Original-Cin Q&A: Sound of Metal Director Darius Marder on Capturing Deafness on Film

By Karen Gordon

Darius Marder has made a remarkable debut feature film, Sound of Metal, which played at TIFF 2019 and is hitting theatres this week before heading to Amazon Prime. It’s about a thrash-metal drummer, Ruben (played by Riz Ahmed) who is in a duo with his girlfriend, Lou (Olivia Cooke). That is until Ruben suffers dramatic hearing loss.

Ruben is a fascinating character, a recovering heroin addict, a sincere and focused guy whose entire world is built around the constant touring in their mobile home, and who suddenly has it all brought to an abrupt halt. We follow his story through the movie.

Read our review of Sound of Metal

There are many remarkable things about the movie. Ahmed’s stellar performance, the fact that Marder cast only deaf actors in some key roles, and that he represents the deaf community as one that doesn’t see itself as deprived or disabled.

But the aspect of the film that grabbed everyone’s attention is the way Marder used sound to open the audience to experience what Ruben was hearing. As well, the entire movie is closed-captioned, which is not an afterthought but, as it turns out, comes from the same inspiration as the idea for the movie.

Riz Ahmed (left) with Darius Marder

Marder’s rigorous attention to detail is part of what makes this movie astonishing and effective. But it also reflects a filmmaker unwilling to compromise to get this film made.

The determination to do things his way meant that it’s taken him somewhere in the neighbourhood of 13 years to get Sound of Metal made, through developing the story with sometime creative partner, Derek Cinefrance, to co-writing with his brother Abraham, who also did the music for the film. We talked with Marder about his movie.

Original-Cin: This is a movie about a male character who is in a thrash-metal band and who is a recovering addict. But your grandmother was a big influence in you wanting to make it. How did she inspire it?

Darius Marder: My grandmother was not like a grandmother that you’d normally think. She was this extraordinary cinephile, gay Jewish New Yorker who finally separated from my kind of Napoleonic grandfather. And she was forging this life for herself. She dated Grace Paley. She was a photographer and she was an extraordinary artist. She took an antibiotic — not when she was very old but when she was very vital — and went profoundly deaf.

Then she was caught in between these two worlds, the hearing and deaf cultures. She was also an alcoholic and it all kind of descended upon her. She fought the rest of her life for open captions and that’s obviously part of why the movie dedicated to her. But actually, the character of Ruben has a lot of her in it.

OC: So let’s talk about the character of Ruben. He’s a complicated guy. A recovering drug addict committed to his sobriety. There’s a lot of layers to him before you even get into the story.

DM: That’s right. And they’re there from the first frame actually, very purposefully there. And that first frame of the movie (a shot of Ruben behind his drum kit waiting to start playing at a gig) is really an embodiment of Ruben. And one of the I things I was really interested in. I say as a man, but I think it’s a universal experience, but certainly specifically as part of a male energy, is this kind of lurking monster that is waiting, waiting for a little piece of that house of cards to fall and present itself again.

And when I say that, there’s a little bit of a red herring in the movie. My brother and I really worked on this kind of concept. As an audience we think the monster is the loss of hearing. We, as hearing people, are indoctrinated to the idea that that’s what’s scary. But it’s really not.

In this film, that’s not actually the problem. That’s a physical issue. But the real problem was within Ruben before that happened, and it was just sitting there and waiting. And so the whole movie is dealing with this lurking thing, this addiction and yet you never see a drug.

OC: The film really hangs on the performance of Riz Ahmed who is extraordinary. What did he do for the character of Ruben? I understand that it took you a very long time to cast the lead…

DM: He’s extraordinary. It was a four- or five-year casting process. It was very hard. Part of that was because I scared the shit out ever single actor I met because I was really looking for someone — and I met a lot of actors—who was not just up for making a movie but actually were open to a transformative experience. And it was a big ask. It was really a ridiculous thing to do, but it was what I wanted. This movie was like my lifeblood. I wasn’t just making it to make to make it, I really was fighting for an experience on the screen. It’s why I want to do this work.

So, I was looking for an actor who was up for that kind of transformation, who actually was ripe for it, wanted it and was hungry for it and I would commit to it. And I did go through a number of actors who showed their hand that they weren’t up for that and everything crashed down over and over again over years. People started to think I was nuts and they started to think this movie would never get made. But when I met Riz halfway through the lunch I offered him the role. I could see it. I could feel it.

