Luc Besson On Sound and Music For Film

In the June 2007 issue of Post Magazine, Director Luc Besson (La Femme Nikita, The Fifth Element) talks about music and audio for his films:

They're huge and so important to me... I really enjoy pulling all that together because it can change what you see on the screen so much.  I was probably the first one in France, 30 years ago, to care for sound and music so much.  When I began, French directors didn't care much about it.

On music:

I saw very early on how it's this amazing tool that allows you to say so many things when it's placed with an image.  So you have the story, the dialogue, the actor's performances, the frame -- and you still have so much room for the music and the sound effects...

Tom Tykwer Talks Sound and Music

In the January 2007 issue of Post Magazine online, Director Tom Tykwer (Run Lola Run, Cloud Atlus) discusses his approach to sound and music for his movies.  There's more of his conversation in the print issue.  Here are some of the bits paraphrased:

The musical aspect of film in general is of course something that relates much more to the abstract relationship leading us to emotional perception. We were trying to establish a movie that somehow, not only through the sound but through the way that sound and image are intertwined, gives us a certain feeling: it's how the person the film is describing actually experiences the world.

For us, the music has to start first. I'm already starting to compose while I'm working on the script. We start composing alongside the script, so we find the sound in terms of the music of the film while we're in the writing process. When we arrive on set, we already have a substantial part of the music composed, and we've hired a small orchestra to play it for us, so we can really play it to the actors and get it 'into the scenery' of the actual shooting, as it were. So people could already explore the atmosphere and the acoustic world of the film while they were acting in it.

Sound design is often appreciated in films that create a lot of noise, but I'm a big admirer of the quiet movies. I know how difficult it is to mix a convincingly quiet film, because quietness has so many levels. It's much easier to produce a very loud, effects-driven and music-overloaded movie. I remain a fan of films that were made in the very early days of sound design and that can still deliver interesting results. The Exorcist, for example, has an amazing soundtrack, and in more modern times, what David Fincher does is really impressive. The entire suspense of his film Seven is really built through the soundtrack, with music and sound so well intertwined.
 

Brian De Palma on Sound and Music

In the October 2006 issue of Post Magazine, Director Brian De Palma states:

"Music and all the audio is also a very important part of the post process for me, and I like to spend quite a bit of time on that.  So much of what an audience sees and feels is actually created by the music and all the sound effects."

Writer/Director/Producer Len Wiseman on Sound

In the July 2007 issue of Post Magazine, Len Wiseman (Underworld, Total Recall, Live Free or Die Hard, Sleepy Hollow) answers the question, "How important is music and audio for you?"

"Huge, half the experience.  It amazes me how you watch a cut with no music or sound design and you want to kill yourself.  It has no pace, you've done a horrible job and then they add sound, and it's like night and day.  Sometimes a scene will just not work, even though you tweak and tweak, and then it hits you -- it needs sound."

Danny Boyle on the Importance of Sound

In the August 2007 issue of Post Magazine, Danny Boyle, in an interview on his movie Sunshine, says about sound:

"I actually feel it's 70 percent of a film.  You turn the sound off on any film and most are unwatchable!  They just don't work.  It's extraordinary, and sound recordists get treated so badly on sets."

He continues:

"You watch any Pixar film and the sound is phenomenal!  Everyone raves about the animation, and it's great, but the sound's staggering.  It's because you can't see sound.  Your eyes are so fast and powerful, that you can't trick them.  They spot bad CG a mile away.  The only ting that tricks you is sound, because the ears are blunt instruments.  If you watch a CG film without sound, however good it is, you can spot the CG right away.  But once sound's added, it gives the images weight and starts fooling the eyes."

Paul Verhoeven on Image and Music

In the April 2007 issue of Post Magazine, Director Paul Verhoeven says:

"I always feel that any image is open to interpretation, but with music you look at it in a very specific way, and if you want that, then music is very helpful."

Director Paul W.S. Anderson on the Importance of Audio

From the August 2008 issue of Post Magazine:

When asked how important audio is, the Director and Producer of several Resident Evil movies, he replies:

"Hugely, and if you make action and horror films, which I've done almost exclusively, you soon realize how vital sound is. It's a cliche, but it's true. Make a scary movie and turn the sound off, it's just not scary anymore. Make an action film, turn the sound off, and you're just watching a lot of fast cuts. So the sound is what makes it an immersive experience..."

Director Alejandro Gonzales Innarritu on the Importance of Sound and Music in Movies

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."