Sound Speak - Phillip Noyce on the Audio of Salt

Excertps from Phillip Noyce as he talks about the sound of his movie "Salt" from the August 2010 Mix Magazine article.

“In this particular film, music drives the soundtrack, and that’s quite unusual for an action film, where usually it’s the effects that drive the sound. The reason music drives the film is because I’ve used James Newton Howard’s score as the unifying factor to combine what is on the one hand fantastical, escapist popcorn entertainment, and on the other hand, a fact-based thriller—two seemingly irreconcilable genres that are pulled together and held tight by James’ score. Everything, in a sense, was subordinated to the music.”

“I’ve always believed in using sound as an ‘emotionator,’ if I can make up a word,” Noyce laughs. “No sound is innocuous, no musical note is innocuous. They simply exist. Whether it’s the rustle of the wind, the sound of birds, the footsteps or the strings, they all have a dramatic and an emotional purpose within the soundtrack.

“We set out at the beginning of the sound work with a number of objectives,” he continues. “One was to ensure that as a ride, Salt is relentless. Once the audience gets on, we want the roller coaster to never stop. The audience has nowhere to hide, you just hold on and hope you get to the end with your brain intact. That means you are trying to create incessant rhythms of sound. There can be no pause. You’re trying to hit them and hit them and hit them as if you have them against a wall, punching them. But you want them to feel as if you’re just stroking them, because you want them on the edge of their seats wanting more. Every time they might want to feel like a pause, there’s another sound ricocheting into the next sound, that’s bouncing forward into the next one. And they keep going within a rhythm that’s relentless. The trick is to find the right level, and I don’t mean volume. I mean the right level of complexity without ever being bombastic.”