Director James Gray Emphasizes Sound as an Opportunity.

In the Nov/Dec 2022 issue of Post Magazine, Director James Gray (Armageddon Time, Ad Astra, The Lost City of Z) mentions audio when asked generally about opportunities in post-production:

"The thing about production sound is you can never reproduce all the magical little inflections of the actor on the day. [snip] Your performances have a greater authenticity."

"Dealing with sound and the mix is my favorite part of post.  Sound is half the experience and underrated, and I love the way a certain sound effect or an ambient track can change the whole mood of a scene.  [snip] It's how we really reach the audience subconsciously.  The audience is tremendously educated and advanced when it comes to visuals, maybe because of videogames and because it's a more obvious form of communication.  [snip] But I think our ears and all the audio processing is our biggest stealth weapon to get to your soul."

Sound Designer Christopher Boyes on Mixing 'Pirates of the Caribbean'

Some interesting quotes on the sound of Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales in the June 2017 issue "Post Magazine" from Re-Recording Mixer, Supervising Sound Editor, and Sound Designer Christopher Boyes:

"It's like a sonic dance.  You have to keep the momentum going, keep the emotion going with the music, and come in and out with the effects while constantly protecting the dialogue.  That is job number one."

"If I'm putting in a sound and it's not propelling the story forward, then it doesn't have a place.  Our editorial team supplies me with a tremendous amount of wonderful sonic assets but at the end of the day, more than 60 percent of them don't make it into the mix.  Once the effects become part of the entire experience they really get held to a very high standard as to whether or not they raise the track."

"I figure out which components of the ambience are actually complementing the music or the dialogue. The choice is scene specific.  If we are out on the ocean we have to have a little bit of wind, a sense of the ocean, a sense of the rigging and the sails, and the creaking ship.  You don't need all of that all of the time.  It's this constantly evolving landscape of sound effects that are folding in and out. Then for the big action sequences, all of those backgrounds disappear."

For action scenes, "[I will] poke the hard effects in and out, always with the notion of maintaining clarity on the track in an overall sense."

Working in 100-foot increments (about 1 minute), "we go through it an say, 'Do you hear that line?'  Are we hearing enough ocean?  Are we hearing enough of this or that?'  We challenge each other, and that is when we really fine-tune the mix."

Writer/Director Darius Marder on "Sound of Metal"

... artful approach to blending sound, cinematography, editing and production design ...

... use sound and its relationship to emotion.

... use sound design to create a point of view ... putting the audience inside the character's head ...

... developed ways to allow the audience to 'hear' through the character ...

"Deafness is not silence.  It's a different way of experiencing sound and vibration."

"We are constantly playing with the dichotomy of omnscient sound and perspective sound."

Pearls of Wisdom from Ridley Scott and Warren Beatty

Several mentionables in separate interviews with Director Ridley Scott and Director/Actor Warren Beatty in the December 2016 issue of Post Magazine:

Scott:  For me, if you didn’t get it in the camera, you’re going to have serious problems and issues in post. You can’t save a movie in post, no matter how many visual effects you stuff it with.

The phrase "we'll fix it in post" gets tossed around a lot, but there's just only so much that can be done on the post-production end.  Try your hardest to make things right in production.  But how does one know what's right in production?  Experience, wisdom, expertise, and clarity of what's to be accomplished — Scott discusses this later in the interview:

Scott:  If you know what you’re doing you don’t need to spend all that time... For me, speed is good. It stops you over-thinking things.

Sounds like he's done plenty of experimentation, and often he knows exactly what he wants and how to achieve it, no more no less.  Laser focused efficiency.  On the flip side, Warren Beatty mentions how unplanned spontaneity can also be beneficial:

Beatty:  A film never turns out the way you first envision it. And you hope it doesn’t, because it gets better as you go along — or it should... I had all these initial ideas in mind, but sometimes you do your best work when you don’t have anything in mind and it just happens when you’re thinking about something else.

