Reading about actual sound design for No Country For Old Men

For Exercise 1, I chose a film I hadn't seen before because I wanted to approach the sound design with an open mind, rather than either imitating or trying hard not to imitate the original sound design for the film. Having finished the exercise now, I've decided to look into the actual sound design used in the Coen Brothers film - though it's worth noting I still haven't seen the film (it's on my Christmas list).

In an article for the New York Times, Dennis Lim says of the film: "It is not a popcorn movie. Which is to say, it is especially ill-suited to the crunching of snacks or the crinkling of wrappers or any of the usual forms of movie-theater noise pollution". He goes on to say "In some of the most gripping sequences what you hear mostly is a suffocating silence. By compelling audiences to listen more closely, this unnervingly quiet movie has had the effect of calling attention to an underappreciated aspect of filmmaking: the use of sound".

From this extract, I can take that I at least took a similar approach in my own sound design for the clip, which was a minimalistic one.

A block quote from the film's composer Carter Burwell's blog discusses the clip I worked on for Exercise 1:

"There is at least one sequence in “No Country for Old Men” that could be termed Hitchcockian in its virtuosic deployment of sound. Holed up in a hotel room, Mr. Brolin’s character awaits the arrival of his pursuer, Chigurh. He hears a distant noise (meant to be the scrape of a chair, Mr. Berkey said). He calls the lobby. The rings are audible through the handset and, faintly, from downstairs. No one answers. Footsteps pad down the hall. The beeps of Chigurh’s tracking device increase in frequency. Then there is a series of soft squeaks — only when the sliver of light under the door vanishes is it clear that a light bulb has been carefully unscrewed."

This shows how the sound is used to tell the story in the film (and how it can be employed to tell story in film in general): The "distant noise" prompts a response from "Mr. Brolin's character", but we don't see a chair being scraped or who is responsible for the footsteps, but these sounds explain exactly what is happening, yet because we are only experiencing half of it - hearing and not seeing, and so not seeing who is lurking around outside - the tension is built much more effectively.

Often I feel that music is misused in film and television. Some films wouldn't work well without music - Michel Gondry's Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind wouldn't have the same tone or emotion to it; The Lord Of The Rings wouldn't have the same 'hugeness' to it - and others wouldn't work with it - Michael Haneke's Funny Games only uses music to juxtapose different types of characters, and otherwise plays on silence to build an atmosphere.

Burwell clearly took the latter approach. On his blog he writes:

"The film is the quietest I've worked on... It was unclear for a while what kind of score could possibly accompany this film without intruding on this raw quiet. I spoke with the Coens about either an all-percussion score or a melange of sustained tones which would blend in with the sound effects - seemingly emanating from the landscape. We went with the tones."