Sound in film: The ‘uber geniuses’ of the invisible art you just can’t cheat

Published

1 year ago

March 9, 2024

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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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.”

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.

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?

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.

Entertainment

Russell Brand charged with rape and sexual assault

Published

21 mins ago

April 4, 2025

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Russell Brand has been charged with rape and two counts of sexual assault between 1999 and 2005.

The Metropolitan Police say the 50-year-old comedian, actor and author has also been charged with one count of oral rape and one count of indecent assault.

The charges relate to four women.

He is due to appear at Westminster Magistrates’ Court on Friday 2 May.

Police have said Brand is accused of raping a woman in the Bournemouth area in 1999 and indecently assaulting a woman in the Westminster area of London in 2001.

He is also accused of orally raping and sexually assaulting a woman in Westminster in 2004.

The fourth charge alleges that a woman was sexually assaulted in Westminster between 2004 and 2005.

Police began investigating Brand, from Oxfordshire, in September 2023 after receiving a number of allegations.

The comedian has denied the accusations and said he has “never engaged in non-consensual activity”.

He added in a video on X: “Of course, I am now going to have the opportunity to defend these charges in court, and I’m incredibly grateful for that.”

Metropolitan Police Detective Superintendent Andy Furphy, who is leading the investigation, said: “The women who have made reports continue to receive support from specially trained officers.

“The Met’s investigation remains open and detectives ask anyone who has been affected by this case, or anyone who has any information, to come forward and speak with police.”

Entertainment

Tom Cruise leads moment of silence in tribute to ‘dear friend’ Val Kilmer

Published

24 hours ago

April 3, 2025

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Tom Cruise leads moment of silence in tribute to 'dear friend' Val Kilmer

Tom Cruise has paid tribute to Val Kilmer, wishing his Top Gun co-star “well on the next journey”.

Cruise, speaking at the CinemaCon film event in Las Vegas on Thursday, asked for a moment’s silence to reflect on the “wonderful” times shared with the star, whom he called a “dear friend”.

Kilmer, who died of pneumonia on Tuesday aged 65, rocketed to fame starring alongside Cruise in the 1986 blockbuster Top Gun, playing Tom ‘Iceman’ Kazansky, a rival fighter pilot to Cruise’s character Maverick.

His last part was a cameo role in the 2022 blockbuster sequel Top Gun: Maverick.

Cruise, on stage at Caesars Palace on Thursday, said: “I’d like to honour a dear friend of mine, Val Kilmer. I can’t tell you how much I admire his work, how grateful and honoured I was when he joined Top Gun and came back later for Top Gun: Maverick.

“I think it would be really nice if we could have a moment together because he loved movies and he gave a lot to all of us. Just kind of think about all the wonderful times that we had with him.

“I wish you well on the next journey.”

The moment of silence followed a string of tributes from Hollywood figures including Cher, Francis Ford Coppola, Antonio Banderas and Michelle Monaghan.

Kilmer’s daughter Mercedes told the New York Times on Wednesday that the actor had died from pneumonia.

Diagnosed with throat cancer in 2014, Kilmer discussed his illness and recovery in his 2020 memoir Your Huckleberry and Amazon Prime documentary Val.

He underwent radiation and chemotherapy treatments for the disease and also had a tracheostomy which damaged his vocal cords and permanently gave him a raspy speaking voice.

Kilmer played Batman in the 1995 film Batman Forever and received critical acclaim for his portrayal of rock singer Jim Morrison in the 1991 movie The Doors.

He also starred in True Romance and Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, as well as playing criminal Chris Shiherlis in Michael Mann’s 1995 movie Heat and Doc Holliday in the 1993 film Tombstone.

In 1988 he married British actress Joanne Whalley, whom he met while working on fantasy adventure Willow.

The couple had two children before divorcing in 1996.

Entertainment

Bruce Springsteen: The Boss to release seven ‘lost’ albums

Published

1 day ago

April 3, 2025

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Bruce Springsteen: The Boss to release seven 'lost' albums

Bruce Springsteen is to release seven albums of mostly unheard material this summer.

The US singer said the songs, written and re-recorded between 1983 and 2018, were being made public after he began completing “everything I had in my vault” during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In a short video posted on Instagram, Springsteen said the albums were “records that were full records, some of them even to the point of being mixed and not released”.

The 83-song collection is being released in a box set called Tracks II: The Lost Albums and goes on sale on 27 June.

Some 74 of the tracks have never been heard before.

Springsteen first teased the release on Wednesday morning with a short social media video accompanied by text which said: “What was lost has been found”.

Tracks II is the follow-up to the star’s first Tracks volume, a four-CD collection of 66 unreleased songs, released in 1998.

The New Jersey-born rocker, nicknamed The Boss, last released a studio album in 2022.

Only the Strong Survive was a collection of covers, including songs by Motown and soul artists, such as the Four Tops, The Temptations, The Supremes, Frankie Wilson and Jimmy Ruffin.

The late soul legend Sam Moore, who died in January and was a frequent Springsteen collaborator, sang on two of the tracks.

Springsteen is coming to the UK in May to launch a two-month tour of Europe with his E Street Band.

The shows will include performances at the Co-op Live in Manchester and Liverpool’s Anfield stadium.

The singer-songwriter has sold more than 140 million records since his debut on the music scene in 1973, according to his website.