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Q&A with Darius Marder and Riz Ahmed

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The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of Sound of Metal.

The character of Ruben has such a distinct physicality. Can you both talk about the process developing the physical look of the character?      

Darius Marder: Riz and I set kind of a high bar for what this drummer’s body was going to look like and what Riz wanted for that, which was one aspect of the physicality. We referenced this drummer Zach Hill. Zach Hill has a very specific body and you [Riz] where going after that… I remember where you put that bar and I thought “good luck, buddy,” and you just went at it with your trainer. The physicality of Ruben is super important not just so people can see Riz’s abs, but because Ruben is regimented. Ruben needs rhythm and walls around him to survive. So that’s an essential aspect of who he is as a character and his addictive nature. It’s part of how he’s trying to keep himself on the wagon. The tattoos were another aspect, and they were a very deep dive. There’s a lot of references in there to punk culture and its history, like “Please Kill Me.”  A lot of those tattoos have to do with his relationship to Sean Powell, who is the drummer of a band called Surfbort. This kind of goes to the heart of how we approached everything in this movie, which was to try and draw from things that felt real and exciting and connected to the heart and spirit that we were after. Sean Powell is an incredibly generous soul and was a heroin addict. He has this wonderful sense of humor that I think he wears that as a survival mechanism. He really introduced that to us during the research process.

Riz Ahmed: Yeah, the dark humor within the punk music scene was so important. Ruben is someone, like Lou, who is trying to construct his identity, as many of us do. But he’s doing it very proactively—he’s dying his hair blonde, he’s defining himself with all these tattoos on his body, and this is who he is. This guy, his life is music, he lives in an RV with his girlfriend, tours America, that’s what he does. So he has a clear but almost brittle sense of who he is, a very clear attempt to define himself. It was important to have that as a starting point. He’s someone who very much has ownership and construction of his identity. That’s important because by the end of the film the journey he’s going on is one of realizing that you can’t control anything in life, least of all who you are or who you think you are. We thought it was really important for there to be a visual transformation of the journey of the character that is almost a stripping back of some of these masks and armor to get back to a place of simplicity and nakedness and to the core of who Ruben is outside of his labels.

DM: When you say almost naked, it’s funny because you are almost naked in the beginning of the movie, and at the end of the movie, you’re not. Literally. And yet it’s an inversion. I think that’s very well-spoken. Because this is very much a journey about shedding those trappings of identity.

Ruben is regimented. Ruben needs rhythm and walls around him to survive

The use of captions in the film is really innovative. At first the audience isn’t aware that you’re setting up a convention and getting us used to the captions so when Ruben starts to become fluent in ASL, the captions seamlessly merge into that and we understand. But in the scenes where he doesn’t understand, we don’t get the captions. Can you talk about including that element?

DM: It became clear to me when I was setting this movie up that we could not make a movie about deaf culture and not open caption it. First and foremost, above and beyond any intellectual and artistic aspects of the captions, which there are in the movie, that’s the most important thing. We all have to question why it is we don’t open caption every movie in a movie theater. That’s very different than closed captions. People mix up the two. Open captions mean they’re burned in and everyone sees them. Closed captions means it’s an option. You can turn them on or off, like we have on this talk. And like we will do on the platform when this is released on [Amazon] Prime. I’d love all versions of this movie to have burned in captions, but in fact it’s not really a good thing to do for the deaf community. That’s something I’ve learned in this process. It’s because they already have their built-in settings. So to have burned in captions means you’re actually taking that control away from that community. On Prime, you’ll have options. I would say that I encourage people to watch it with the captions, for the very reasons that you just said. Open captions is a whole discussion. Frankly I think that as long as we don’t open caption movies, we’re essentially closing the door to deaf culture. That’s a huge world, a lot of people we’re closing these movie theater doors to, even if we have closed captioning in some theaters. It’s not really fair. It became clear to me that the film should be open captioned and then that became this total dive itself. It’s very intentional. Even the title of the movie. Sound of Metal, not “The Sound of Metal.” That’s not a caption. The captions are very important to me and they took a lot of work to get even the descriptions of sound right.

I’m curious if Riz orchestrated anything physical to restrict his hearing. The way he reacts to not hearing what is being said around him is so authentic. 

RA: Darius and I discussed this and we landed on the idea that the approach to Ruben’s hearing loss should be explored by us as filmmakers in an emotionally-led way. That would be our access point into this character and into this story. It’s not through our lived experience but being able to relate to him emotionally. What that meant was, when Ruben feels that his deafness is a loss or a lack or a disability, we use auditory blockers, which are customized hearing aids that are placed deep in the ear canal and placed on a white noise setting. When they do that, it blocks out everything. It blocks out the sound of your own voice. And once they were in, they were in for the day and they weren’t easy to take in and out. So we’d communicate on set with pen and paper. And that is when Ruben thinks the deafness is a disability. It’s disorienting to him and cutting him off from himself in the world. However, there are other sections of the film where Ruben starts to realize that deafness is not a disability, it’s a culture and a way of being and can be an invitation as a way to connect more with others and himself than ever before. In those situations, we didn’t use the auditory blockers and it was kind of irrelevant at that point because we were communicating on and off set with the deaf cast in sign language. It was an attempt to inhabit some of the disorientation that Ruben was feeling by losing his hearing.

