From first-time feature filmmakerDarius Marder, the dramaSound of Metalfollows a drummer named Ruben (Riz Ahmed) who, after years of punk-metal shows in seedy bars and clubs, suddenly develops severe hearing loss that, as a result, essentially ends his music career. Not adapting to his new situation well leads his girlfriend Lou (Olivia
Cooke) to take the recovering heroin addict to a secluded sober house for the deaf where he struggles to find his place in his new reality.
During this 1-on-1 phone interview with Collider, director Darius Marder, who co-wrote the script forSound of Metalwith his brotherAbraham, talked about the long road to getting this film made, weaving the music world into a story about the deaf community and addiction, what inspired the decision to caption the film, the exploration of sound, how he approached shooting the live performance sequences, and currently being focused on the creation of his next project.
COLLIDER: This is quite the full length feature debut for a director, so congratulations on that.
DARIUS MARDER: Oh, thank you. Yeah, it’s certainly a big moment in my life, that’s for sure.
What’s it been like for you to spend so many years putting this all together and bringing your vision to life, to now hear how people are reacting to the film and to even have awards buzz going on with it now?
MARDER: Well, it’s very profound. It’s truly profound. I was talking to the team yesterday and when you’re doing press and you make something that people want to talk to you about, it’s really an honor. That’s why we’re doing this work. Hopefully, people see it and have feelings about it. This really was a hard movie to make. Anyone who knows me and has known me for a long time and heard me say that would roll their eyes at the understatement that is. So, it feels very good that it’s hitting the world, even though it’s hitting the world at a very odd time.
In all of this time, you must have had some seriously legit days where you thought this was just not gonna ever happen.
MARDER: Oh, many. I really enjoy process and I enjoy the creative process, which means the writing and the casting and everything. The waiting is hard, and the dealing with industry, dealing with financing, dealing with people who don’t necessarily follow through, or those many times we were close to making this film and it couldn’t happen, or the times that actors said they were interested, but then were actually too scared to do it. All those things happened, and it was year after year after year after year. There were many moments in that time span where people around me truly thought I was crazy, and in a way, I was. If the definition of craziness or insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result, then in fact, I was. But when I actually look at the experience I had and eventually meeting Riz [Ahmed] and Paul [Raci] and everyone else in this film, I wouldn’t trade it for anything.
This story is such an interesting blend between the music world, the deaf community and addiction. When and how did you know that that was the story you wanted to tell and how did you come to weave all of that together?
MARDER: Well, that was hard. That was genuinely difficult. Some of the elements existed right from the beginning, which is to say the music and the deafness was always there. I knew that the story would be that. The addiction piece and the way that they tied in took years of development. What’s fascinating about writing is that we look at the words on the page but we never understand all the words that didn’t make the page that were written. In the case of this, in order to find a character and discover a character and create a character, like Ruben was created, at least for me and my brother, it really took years and we went down rabbit holes. It was the same for Lou. We even wrote Lou’s whole story that you don’t see on the screen. I’m really grateful for all of those rabbit holes because they gave me so much insight. All of the turns that I made that ended up being called wrong turns, they also helped me understand a level of specific intentionality in this film. But it was a deep dive. It was probably 1,500 pages or 2,000 pages of writing to get to a 90 to 100 page script.
What did you learn from talking to the deaf community that became essential for you to get right for the movie?
MARDER: I always knew that I wouldn’t be representing the deaf community or deaf culture or the hard of hearing community. I knew that they would be representing themselves and would gift that to the film. Maybe that’s because of my documentary background but I think it’s just a matter of respect. Everything that you see in the world of deaf culture really comes from deaf culture. Jeremy Stone, who plays the ASL teacher and who was also Riz’s teacher, was also my creative assistant. I really gave him a lot of freedom to direct deaf actors with a level of nuance that I couldn’t possibly understand or have, even to the point where people on my set were surprised and alarmed at how much freedom I was giving him. That was really what I felt was necessary, as it related to a culture that wasn’t my culture.
You also made the interesting decision to caption the entire movie. What made you want to do that and did you know that would actually work?
MARDER: No, I didn’t know it would work and I realized, at one point, that I absolutely had to do it. I struggled with that and what that really meant. And when I say had to, I mean that I had to and was compelled to, for a whole lot of reasons. And when you say captions, you mean open captions, which pertains to a theatrical experience. When we watch something on a platform, we have the option to caption or not caption, and that’s closed captions. But when you go into the theater, films that involve the deaf community or don’t involve the deaf community are never open captioned, and that essentially excludes that entire culture from watching the movie on an equal playing field. If a theater happens to have that technology, then deaf people are invited, but they have to have that and be willing to use that technology. That’s hit and miss. It’s not really fully respectful, in my opinion. Also, my grandmother went deaf. The film is dedicated to her, and she fought her whole life for open captions. That’s the subplot there. That’s part of why I knew I had to do that, but for all the right reasons. To answer your question a little more specifically, it was very difficult because we spent a huge amount of time on captions. Other than my very brave and wonderful producers, most people said, “Do not do that. You’ll ruin your movie. No one will watch it. No one will buy it.” I have to say, not just from my standpoint, but from everyone’s, it was a very brave decision and not one that was welcomed by anyone until we did it.
