I puzzled over this for a while until a composer friend explained it to me: if a character opens a door in a film, sound is used to exaggerate turning the door handle, with a long pressurized creak, for example, so it’s larger than real life. Sound is used to link a viewer to visceral experience; to action and mood.
In a live performance you have the living body before you - your own and also the performers’ - guiding your senses at an animal level about what’s happening, how it feels, what’s at stake. This is the power of dance; we decode instinctually.
I want to explore how movement on film can likewise feel visceral, intimate and immediate. Sound is an important part of that, bringing us back to the body, to the feeling of being inside our own bodies.
I’m fascinated by what connects the body in my own filmmaking experiments, and I’m also watching and listening closely for what works in other films. One of the most body-affecting scores I can think of recently was created by Hans Zimmer for Dune; I felt my bones trembling.
Film is undoubtedly a deeply vicarious experience, and a highly-constructed one too; yet it can feel close to you, almost inside of you. This is a part of filmmaking that really excites me.
