald Trump saw IVF as a campaigning point – promising his government, or insurance companies, would pay for the treatment for all women should he be elected. He called himself the “father of IVF” at a campaign event – a remark described as “quite bizarre” by Kamala Harris.
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Bill Nighy ‘proud’ of new film on IVF breakthrough
“I don’t think Trump is a blueprint for this,” Norton said. “I don’t know how that fits alongside his questions around pro-choice.”
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In the UK, statistics from fertility regulator HEFA show the proportion of IVF cycles paid for by the NHS has dropped from 40% to 27% in the last decade.
“It’s so expensive,” Norton said. “Those who want a child should have that choice… and some people’s lack of access to this incredibly important science actually means that people don’t have the choice.”
Joy is in UK cinemas from 15 November, and on Netflix from 22 November
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