Original subtitles

They used to be all these rules.

You're not supposed to write for clarinets because they had the vocal range.

Well,

if you.

I don't think I sound like a clarinet.

I don't think I sound like a clarinet.

so I think.

It's just just just be a little bit mindful.

I mean, a lot of these rules about how we're supposed to

circumnavigate dialog come from the days before,

you know, I have the picture running when I'm writing

and I pop the dialog up and I can see if I can understand every word.

You know, if they come from the time before pick up, people actually had,

you know, they had a viola if they were lucky.

And but they couldn't, you know, they couldn't sink it.

It didn't matter their piano playing to the dialog.

It wasn't until they unleashed the orchestra that they found out that

it's all a bit

loud and a bit, you know, stepping all over the dialog.

Most screenwriters, if they're any good, will pick just the right words

and just the right amount of words to get that story across.

So as a composer, you got to do the same thing.

Don't pick too many words.

Don't pick the wrong words.

It's just, you know what?

What's what's the story you're trying to convey right now.

And it doesn't matter

if an actor is speaking or if it's a well, it doesn't matter if it's a car chase,

because nothing new can happen till the car chases over anyway. So.

And nobody can hear anything other than the roaring of cars.

you know, look, it's back to the same argument.

All the same thing I've been saying all along.

Be mindful of the story.

So if you're getting in the way of the story

which is being told by the character, you're doing something wrong.

if you are on story, if you just stick with story,

stick on story, but that's your safety net.

You know, it doesn't matter that you've just written

the nicest and most beautiful piece of music of your career.

If it interferes with the story,

then it chuck it,

throw it in the trash.

You know,

the Sherlock stuff is actually strange because it was

it was a bit of an oopsie.

Not having everything this close, recording everything this close,

and not giving a perspective so that it became really tough.

And, you know, on the dubbing engineer and you just want to have real masters

working it, because,

quite simply, I think it's, it's not the size

of the orchestra or the amount of noise you make that gets in the way.

if your dialog is close, if your character is close to you

or whatever, unclear.

And you make your orchestra in the right way.

Perspective, it's just as effective as turning the volume down. So,

I think a lot about

the perspective of the scene, you know, where I want to have

the players placed in relationship to the,

to the actors in a way.

But it's not necessarily

about volume.

It's it's about perspective.

So if you can make sure that

your orchestra or your musicians aren't further away, your

your ear will automatically go to the the clear, closely miked thing.

I mean, you know, just it's

you're about nine milliseconds away from me right now.

You know, you're not in real time because of the distance between the two of us.

So if I recorded Abbey road an hour

and any of the whole that I like recording at, you know, that's a

fair distance between the orchestra and,

and where the mics get hit, you know, so, that's an automatic thing.

And then I can go

and push things further away by adding, you know, adding more room.

And, and, you know,

very quickly you actually lose the sense of how close things are.

And, and the other nice thing, of course, is

when you have mics farther away, even in a dry room,

the, the

air absorbs the high frequencies, so there's less of a natural, beautiful

roll off that happens and that just, you know, lets the voice through.

So if you record everything really close and otherwise

you do not have that natural roll off

like some people might have done in Sherlock Holmes.

yeah.

You're gonna land yourself in a world of trouble.

Sound has changed, you know, it's we're not in.

And the mono world where it comes out of one little speaker anymore.

And you do have to sort of you have to make a decision

at a certain point about how you're gonna approach things.

I mean, I find this this happens to us on the Chris Nolan

movies all the time where,

we get

berated for the music being too loud in interstellar

that you can't hear the dialog and and people keep forgetting

Chris is not only the director of this film.

He's the writer of the film. It's his dialog.

He could do with it what he wants.

And if sometimes he thinks that the music

creates, you know, creates

a better narrative or explains

or says something that he prefers to hear

notes as opposed to words, then you know, he can do this.

But the point is.

Don't be shy about

being, you know, being ballsy on the dialog as well.

The it's a huge big screen.

And you, you hope that you're going to have a great, huge, wonderful

sound system to listen to it on all you can go the other way and you can say,

but I'm just going to go and write for the worst

cinema experience I can possibly think of, which is some screen,

but all the speakers are blown except for the left hand corner tweeter.

Aim upwards.

Hope that the hope that this movie is going to get shown

only in cinemas, where the sound is wonderful

and if the sound isn't wonderful, don't blame us.

We really did do a good job and we really sat there

and you know, we weren't haphazard.

We're not random.

We spend an enormous amount of time making sure that you can hear

everything you're supposed to be hearing,

and therefore I'm going to be really, really cautious.

But my attitude, as they all know, we're working really, really hard

and we're trying to make it sound really good

and we're trying to make it comprehensible.

And yeah, the last thing you want to do is not let people

have the information, that, that they need.

But not all the information is always conveyed in dialog.

It's not necessarily that that it's always just dialog,

that that gives you the right information.

Sometimes it's sound, sometimes it's music, sometimes it's silence.

This is not part of the game.

You try to figure out an interesting way of

how to coexist with the dialog, how to be quiet.

I bet you that a lot of people who go, oh my God, it's a dialog scene.

They're going to go and write the dialog.

All I'm going to do is be like some pad underneath

the dialog doesn't have to be that can be something really interesting.

It's it's teamwork.

I mean, it's it's it's you can't just say, oh, it's going under dialog.

I mean, if you're dealing with an actor

with a soft voice, I'm not a very strong voice.

Yeah.

It's going to be probably a little bit more problematic than if

if you're dealing with Jack Nicholson or just like, you know,

as somebody who projects somebody who really knows how to do it,

and then it really does become teamwork as well.

The circumstances. Okay.

I'll give you, great example.

Dark Knight Rises,

we have a scene between Batman and Bane,

and they're having a big showdown.

And it's right in front of a waterfall,

you know, visually perfect.

But they're both wearing masks, and it's in front of a waterfall.

So there's a lot of a lot of the spectrum has been covered,

you know, and, you know, and,

Chris

is absolutely the treatment and shooting the scene

that way.

and, you know, and,

and trusting us and the sound department, etc., to go

and dig the dialog out and make it comprehensible.