On watching and showing their work:

Scott:  I never watch any long-form version of my films till we have it all cut and put together. So you’re a virgin and you watch it fresh.

When creating, try to experience it with a first-impression mentality so you can critique and improve it properly for your audience.  Do not let your familiarity with the material equate to clarity of the material.  Beatty talks about another aspect of immediacy:

Beatty:   I don’t like to show a film before it’s ready, because with my films, they only get ready at the last minute. To quote Cocteau, ‘A poem’s never finished, it’s just abandoned,’ and that’s how I feel. I like showing it but not to people who then have to decide what they think of it. That’s dangerous, and you only have one immediate response.

When asked his opinion on music and sound being half the movie, Beatty responds:

I wouldn’t say half. I’d say more like 95 percent. (Laughs) It’s just so important and I choose all the music myself.

Alejandro González Iñárritu on the Importance of Sound in Movies

In an interview in the January 2016 issue of Post Magazine, Director Alejandro González Iñárritu provides his thoughts on the importance of sound in movies:

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. So I spend a lot of time looking for just the right sounds and textures for my films...

Walter Murch and The Search for Order in Sound & Picture

In the April 1998 issue of Mix Magazine, an article on the Godfather of Sound Design Walter Murch entitled "The Search for Order In Sound & Picture" is a great summary on his unique and over-arching views of aural theory and craft in movies.  Murch's approach has proven influential and thought-provoking to an entire industry, and there are just too many insights to post.  Instead, here's a link the article itself, a must read for everyone in Sound Design and Filmmaking.

http://www.filmsound.org/murch/waltermurch.htm

Randy Thom Interview, April 2005

In the April 2005 issue of Film & Video Magazine, there's an interview with Sound Designer Randy Thom called "What Randy Thom Hears."  Here are some quotables:

In an action sequence, the impression you want to give the audience, typically, is that they’re hearing 50 things at once — people screaming, gunshots, explosions, the score, etc. But if you actually play all of those sounds at an equal volume, it turns into incoherent noise. The trick is to decide what you want the audience to focus on and use various audio tricks to allow them to focus on those sounds to the exclusion of everything else. Sometimes it’s as simple as raising the volume on the thing you want them to focus on and lowering the volume of everything else. Sometimes you change the tonal character of the principal sound and what you want to be the background sounds. If you do it artfully enough, the audience gets the impression that it’s hearing everything all the time. But if you analyze it, what you’re hearing is a carefully orchestrated changing of focus from moment to moment, from this to that.

In reality, everything that we hear in our environments has an emotional effect on us.

...when you’re a filmmaker and a sound designer, you should be thinking about the story and about using sound in the smartest possible ways to help tell the story and not be obsessed with 5.1 and 7.1 and all that. Because I would, and most people with a brain would, rather watch and listen to a great movie in mono than a thoroughly mediocre movie in 20.1 if such a thing existed. All of that stuff, being able to pan sounds around the room and having lots of subwoofer, is the icing on the cake. And first you have to get the cake, and too many movies these days don’t start with a very good cake.
 

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...

Danny Boyle on Sound and Music for Trance

In the May 2013 issue of Post Magazine, Director Danny Boyle comments on the importance of sound and music for his latest film, Trance:


"POST:  As usual, the sound and music are also key elements in this film.

BOYLE: “They’re hugely important to me as a filmmaker. I actually believe — and we don’t realize this as an audience — that it’s at least 70 percent of a film, if not more. If you have bad sound, any movie is unwatchable, and if you turn the sound off on any film, most are also unwatchable. They just don’t work. It’s extraordinary, and sound recordists often get treated so badly on sets, even though the audio is so vital. But if you have a film with bad visual quality, you can get away with it.  In fact, your eye adapts quite quickly.  28 Days Later, for instance, was a very rough-looking film deliberately, and it didn’t faze anyone.  But there’s no way around bad sound. If you can’t hear dialogue and so on, it’s a disaster.  The opposite side is just how effective a film can become when you have really good use of sound..."