In the February 2011 issue of Post Magazine, Director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu states, "For me it's hard to overestimate just how important [sound and music] are to my films. I think there's a dictatorship of the image in all films, and I really like to challenge that. For me, sound is even more important than what you see on screen, in the way that it hits you. The emotional chords are much more sensitive to sounds than images, because they're more abstract, and like smells they can trigger a much deeper understanding of things. When you see images, they're very concrete. When you hear them, they're abstract in the way they trigger your own emotional baggage.
I spend a lot of time looking for just the right sounds and textures for my films, and I've worked with sound designer and [sound] editor Martin Hernandez, who has designed all my films since we were at college together. So he knows exactly what I like and want, and in this case we really pushed it, just as we changed the formats to get the visuals wider. So little by little I wanted to keep all the scratches and sounds of the lavelier mics to come up in the mix, which we did at Universal.
There's the scene where Uxbal embraces his daughter in the bathroom, saying goodbye to her, and you could hear their heartbeats in the laveliers, and the classic first session with the mixer is where he wants to erase all that.
I said, 'Wait -- this has to be pumped up, not removed!' Because this apparent technical mistake is for me a statement. This guy's hearing every heartbeat, every scratch their clothes make. So this hyper-realistic approach to the sound mix was very important to me, to make people aware of his journey and the hyper-sensitive last moments of his life.
The music is the same. I need to hear a film before I start it -- what are the sounds, what is the texture, what is the tone? A film for me always begins with a vague idea, often a bit of music, and this began when I was listening to Ravel's Piano Concerto in G Major."
I spend a lot of time looking for just the right sounds and textures for my films, and I've worked with sound designer and [sound] editor Martin Hernandez, who has designed all my films since we were at college together. So he knows exactly what I like and want, and in this case we really pushed it, just as we changed the formats to get the visuals wider. So little by little I wanted to keep all the scratches and sounds of the lavelier mics to come up in the mix, which we did at Universal.
There's the scene where Uxbal embraces his daughter in the bathroom, saying goodbye to her, and you could hear their heartbeats in the laveliers, and the classic first session with the mixer is where he wants to erase all that.
I said, 'Wait -- this has to be pumped up, not removed!' Because this apparent technical mistake is for me a statement. This guy's hearing every heartbeat, every scratch their clothes make. So this hyper-realistic approach to the sound mix was very important to me, to make people aware of his journey and the hyper-sensitive last moments of his life.
The music is the same. I need to hear a film before I start it -- what are the sounds, what is the texture, what is the tone? A film for me always begins with a vague idea, often a bit of music, and this began when I was listening to Ravel's Piano Concerto in G Major."
