"About That Interstellar Soundtrack..."

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MikeQuell
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"About That Interstellar Soundtrack..."

Post by MikeQuell » May 30th, 2015, 12:34 pm

All These Letters has a fabulous post on the soundtrack for Interstellar. It talks about working with Chris Nolan, the "drama" behind the sound work, and how everyone collaborated to push the bar on what sound in film can be. What I like most about this article is how extremely professional everyone is while at the same time letting you in on the "controversial" thought process behind it all in a very enlightening way.

Source: http://alltheseletters.com/about-that-i ... oundtrack/

Here are some of my favorite moments:
That’s one thing that Chris always shied away from. ‘I don’t want this Hollywood-esque planet’s tonalities. I want it very organic, so that people can latch on to it.’ So, when you go down to the water planet, you hear water laps, you hear wave movement. When you go down to the ice planet, you hear ice cracks and things that we were able to latch on to. He kept his worlds out of that sci-fi tonality, as I call it, and left that to the music.
There were so many things that we experimented with. One of the things, David. This was not an Atmos mix. Chris is a traditional 5.1. So, the power and energy that we generated was out of a 5.1 mix. A lot of people were surprised it was only a 5.1 mix. Yes. In experimentation, we did a special set up that we started experimenting with on “Dark Knight Rises.” We didn’t implement it in that show, but it was started there. Gary would say, it was sketched out as a schematic on a napkin and handed to our engineering staff and we went from there. We tried to change the way we would traditionally do a film. We did a whole different ballgame on this one.
It was pretty cool.

I almost, instead of calling it a 5.1 mix, want to call it a 6.0. That sixth channel is working 100 percent, all the time, except for the silent scenes. We did a whole other ballgame on it. And, we road showed it. Every time we finished the film at the end of the week, we’d take it out to a different theater, whether it was the Grove or Burbank 16 or the Arc Light or Universal City Walk. We played these reels back in that environment. How does it hold up? What could we do different? How can their speaker system get better? This was a good experiment all the way down the road and we all learned a lot.

Interstellar was my 200th film and I said to Chris, ‘We’re venturing in to an area where I had never gone in my 200 films.” He said, ‘No time for caution now, Gregg. Let’s go until it breaks and then we can back out.’
Hans Zimmer is the guy that is more like a director than most other composers. He’s a guy that is clearly communicating on a level with Chris and on a level with us where he sees the colors that we’re mixing. How’s that for a crazy term? He sees those colors and understands that we’re trying to get a different shade than the color than we have and trying to figure out how to get there.
I’m not surprised by it. It’s the 21st Century Internet Generation. It is what it is. I would hope that for an artistic community that we work in and we live in that we can appreciate art for what the art is and what the art is trying to say, versus criticize it because it isn’t perfect in somebody else’s perspective.

Last time I looked at “The Starry Night,” it was not photo accurate. But, that’s why I enjoy van Gogh. That’s why I like van Gogh and I think a lot of people like van Gogh. I’m still going to like van Gogh, even though someone says, ‘That’s not what a star looks like. That’s not what nighttime looks like,’ that’s okay. I kinda like what that nighttime looks like. I can appreciate that for what that is.

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Re: "About That Interstellar Soundtrack..."

Post by joe_griffin » June 3rd, 2015, 11:04 pm

Very cool article. Thanks for posting it. I'll cop to being one of the people who had issues with the sound mix on the film – not that I am going to put my foot down and declare that there is a right and a wrong way to mix a movie, but I didn't find it an enjoyable listening experience at times.Bit I also recognize that Nolan and his sound team had an aesthetic they were after, and they got it.

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Re: "About That Interstellar Soundtrack..."

Post by MikeQuell » June 4th, 2015, 2:56 pm

There were parts I loved and parts I didn't get. Most of the time it was the music choices and how intense they were during scenes that were much more mellow, or more of a downbeat. Those "quieter" scenes (mostly at the house/ranch) had the dialog stomped by the music and it didn't make much sense in regards to storytelling. The scenes where the SFX trumped the dialog during the launch and other "high intensity" moments, I loved. It made sense and made you feel like you were sitting in with them during that moment.

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Re: "About That Interstellar Soundtrack..."

Post by joe_griffin » June 9th, 2015, 10:36 pm

MikeQuell wrote:There were parts I loved and parts I didn't get. Most of the time it was the music choices and how intense they were during scenes that were much more mellow, or more of a downbeat. Those "quieter" scenes (mostly at the house/ranch) had the dialog stomped by the music and it didn't make much sense in regards to storytelling. The scenes where the SFX trumped the dialog during the launch and other "high intensity" moments, I loved. It made sense and made you feel like you were sitting in with them during that moment.

I agree with that. I joked to my friends that anytime Nolan's script got into murky scientific territory they just turned up the music so loud no one could hear the technobabble. I really didn't mind when SFX eclipsed the dialog, as you say - because it was generally motivated. But the music, especially that really weird low-end stuff at the ranch...yuck.

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