DM: And to ground it in a version of reality. Obviously, there’s no way to perfectly simulate that, but take for instance that moment when you first hear his tinnitus in the movie. Riz didn’t make it up, there was actually something happening that he was responding to; there was a literal tinnitus in his ear that he then had to contend with, and it’s enough to make anyone go crazy. It was really a meta experience that way.

Q&A with Jake Gyllenhaal, Rene Russo, Dan Gilroy, Bill Paxton, and Riz Ahmed

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The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of Nightcrawler.

How did you come up with this idea, and learn about this world?
Gilroy: The original idea came when I was exposed to the world of Weegee, the New York crime photographer. He was the first person to put a police scanner in a car, way back in the 1930’s. I just loved his photographs. And I thought it was a very interesting idea. And as it turns out, Joe Pesci did a movie on a similar subject called The Public Eye. When I moved to Los Angeles, I heard about the modern equivalent of Weegee, which are these “Nightcrawlers” who drive around at a hundred miles an hour with a dozen police scanners in their cars. As a screenwriter, this struck me as a very vibrant, kinetic world that I’d never seen before. And as interested as I was in this world, it didn’t really come together until the character of Lou plugged into the picture. So that’s when it actually became more of a character study – as opposed to the study of a world – in spite of how interesting I thought that world was.

Lou’s hunger, his drive, his ruthlessness, mimic that of a wild animal.

Can you discuss how you approached the character of Louis?
Gyllenhaal: Very early on, Dan and I were talking over the character and how we saw him. And Dan said to me, “I see this as a success story,” and I loved that— it was just brilliant to me. And he went on to describe how even though Los Angeles is a huge metropolis, it’s also surrounded by areas that are completely inhospitable to people: Deserts. Mountains. Ocean. And at night the edges of the city just fall off into blackness and nothingness. Wild animals come down from the mountain ranges and they infiltrate the city, scrounging for food. And I remarked that Lou was like a coyote, and he just said, “Yes, perfect!” And we went from there. I felt like Lou’s hunger, his drive, his ruthlessness, mimic that of a wild animal. I wanted him to be literally and figuratively hungry—I wanted him to walk into a scene, and to just to eat up whoever was playing opposite me, to drive through them until he got what he wanted. To not really hear what they’re saying, to just have my own agenda. And when you’re hungry, you only have one agenda; it’s primal. So that’s how it all started.

Ms. Russo, could you talk about becoming involved in the film?
Russo: Well, it helps to be married to the director! And he told me he was going to write a part for me, and I said, “Ok,” but thought nothing of it really—I mean, it’s hard to get a movie made, particularly one like this. So he gave me the script, and I thought it was brilliant, but I remember saying that the female lead needs some work! But you know… it didn’t. It took me a long time to discover Nina, because I’m not by nature a cutthroat person. So I didn’t know at first how to get a handle on her. But if I do ever cross moral boundaries, it’s usually because I’m afraid. Or I’m desperate. So once I found that, I was good to go with her. But it took me a while to find that.

Mr. Ahmed, can you talk about becoming involved, and getting to understand the character of Rick?
Ahmed: Well, I was in LA randomly for something else, and my agent called me and told me I had to meet Dan Gilroy. So we met for a juice or something (did I mention I was in LA?), and just went over the part. And he said to me, “Look, I’ve got this part, it’s a good part, but I don’t think you’re right for it at all.” And that really took the pressure off, I can tell you! When you know you already don’t have the part before you’ve started talking about it, that takes the pressure off. But he told me a bit about the character, and I remember one insight in particular that stood out, since it was so smart. He said that the character thinks like a three-legged dog. He’s so used to getting kicked he thinks it’s mealtime, when someone hurts him. So with that, and with the knowledge that I was expected to completely fail this audition, I just went for it without any anxiety at all!
Gyllenhaal: And of course when he came in, he was completely convincing. He just blew away everyone else we had been looking at. It’s amazing, the transformation he went through.

Mr. Paxton, can you talk about Joe?
Paxton: I just loved the script. The story is original; the characters are very well drawn. When I met Dan, we had a great conversation, and I knew I had to get involved in this. You don’t see movies like this getting made, frankly. This was an original film, and I think it’s a success purely for that reason. When I was reading the script for the first time and I got to the climax of the film, I didn’t see it coming at all, which is a rarity and a real credit to Dan.

Mr. Gilroy, can you talk about the score? It really sets the tone for the film perfectly.
As Jake mentioned earlier, we approached this as a success story. Not to celebrate what’s going on, but to highlight the fact that Lou sees this entire experience as way to achieve success. If you start on someone who is looking for work and end on that same person running a thriving business, maybe a question pops into your head: Maybe the problem isn’t Lou (although Lou is certainly a problem for other people in the film). Maybe it’s the society that creates and rewards Lou. When I discussed the score with James Newton Howard, we wanted to do a counterpoint, subversive score. We’re going counterpoint to everything you’re watching. Every time Lou does something wrong, we’re celebrating it. The scene where he steals the bike, there’s a little score that might fit into a kid’s movie! For this movie in particular, the score carries a lot of weight. It’s pushing against all of our natural inclinations to judge Lou. Which runs counter to a lot of scores that serve to pre-digest and underline the intended emotions of a scene… “In case you weren’t picking up that something bad is going on, we’re going to put insane string music to mirror the inner mind of the character.” And I think it’s a really brave score for that reason.