By Daniel Restuccio

The Darius Marder-directed Sound of Metal tells the story of a troubled rock drummer and recovering drug addicgt who is rapidly losing his hearing. Nominated for six Oscars, it took home two golden statues: one for Best Sound and one for Best Editing.

Mikkel E.G. Nielsen

The film’s audience not only gets to see the lead, Ruben (Riz Ahmed) go deaf, they experience it viscerally thanks to deft direction, compelling performances and seamless sound design and editing., Ruben (Riz Ahmed) go deaf, they experience it viscerally thanks to deft direction, compelling performances and seamless sound design and editing.

Sound of Metal is based on a true story that was being chronicled in the unfinished documentary Metalhead. Marder served as editor on that doc, working alongside director Derek Cianfrance. Marder was driven to tell this story, and more than 10 years later it was his feature directorial debut. Also, taken with the tale, Cianfrance, ended up co-conceiving the story with Marder. The screenplay, which Marder wrote with his brother Abraham, earned a nomination for Best Original Screenplay.

To help tell his story, Marder brought on Danish editor Mikkel E.G. Nielsen with only three weeks left to the shoot. “This film was edited in so many different places,” explains newly minted Oscar winner Nielsen, who would work on a laptop running Avid Media Composer while on the road and on a six-core Mac Pro (the trash can model) at Rock Paper Scissors in New York.

“Darius would also have a laptop with the material so he could edit and send me sequences, or we would sit next to each other, working that way,” he says.

Nielsen worked on Media Composer using the SAN Fusion virtual file system, which allowed him to work as if he were connected to an Avid Unity using existing shared storage. He also called on Frame.io and Aspera for Mac for review and approval. Assistant editor Alex H. Liu would also upload the edit to the internal server at Rock Paper Scissors, where they would screen and watch footage.

The film was shot chronologically, with an Aaton Penelope 35mm camera with Sigma Cine lenses on Kodak Vision3 50D 5203, Vision3 250D 5207 and Vision3 500T 5219 stock. Dailies were processed at FotoKem.

We caught up with Nielsen shortly after his BAFTA win and just prior to his Oscar win.  Let’s find out more from Nielsen…

How did you come to work on the film?
I know that Darius is very influenced by Danish movies. The film’s production company, Caviar, is LA-based, but it started in Belgium, so I believe they might have put me on the list. I did ask him why he picked me, and he said the reason was that I was the first editor who told him, “No, that’s not how we’re going to edit it.” He interviewed me and told me how he wanted everything to be, and I listened, and then I asked him afterwards, “So would you like to hear how it’s going be if you edit it with me?” And that worked.

What did you find in the footage that had already been shot? Also, the film has a lot of close-ups. Were there also master wide shots that were tried and rejected?
There was plenty of material and plenty of opportunities. I had the same amount of footage as I would have had on a normal European film. I’m the kind of editor who doesn’t like working on a film while they’re shooting, so it worked out. Dialogue scenes, for example, were shot as wide, medium and close-up. We didn’t have 10 takes, but we didn’t have two takes. I would say we definitely had the material to play around with the scenes. Certain scenes were shot more like a documentary, especially ones showing the deaf community.

Darius has an editing background. Did he structure the shots? Did he choreograph the movie for the edit?
I’m not really sure. I asked him to give me the material and I put together the first assembly without us talking about it. I asked for that because he was 12 years ahead of me on this project, so he knew everything. He edited it when it was a documentary, and he inherited it as a film. He raised it and wrote it and found actors and shot it, so he was lightyears ahead of me.

The only way I could get into this project was by him allowing me to sit with the material alone, watch the footage and put a first assembly together… potentially with a lot of mistakes. A mistake could be the key to something that opens up a whole new world. So that was very rewarding, and it was a way for me to get into the material and at least be able to have a dialogue about structure and story and all these things.

After you started editing, did you have any influence over what was left in the script to shoot?
Not at all. They shot it chronologically, and I started from scene one. The first two or three weeks I only watched the material and selected from it, and then within two weeks, I put the first assembly together, which was 3 hours and 45 minutes long.

You’ve said that Marder encouraged you to experiment and try new things. What are we seeing in the movie that came out of that experimentation?
It’s difficult because you have to see it as a whole, and frankly, you shouldn’t even feel that it’s edited. That was the goal, because if you notice the edits that means that you’ve somehow become aware of the film itself.

The idea was to give you a sonic experience, put you in the head of Ruben, experience being with him, and earn those moments. So when Joe (Paul Raci) asked him, “Do you ever find that stillness?” That moment of stillness is in the last scene. You would feel that he found it, because you’ve seen it, you’ve been with him in that room where he was looking out of the window, sitting, just sitting.

For me, a good edit of a film is when you forget about time and place — you’re just there. You forget how they put it together. Obviously, there are lot of tricks on how to put you in that situation, how to create that language, how to make it work. For example, when Ruben is listening to Lou sing with her dad at the end, and you go into the cochlear implants, how does that become as effective and emotional as possible? Because what if it’s the first time in the film we do it (the implants), and it doesn’t work? If it’s something that we already showed you in the start of the film, then it’s kind of a language or a contract that you and I have agreed is how we can tell the story. So the third time it really works because you don’t think about it; you experience it.

