‘Sound of Metal’ reminds its audience about power of silence

Chasing a dream often leads to a sacrifice – an understatement for a heavy-metal drummer who loses his hearing.

The Amazon Studios drama “Sound of Metal” tells the heartfelt story of Ruben (Riz Ahmed), a drummer for a rock band who abruptly loses his hearing while performing gigs with his girlfriend and lead singer Lou (Olivia Cooke). The film is up for six Oscars at the 93rd Academy Awards on April 25, including Best Picture and Best Actor in a Leading Role. Writer Derek Cianfrance, who’s also nominated for Best Original Screenplay, said the story is loosely based on his own experience of playing the drums and consequently developing tinnitus in his late teens.

“One of the things that’s inspired me is always some sort of trauma, whether that’s emotional or physical,” Cianfrance said. “Those traumas in my life have always become the things that I’ve chosen to write about. It’s never really a choice.”

[Related: Alumnus’s Oscar-nominated animated short explores social issues, human history]

Initially, he said he wrote a 10-page narrative-type documentary about an actual couple who started a heavy metal band named Jucifer that traveled across the country playing gigs. However, he quickly realized there were too many limitations to creating such a film, including having two people play fantastical versions of their real lives. Cianfrance said that was the moment when he reached out to friend and director Darius Marder to take his story to the big screen.

Marder worked on the film for two years before producer and alumnus Sacha Ben Harroche was invited to work on it. As one of the two producers, Harroche said he had an expansive range of responsibilities from pre- to post-production. In addition to casting and script breakdown, Harroche said he also worked with a foley artist in Finland, an editor in Denmark and a sound mixer in Mexico. Despite taking only 30 days to shoot, Harroche said every detail of the film was created with authenticity and passion – especially from Ahmed.

“Seven months before the shoot, he started intensively doing physical training every day, drums every two days and signing almost every day,” Harroche said. “We created earbuds that create white noise that makes you deaf when wearing them. He was wearing those for the first week of the shoot. … He could barely walk because you lose your balance.”

In addition to Ahmed’s commitment to his role, Harroche said the production team was persistent in giving the deaf community a chance to portray themselves in the film and ensured that most hearing-impaired characters were played by hearing-impaired people. For the role of Joe, Harroche said they rejected numerous famous actors and chose Paul Raci – who is nominated for Best Supporting Actor – because of his service to the deaf community as an interpreter, a strikingly similar job to his character’s in the film.

Production sound mixer Phillip Bladh, who is also up for an Academy Award for Best Sound, said what continues to make this film extraordinary is the detailed work put toward sound. Bladh said Darius and supervising sound editor Nicolas Becker spent 10 months planning each shot’s sound before filming. As the production sound mixer, he said his biggest responsibility was to record the set’s audio when they were rolling, a task that proved to be a challenge given all of the sounds in the film were played in real time.

[Related: Alumna’s film ‘The Mole Agent’ provides heartfelt look at living in a nursing home]

“The beginning of the metal when they’re playing is actually our two actors playing for real,” Bladh said. “The venue set up the mics on the drum set, on the vocals, on the guitar cab. … From there, it was sent to me. … What I ended up doing was also putting plant mics … so we could record kind of the sound of the room and maybe some of the audience.”

But before the intricate audio layering, Harroche said he fell in love with the film when reading Ruben and Joe’s final scene together, in which he realized one of the themes of the story was self-alignment and that everything someone is looking for is within themselves. He said the film gave him an opportunity to produce a story that might be very foreign to its audiences, as many viewers may start the film ignorant of deafness and finish with learning about the hearing-impaired community. Although this film also depicts sensitive topics such as drug addiction, Harroche believes the main theme viewers should be taking away is a lesson to live in the present instead of constantly grabbing at the future.

“Silence in movies doesn’t really exist – they create silence,” Harroche said. “(In the last scene), we went with pure silence. We wanted the audience to hear itself to realize they’re not sitting still.”