Darius Marder was helping his friend, “I Know This Much Is True” director Derek Cianfrance, on a film about a real couple in a metal band. When Cianfrance, with whom Marder would write “Place Beyond the Pines,” realized he’d lost momentum, he offered the movie to his friend. Marder, who won a Los Angeles Film Festival Award for his documentary “Loot,” said he do it only if he could start over, making it fully his own.
“Sound of Metal,” Marder’s feature directorial debut, received strong reviews at the 2019 Toronto International Film Festival and opens in theaters November 20th and on Amazon on December 4th. (He wrote the screenplay with his brother Abraham.)
Nomadic metal drummer Ruben (Riz Ahmed), a drug addict clean for four years, lives in an RV with his guitarist girlfriend Lou (Olivia Cooke). They perform at outrageous volumes until his hearing suddenly breaks down. Lou finds a community for deaf addicts run by a compassionate but tough leader named Joe (Paul Raci), who encourages Ruben to reckon with his future.
“Making him an addict broke the script open because it is a movie about co-dependency and about facing your demons and your own sense of self,” Marder says, adding that his grandmother was deaf and an alcoholic so he was familiar with deafness and deaf culture and also the surrounding issues.
Full disclosure: I’ve been friends with Marder for about as long as this project has been gestating. The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Q. You share with Ruben a relentlessness, a passion, and an identity closely tied to what you do. How much of yourself is in this movie?
I’m absolutely in Ruben and that became more conscious as I wrote. My brother, who understands me better than anyone, helped me allow that in. As a teen, I was very wild and anti-establishment. I was looking for fights. I had a punk phase. I was not doing drugs but was utterly lost and there was a palpable darkness of the mind. I was looking for the edge.
A couple of things saved me. One was children — I started teaching, and that concept of children as healers shows up in the script. I also began what became a 30-year relationship. That sense of being “saved” which you see in the film, that’s what co-dependence is. We find these ballasts in life. You get your life saved but you have this lurking monster that you didn’t necessarily face. And it’s sitting there. I know that feeling really well
Q. The film maintains constant focus on Ruben. Was it tricky creating a first-person perspective?
My brother and I spent so much time walking around, talking this through, making ourselves crazy. We wrote 1,500 pages. But it was going to first-person [perspective] that was the huge revelation. Still, it’s hard always being in someone’s head, especially when a film’s chronological — you can’t cut away, you can’t give the audience any relief. You limit yourself. That took rigor.
I also made it rooted in the present — there are no sound dissolves between scenes. Everything is its own little moment. You never look back and never look forward.
Q. Staying in the present is often vital for addicts.
Exactly. It’s a very important state, and my goal is to indoctrinate the audience in that immediacy and the strength of our desires. The challenge is that he’s clean so you have to feel the addict behavior without ever seeing a drug.
Q. How did you ensure Riz’s descent into deafness was not just an intellectual acting exercise?
My overriding objective is that the experience is visceral. I had custom earpieces designed that blocked sound and emitted a whole range of sounds, so every stage of hearing loss is literally happening to him.
The first time Riz put them in and the audiologist put the sounds on, tears came to Riz’s eyes because you lose more than just a sense, you lose your equilibrium, you lose control. You could see the physical change come over him.
We shot chronologically so his hearing loss progressed in order. I could control this mechanism: first, it was a ringing, then a white noise and Riz couldn’t hear his own voice.
Q. Twice you had other actors lined up for the role, only to have it fall apart. What happened?
I would try to scare actors: if they didn’t want to deal with what I wanted, they weren’t right for it. I would say, “I know you don’t play the drums but you’re going to learn. The band’s show will be filmed with a live audience and I’m not shooting cutaways to make you look good.”
Besides wearing that earpiece, I said they couldn’t just learn their lines in American Sign Language, they’d have to learn the amount of ASL Ruben would know at 4-6 months in a deaf community.
One actor told me he was taking another movie right before mine and he’d just jump from that movie to mine. I already had a film crew on the ground and locations lined up but I walked away. I wanted the commitment. Maybe that’s on me, but that commitment showed with Riz in our first meeting: He was a seeker, he wants to learn and to experience new things.
Q. Paul Raci beautifully conveys all that Joe lost in Vietnam and through his drinking and all he has found and built in the deaf addict community. Why was he the right actor for this?
I refused to cast someone with no connection to the deaf community, which meant saying no to big names. I wouldn’t even take a meeting with Robert Duvall, even though I love him. Paul is a Vietnam vet and both his parents were deaf, so he didn’t speak English until he was around five and he was their liaison between the ASL and speaking communities. You could never get this performance from someone who didn’t have this experience.
Q. Insisting on film instead of digital nearly sank the project. Besides film’s look, why was this so important?
I blackmailed everybody — I said I’d refinance my apartment to pay for it — but the producers were great and ultimately supported it. Most people look at just the raw cost but the most expensive thing on a set is overtime and digital is the biggest reason people go overtime because you can just shoot and shoot.
I love the restrictions film brings. It changes the way a set works and raises everybody’s energy. When you say, “Rolling,” you’re actually rolling film, not doing this crap we do every day on our iPhones. We only went overtime on the last night and that’s how we stayed in budget.
Q. Talk about why you agonized endlessly over the use of captions and the sound perspective, going in and out of Ruben’s head.
It had to feel natural and be immersive but also watchable. It couldn’t be jarring. The dance of the visuals and sound are so complicated. We had to plan beforehand the perspective out for every shot — whether you’d be in his head with his sounds or out wide for omniscient sound. If you overplay being in his head, it’s too much, but we had to figure out what we could get away with. You could never do all that if you didn’t shoot it the right way.
Q. How comfortable were you directing your first feature?
It’s like someone setting a hungry lion out across the plain at you and then saying, “Enjoy yourself.”
Every minute is money, which would suggest you have to be rigid and careful, but if you’re too rigid and careful you get no movie. I enjoyed myself every moment I was shooting — I didn’t feel nerves, I felt natural. I know what I don’t know and I’m comfortable with that. I hire people that I think are better than me. I don’t need to be a better DP than my DP.
I had a deaf creative consultant on the set, Jeremy Stone, and he started telling the deaf actors things that needed to be truer or better than what the script said. Other people asked, “Are you going to let that happen?” But I was happy to let him take the reins there; he was making the movie better.
Q. After earning strong reviews at your film festival premiere, you cut ten minutes out. Why?
It wasn’t about making the movie shorter. I wanted to ensure the audience is never smarter than Ruben but at the premiere I saw how I’d undermined that in a couple of moments. I cut whole scenes, like one where Joe and Lou are talking, meaning the audience knows something Ruben doesn’t. Also, that scene undermined Lou’s character, with Joe telling her what to do when it should be her decision. I also added some scenes back in to build the characters in the deaf community and to give Ruben some history.
It wasn’t me being obsessive — OK, it was — it was me believing in something, it was my vision for the movie.
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