Original subtitles

Let's roll.

They had a spec script.

It was a little bit more of a horror movie, the spec that I read,

and, to me, the idea was so good, that idea of family.

The idea of how this family communicates...

Amazing!

...to laying out sand paths so that they can walk quietly.

How far can we take it? How deep can we go?

It was extremely scary.

The biggest challenge for me going in was,

"How are we gonna make this movie as interesting as possible

"without having dialogue?"

When you don't have dialogue in a movie,

you have to bring the world to the movie in a different way.

Then you realize within one or two days of shooting

that actually, the thing I was most scared of

kind of became our superpower, which is...

I started realizing very early on that there was a real power in the room

to not speaking.

We started shooting these scenes and realizing what the barn sounded like,

what the forest sounded like.

All these things really came to life on their own.

Sound design started to become apparent,

how important it would be when we were shooting.

- Th ree! - Th ree.

Action!

It's funny, I remember, the casting and the crew

where most of the crew had to learn how to be quiet because...

- I just needed the major... - Right.

"Well, it's a quiet movie, so we'll just dub it all out.

"We can be as loud as we want."

I was like, "No, no, no, quite the opposite.

"We actually need you to be more quiet than you've ever been on set."

Okay, ready?

It was actually really funny to do it all together.

The actors were learning how to be quiet because we were in the scenes.

- Cut. - Cut.

One of the first days, we were on a bridge, and all of a sudden,

it's almost like a zen experience where you stop and say to yourself,

"I'm just gonna stop, not say anything, not do anything and just listen." Right?

And all of a sudden, you hear water and you hear trees,

and it sounds super heady, but it's true.

Then, sounds started being introduced into the way we shot

knowing full well that we would have to design a lot more.

In the horror genre, there's no more powerful special effect than sound.

To go into Regan's head, we turn the sound off in the movie.

We don't even have backgrounds on.

There's always backgrounds on in a movie.

There's always some sort of ambiance, from a room tone,

to outside, to crickets, to wind.

There's two or three times in the movie where we turn it off completely.

We were so nervous, at least I was.

The first time we did it, I'm like, "I think the speakers are broken."

Then we found the greatest people on Earth for this.

They've done so much incredible stuff.

People might assume that a film that's really quiet and has a lot of silence

is a lot easier to do for sound designers

than a big bombastic wall-to-wall extravaganza.

In fact, the opposite is true.

It's just as hard to do a quiet film, if not harder.

You are naked.

Every little detail becomes a huge thing.

The cool part was, they've done such huge movies

like the Transformers movies and things like that,

that they were so excited to get a movie that was really intimate.

Talk about a risky thing that's unlike anything I've ever worked on.

One of the really interesting challenges was creating contrast.

It's like, "How many different shades of quiet can we have?"

We really tried to create an environment that followed the rules.

The idea that the creatures had wiped out

a lot of the humans and a lot of the animals,

we were really careful to keep it to insects.

We didn't have any songbirds.

It was really fun to play with the different levels

and the different tiers of sound.

It creates a really different psycho-acoustic experience.

When you start taking away sounds,

the sounds you do play become way more powerful.

The foley team, Foley One in Toronto, they did a fantastic job

because this is a really demanding movie to work on.

All those little details are just exposed.

You're gonna hear every single footstep.

It's got to be just right.

That's fun having an audience, too, just hanging onto every little footstep

and being afraid to eat their popcorn in the theater.

Some of the feedback we've been getting from people is kind of interesting.

When they've gotten out of the movie theater,

they've started to hear the world around them in a different way,

and that's just super gratifying.

People who are watching this movie at home,

turn off the dishwasher, shut all the doors and windows,

and really try and create the quietest environment you can.

Sound played just as much a role as it does in Transformers,

but in a completely different way.

You're not fighting with dialogue, that actually, sound is the movie.

It was really cool to see people at the level that they're at get giddy,

like legitimately giddy, about doing this, and that was really fun.

That energy was contagious.

- Cut? - Cut. All right.

Let's clear... Clear Leon...

Okay.

You're not gonna get back in that grass Leon.

Thank you.

That's it for Leon, everybody!

You're good, Leon!

"What noise does the alien make?"

It's a huge problem.

We have spent so much time

just figuring out, "If the alien hates noise, why would it make noise?"

In Jaws, you had the theme, right?

The shark didn't make any noise.

We couldn't do that 'cause we didn't want to rely on music every time.

"How much vocalization do we give to the alien?"

Or, "Is it better not to do any..."

I mean, we've spent years, it feels like, arguing back and forth.

Luckily, one of the benefits of having Michael Bay as your partner is

you get to work with people that he works with on his movies,

and so, our sound team is the guys that work on Bay's movies

who've been doing this for a long time.

They weigh in and have a lot of insight and have done this more than we have,

and we all came to an agreement.

But, it was not easy to figure that out.

In the very beginning, in the initial screenings that we had,

the alien wasn't in the movie because it's all visual effect,

and at the same time, you have to show the movie to people

so that they understand what's happening 'cause they have no way to evaluate it.

So, initially, the alien was screeching and clicking.

I mean, it was super loud.

Some of the screeching, to me, sounded like fingernails on a chalkboard,

and it was just too much and too uncomfortable.

Feedback that's causing the aliens to convulse, that was really loud.

Ultimately, we came to the decision,

"These aliens like a world that's silent."

We have to limit their sounds to the bare minimum.

For A Quiet Place, sound is all about what you don't see.

It really allows the audience to participate in the process

and use their imagination to scare themselves.

I was gonna have a lot more music in the movie.

We were unbelievably lucky to get Marco.

Marco had done some of my favorite scores

like The Hurt Locker and World War Z,

and these things that are big action-y things, but have so much heart,

he does that in music.

He wrote all this incredible music,

and then it was about how much music we used, and when we used it,

and where it was more sparse and where it was more

a character in the film, and, "Do you feel the presence of it?"

I didn't want the score to be wall-to-wall,

I wanted it to let the family do the work.

He was such a great partner in this

'cause he was one of the people who understood what this movie was,

and how to get where we were going.

In this day and age with the phones and everything,

we just don't get a chance to listen.

So then, when you're doing a scene where no one can talk

and they're just walking through the woods,

and you're recording that sound,

you start to think, "Oh, my God, this is really cool."

Like, "People are actually gonna pay attention to this

"rather than just go, 'I get it, it's woods. I get it.'

"And you're like, 'Yeah, but what does woods really sound like?"'