Total Banger
SOUND OF METAL Darius Marder’s dramatic debut brings the noise…
IIthink anyone who hasn’t been through therapy is crazy!” chuckles Darius Marder, the American screenwriter-turned-director. His feature debut Sound Of Metal stars Riz Ahmed as Ruben, the drummer of a two-person industrial-punk band – his girlfriend Lou (Olivia Cooke) is the singer – whose world implodes when he loses his hearing. His career in tatters, the therapeutic soul-searching comes when he’s welcomed into a secluded deaf community.
Rather than adjust, though, Ruben is desperate to pay for cochlear implants to restore his hearing. “It’s the journey of awareness,” says Marder. “The movie asks for you to be in the experience with him. We’re not looking ironically down on him. We’re in it. I want you as a viewer to be as caught up in the desire for the fix as he is. We literally go through the same process. We go through that horror of what he goes through, physically.”
Marder was partly inspired by his own grandmother, who lost her hearing when she was young, but also Metalhead, a never-finished docu-fiction about two-piece metal outfit Jucifer, directed by his good friend Derek Cianfrance (they previously co-scripted The Place Beyond The Pines). “I ended up cutting a lot of that footage,” says Marder, who was given Cianfrance’s blessing to fully fictionalise the idea from scratch.
The film really took shape when he met Ahmed. “A lot of actors are too scared to do this role, even though they want it. And Riz just has courage. He’s a seeker. He wants to grow. He wants to expand and this role required that. He was just ready, hungry and willing to be scared. The guy moved to Brooklyn for seven months to learn the drums. He became fluent in ASL. Have you any idea how hard that is to do?”
Using diegetic sound to replicate Ruben’s ailing ears, Marder also uses open captions to describe the noises he hears. A rarely used technique that’s ideal for deaf people to enjoy cinema, it’s a unique chance to level the playing field, the director says. “Everyone can watch the same movie.” JM
ETA | NOVEMBER / SOUND OF METAL OPENS NEXT MONTH.