It seems obvious that this film employs sound in a special way to tell the story. What did that mean for you? What was that exploration and journey like, figuring out how you wanted to use the sound?
MARDER: Oh, it was so incredible, just as a creative exploration. It started, of course, in the writing. My brother and I had so much fun. It was such a rich creative experience leaning into that idea, and then [we] started to communicate that to everyone making this. We started to dive into [the question]: Could we in fact create a cinematic experience that maybe people hadn’t heard before? I’ve been calling it a PoH, or point of hearing. It’s very, very ambitious. It was a very tough sell. First of all, you have to think in terms of finding the right sound team and the right process on set, which is much more involved than a normal sound process. That started years before we shot. I went to France and met with Nicolas [Becker] and we talked through it way in advance of shooting. And then, I eventually talked it through with Nicolas and my DP Daniël Bouquet, and we started talking about how sound and picture can co-exist and how they need to interact. It’s not enough to do sound and do picture and then hope it works. They have to cut together and be very, very specific and intentional, and yet not a gimmick. That’s a really fine line. And then, of course, we started playing around with sound. On set, there was this very rich experience. And then, there was the post experience, editing with my incredible editor Mikkel [Nielsen], who has an amazingly refined ear for sound. We had to do sound and picture at the same time. And then, we went into this 23-week sound mix. Imagine at the end of this entire process going into a sound mix which was seriously long. It was much longer than the shoot or the picture edit. We actually put ourselves in the complete embodiment and emergence of sound, without any distractions of anything else. It was a remarkable experience. I just feel so grateful for it, and grateful that the producers stuck by me with this ridiculously audacious vision.
I love music and I’ve been a concert photographer since I was 15, and I’m hypercritical about how live performance is captured. You did such a great job with that in this film. How did you approach shooting the live performance scenes and capturing that feeling?
MARDER: Yeah, that’s great. I like the way you say that because that’s exactly how I thought about it. Like you, I have a very low threshold for fake music in movies and fake performance, or feeling less performances. The amount of lifting that went into just that one opening concert is kind of embarrassing, almost. It was just ridiculous. Certainly, Riz and Olivia [Cooke] spent months learning how to do that, which was a crazy feat onto itself. What I did is that I really challenged everyone, and not just Riz and Olivia. I said, “Here’s what we’re gonna do. We’re gonna put everything we have into embodying this music and the real world of this. And then, we’re gonna play it live in a club. We’re gonna have one shot at it.” We were shooting on 35mm, so we couldn’t just roll, and we shot it without cutaways. One of the reasons that performances feel so dead, a lot of the time, is that the way you would normally shoot it is that you would shoot Olivia singing and Riz would be pretending to play drums in the background, so that you can mix the separate parts. And then, you’d film Riz and Olivia pretending to sing. That’s not what we did. Every single take was a live take. The reason for that is exactly what you said. You would not feel that energy, if that weren’t the case. It’s a palpable and a real thing, and that’s because it really was real. It was sink or swim, put everything you’ve got into it with no safety net, just like life.
After spending so much time working on one film, how do you move on from it? Have you already jumped into thinking about what you might want to do next?
MARDER: The film is so much about acceptance and the impermanence and letting go. It is intense but it’s wonderful that it will live on its own without me now. That’s what it should do. I am really deep in a new project and I really live for that space. I really live for the place of creating something and the struggle that is. Frankly, it’s saving my life right now, in the sense that this is a hard time for everyone. There aren’t any external joys that we’re getting to have, in terms of social interaction and the rest of it, so that process really is my ballast and always has been. And so, while this movie is near and dear to my heart and will always be, in a very special way, it’s wonderful to be engaging in a new project. It’s wonderful, in an awful way.
Is that new project something that might surprise us? Will it feel very different from this?
MARDER: Yeah, it will, and yet I would guess that it will have connective tissues. That’s an interesting thing, the way you feel and what draws you to stories and to cinema. I think that people will really recognize my fingerprints in this new project. Sincerity and really real, emotional, cathartic work is at the heart of what I want to do. I find myself drawn to it, over and over and over again. I can’t imagine that it will be different. I think it’s fascinating. I don’t actually know exactly how different it will feel. It certainly is very different. It will be a different scope but it will probably have a very palpable energy.
Sound of Metalis currently out in theaters, and available to stream on Amazon Prime Video December 4th.