And he really was hungry. He was hungry and willing to be frightened and willing to move toward that fear. Willing to get out of his frontal lobe. Willing to get into a physical space. Of course, there’s the obvious: learning drums over seven, eight months or whatever it was, and learning sign language, actually learning that new language and becoming partially fluent in it, is remarkable feat. That’s commitment. But the commitment went beyond that. The commitment was about opening him up as a vessel of vulnerability for true physical process that might be transformative and in fact was for him. It’s what you see on the screen.

OC: This is your first film. How did you get the confidence to say, ‘This is what I want’ and then refuse to compromise?

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DM: Yeah. I did have confidence in this, because I saw it and I felt it and I know why I do this work. And it’s not for any other reason. I wasn’t going to do it in another way. I wanted something to form this process. That’s what I think vision is. It’s believing in something that doesn’t exist yet.

I’ve been a filmmaker for a long time. My life hasn’t followed normal paths. I don’t know how it is for other filmmakers, but it’s taken me this long in my adult life to make this movie. I wasn’t going to make a movie that was halfway there. And that’s really hard. Just because you have movies you can make along the way that can get financed but might not feel just right. And you have to be willing to say no to those versions. Everything begs you to compromise.

OC: It was also important to you to use deaf actors. Again a remarkable cast from the kids to the adults. But a key role and a key part of the movie hinges on the performance of Paul Raci.

DM: Boy, is he special. All of the deaf cast in the movie are all from deaf culture and that was never a negotiable aspect to the movie, but another one that made it tough to finance. For all the talk of Hollywood about diversity they support it when its done… but not necessarily when you’re trying to make it. It was extremely hard. I was told over and over again to cast. I even talked to Robert Duvall. Look, I love Robert Duvall. Who doesn’t? He’s one of the best actors out there. But not for this role. Because it was impossible.

This is a culture and it has to be represented by people from within the culture. So, I don’t really look at it as representing deaf culture myself. It’s really deaf culture representing deaf culture and the film is invited into that.

OC: One of the things that makes this movie so effective is that you take us inside of Ruben’s head so we can hear what he’s hearing. It’s visceral. Kind of scary. How did you decide to give us that experience and how did you achieve it? I understood that you something like half a year to mix the audio.

DM: That was a 23-week mix. But that was just the mix! The sound journey that we went began a couple of years before we shot, and involved a ridiculous amount of planning and experimentation, and then a merging of sound and picture because they have to be thought of in tandem. It wasn’t like you just shoot this movie and cut it with sound afterwards because the cuts relate to the sound as you notice in the movie.

And that was a very, very deep and deft balance act between it not becoming a gimmick and not pushing an idea too much. It had to feel naturalistic. It was really a difficult and fascinating challenge.

But then: the sound designer Nicolas Becker who is amazing, he came to set while we were shooting which is very unusual and he was mic-ing down Ritz’s throat a lot. What you hear is actually inside of Riz, and in his mouth.

One of the first things that Nicolas and I did was go into a soundless chamber in Paris and it’s a place that sucks the sound out of the air so when you talk its just gone. You have this sensation of everything going inside of you. Like you’re hearing the inside of yourself and so we kind of work on recreating that. We had mics underwater concurrently while we were mic-ing other things and we really pushed the boundaries of how you can experience diegetic sound and omniscient sound.

And we also just forgot the sounds of the movie. Forget about the design but just the normal atmosphere. We worked with hyper-realism of the atmosphere. We did with these multi directional mics so that the cicadas are coming at you and surrounding you and really worked to kind of turn your attention to sound in ways that are specific.

And then we went eventually to Carlos Raygada’s Splendor Omnia in Mexico. It was a sound retreat. It was only about sound, week after week after week which was amazing. Anyone who knows his films understands that he works with sound in a very beautiful and deep way. We were really drawn to that experience. It was a very deep and wonderful journey.

Sound of Metal. Directed by Darius Marder. Starring Riz Ahmed and Olivia Cooke. Open now in theatres nationally, as permitted by COVID restrictions, and is available on the Digital TIFF Bell Lightbox (digital.tiff.net) starting November 20th. It debuts on digital platforms December 4.

Hey! Where you going? Check out Bonnie Laufer’s awesome interviews with Riz Ahmed, Olivia Cooke and Paul Raci.