The idea of putting the concert scene up in the start wasn’t scripted. That made it whole for me, editorial-wise, because it made the arc that you have the same image of him sitting as the end shot of him sitting. One minute he is eager, and the other he’s in silence. Just allowing us to have a three-, four-minute music track for such a long amount of time to awaken your senses, to put you on the edge of your seat, where you would say, “If this film for two hours is going to be like this concert, I’m out.” You probably wouldn’t be able to listen to this for so long. So, if you don’t like the music, it almost annoys you, and right when it’s finished, it hard-cuts — that’s the loudest part of the whole film.

Then it opens in the trailer, you start looking, and there’s almost no dialogue in the whole opening section. Ruben looks at Lou and prepares breakfast; he does the smoothie and the air dust. So you start listening and looking at him doing push-ups and stuff. And that’s like a language. Even the scratches on her arms are very, very little. You could also just tell it [the importance of those things] a lot with dialogue and talk about it because it’s important for the end, but we (wanted) you to experience it yourself and notice it yourself.

You mentioned that the first cut of the movie ran almost four hours. What were the notes that you got when you screened that version for the director?
I don’t know because I put him in the edit room on his own so he could watch it. It’s tough because as a director, you are suddenly seeing everything being put together. Of course, that’s not the film, because the film has to be found in the material. So, normally a first assembly is this: You have a film, there might be a structure, there might be issues with the structure, but there’s absolutely no emotion. Those are the things we have to find in the way they look at each other. How do you get in and out of a scene? What’s the balance of other things? Those are the things that create the emotions of the film.

That was probably extremely hard for Darius, which I completely understand, which is why I let him sit with it and take it in. Then we were able to discuss things like what he saw, what I saw, how we were going to approach it. Would you like me to take away all the mistakes that I made? Should we go scene-by-scene and talk everything through?

It was an amazing process working with Darius on this film because he was so open. He was so open to exploring and allowing me to ask all the stupid questions. That’s the dream…  you sit with the material and know that you’ve tried to turn every stone. You might have an issue, but at least we know it’s an issue.

Sound design played a huge role in the film. How do you build a scene that awakens the audience’s senses?
It’s interesting that you can get such powerful storytelling through less sound. To be able to play with it — you can dial it up for information or dial it down for information, but it’s all about information. What do we want to give you in the scene? How do you want to experience a scene? Do you want to experience a scene where you’re like, “What’s going on? What’s going on? I don’t understand what he’s saying?” Or do you want to see it from the outside, hearing what is said, but you understand that he’s not hearing what is said.

So that’s interesting, how to develop that language. How much do we want to tell you, and how much do we want to hold back? How do we find that balance? Then it’s about “awaking the senses” … like that concert scene that not only awakens the ear, but also the eye. You feel present in the scene. With headphones or in a cinema, you are there; you’re sitting right at those drums and experiencing it.

Mikkel E. G. Nielsen accepts the Oscar for Best Film Editing

Then you start looking at things, and you open your eyes and your ears, and little by little, you start sharpening the audience. You, as the audience, have to notice things; you have to be awake. You can’t not be active in this film. You can’t just sit; it’s not eye candy. We’re not just giving you beautiful montages of eye candy, where you can say, “Hmm, that’s nice.” This is much more of an experience, and that’s a physical thing. This is what’s so nice about sound; it’s so physical. We feel it in our stomach.

Were you constantly shuttling scenes back and forth with sound designer Nicolas Becker (who also took home an Oscar)?
No, but in order to know the internal and external and how we treat that, I would try variations, and then Nicolas would work on them. Just to find the language, not to be unnecessarily precise in the scene, but more [figuring out] “How does it work when we do it like this? How long can you be in this world?” What was interesting about working with Nicolas was that he gave me all the “atmosphere” for the film. He doesn’t work with library sounds at all. I had everything in stereo for the whole film, and we could create a blueprint editorially with the sound. I used to be that sound designer working on a Steenbeck!

My approach to sound and picture is that you can only have eight tracks to work with, and if you can’t solve it with eight tracks, it’s because you don’t have the right sound. Then you have to build the sound or make it.  Walter Murch would say that you can have 2 ½ sounds with the image, because otherwise you get confused. As you find the right dialogue, a stereo atmosphere, then you can work with music or source. Then you can play with some effects, like the cochlear sound.

I would export, out of the Avid, the whole section with the cochlear and run it through this equalizer Nicolas gave me called Ircam. Then I would import it again and put it on tracks 7 and 8 and only listen to those. I did this to find out how long can you actually be in that world — how annoying it would be in that world. When does it start to become less about the emotions of the scenes, such as when he meets the dad? And that’s beautiful. Then when you learn that language, you can just cut out to the wide and be in the real world and decide never to enter it again until he walks out in the garden. From that moment, and when he’s with Lou’s dad and Lou, we’re in just a normal film.

Daniel Restuccio is a writer/director with Realwork Entertainment and part of the Visual Arts faculty at California Lutheran University. He is a former Disney Imagineer. You can reach him at dansweb451@gmail.com.