Dar­ius Marder: ​‘I want­ed to show and cap­ture deaf culture’

Dar­ius Marder’s grand­moth­er Dorothy loved movies, and when she devel­oped hear­ing loss and even­tu­al­ly became deaf she was dev­as­tat­ed. Dorothy became a tire­less cam­paign­er for the inclu­sion of open cap­tions, which would make a world of tele­vi­sion and cin­e­ma acces­si­ble for the deaf and hard of hear­ing. Sound of Met­al is ded­i­cat­ed to her, and stars Riz Ahmed as a for­mer addict and heavy met­al drum­mer who los­es his hear­ing and must adapt to a whole new way of life.

LWLies: I feel for­tu­nate that I was at the pre­mière of Sound of Met­al, because the cin­e­ma expe­ri­ence is so essen­tial to the film’s sound design, and being immersed with­in it.

Marder: Y’know, I had a real­ly inter­est­ing expe­ri­ence in Toron­to. At that screen­ing, we’d been cut­ting, cut­ting, cut­ting; we’d done 23 weeks on the sound mix. It was obscene. And I’d done plen­ty of screen­ings. But some­thing hap­pened to me in the pre­mière with 1,500 peo­ple. I felt the film could be a lit­tle braver, that it wasn’t real­ly around com­mit­ting to a very pur­pose­ful lan­guage that I want­ed. And that result­ed in the film being short­er which is interesting.

There are a num­ber of deaf actors in the film who help Ruben accli­ma­tise to his new life. How did you work with them to make sure their expe­ri­ences were built into the DNA of the film?

I had been work­ing with the deaf com­mu­ni­ty for a long time, but that rela­tion­ship inten­si­fied. It was an incred­i­ble learn­ing process, which I just found so joy­ful. It felt like all my years shoot­ing doc­u­men­tary where you’re in ser­vice of some­thing that you’re invit­ed into, you just feel so priv­i­leged to be able to wit­ness it and learn from it. I had a cre­ative kind of co-direc­tor with­in the deaf com­mu­ni­ty, who is Jere­my Lee Stone, who taught Riz and me sign lan­guage. I asked him to talk to the actors him­self, because it wasn’t just about the ASL [Amer­i­can Sign Lan­guage], it was about show­ing and cap­tur­ing deaf culture.

I invit­ed every­one to always tell me when some­thing felt full of shit – there were so many moments like that, which was great because the film always got bet­ter, always got truer. Lit­tle things you wouldn’t expect, like a com­put­er or TV would nev­er have the sound on in a Deaf house­hold. I had writ­ten a scene where Ruben gets his name sign, and I met var­i­ous mem­bers of the deaf com­mu­ni­ty who said, ​‘That’s not real­ly the way it works. It just hap­pens.’ Hav­ing their involve­ment meant it was so much bet­ter than any­thing I wrote on my own.

We can’t talk about Sound of Met­al with­out talk­ing about the sound design. Could you walk me through the scene at the con­cert where Ruben starts to become aware he’s los­ing his hearing?

Nico­las Beck­er and I start­ed on the sound design well over a year before we shot, but that scene is real­ly cool because one of the things that hap­pened in the edit – and this is the real genius of Mikkel Nielsen – is that this scene comes soon­er in the movie than even I expect­ed from the script. It under­mines your rhyth­mic expec­ta­tions. We expect to be in our nor­mal world for a while. But one of the things about hear­ing loss is that it isn’t expect­ed and it doesn’t come at a con­ve­nient time.

Riz had pre­pared for sev­en months, he’d learned ASL and has these gad­gets in his ear canal that emit white noise, which is hooked up to my phone. At first, they’re just there and Riz doesn’t know what’s going to hap­pen when. So I invit­ed this band Surf­board to per­form at this show, and they’re hang­ing out. I want­ed it to feel just like every­day life, just so mun­dane. And rather sadis­ti­cal­ly I hit the but­ton, and Riz hears this high-pitched ring­ing noise, which is mim­ic­k­ing tin­ni­tus. There’s this real phys­i­cal process hap­pen­ing in that scene.

Then with the sound mix, we had con­tact mics every­where so we could get sound from dif­fer­ent per­spec­tives. We were cre­at­ing this lan­guage of sound, and show­ing that it’s not just a ring­ing, it’s almost like a bub­ble of sound is cre­at­ed around you, with cer­tain fre­quen­cies not com­ing through that bub­ble. It’s not the final des­ti­na­tion of where he’s going, but we want­ed the audi­ence to be trapped with Ruben – even though we’ve actu­al­ly been in his sound per­spec­tive since the first frame. We’ve actu­al­ly been with him, we just don’t realise until that moment. It was amaz­ing to be able to cre­ate that kind of son­ic lan­guage for the film.

Sound of Met­al is avail­able on Ama­zon Prime Video from 12 April and in cin­e­mas from 17 May.