How Riz became a real whiz on the drumsticks
SEEING Riz Ahmed on my Zoom screen came as something of a shock. He looked so . . . normal. He was wearing specs. And his demeanour was thoughtful and polite (we’ve known each other since the earliest days of his career, when Michael Winterbottom’s explosive film The Road To Guantanamo burst out of the Berlin Film Festival in 2006).
The discombobulation over his appearance was because his scorching performance in director Darius Marder’s Sound Of Metal had become seared in my mind since I saw it last year at the Toronto International Film Festival (which I attended from home).
In the movie — Marder’s feature film debut — Ahmed plays Ruben Stone, a punk-metal drummer with Blackgammon, a duo with a fine Olivia Cooke as lead singer Lou.
Ruben has a shock of bleached blond hair. In one scene, he performs in front of a real-live audience, shirtless; his body covered in tattoos including one saying ‘please kill me’.
It’s acting on a Brando-esque scale, so it’s no wonder he has best actor Oscar (and BAFTA) nominations alongside Chadwick Boseman for Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, Anthony Hopkins for The Father, Gary Oldman for Mank and Steven Yeun in Minari.
Ahmed agreed that ‘it’s an amazing thing’ to be nominated; and that he’s ‘pleased personally’. But he’d rather praise be attributed to the film itself, which garnered six nominations, including one for best picture.
The small, indie effort chronicles Ruben’s slow realisation that his heavy drumming — and equally heavy drug addiction — has led to him losing his hearing.
When I mention the ‘d’ word — ‘disability’ — Ahmed rebukes me gently. ‘One of the big takeaways for me, making this film, is that deafness isn’t a disability,’ he said. After seven months of research and preparation, he came to see the deaf community as ‘a rich and vibrant culture, from which many people could learn’.
For the film, he learned to play the drums, worked with a trainer to ‘give me a body’, and attended addiction recovery meetings. He also spent two hours a day gaining proficiency in American Sign Language (ASL). His instructor told him that ‘deaf people will say hearing people are repressed, because we hide behind words’.
The deaf community taught him the ‘true meaning of listening’, he added. ‘Listening isn’t something you just do with your ears. It’s something your whole body pays attention to.’
The 38-year-old old actor from Wembley, now living with his novelist wife Fatima Farheen Mirza in California, said he’d been ‘looking for a challenge’ when Marder offered him Ruben.
His work on big budget projects such as Star Wars film Rogue One and Jason Bourne stretched him, and brought him widespread recognition; but left him feeling ‘restless’, too. ‘I felt like I’d gotten used to a certain way of working, and I needed to pull the carpet from under myself again,’ he said. Go back to the kind of small-budget films that helped make his name: pictures like Shifty, Four Lions and Rage. ‘When you’re not fully in control, when you’re finding your feet, that’s when you dance the best,’ he said. ‘When you’re almost falling over.’
And it was that urge, to not play it safe, that led him to Marder.
The way Sound Of Metal draws you into the world Ruben is experiencing is a marvel. Sound designer Nicolas Becker (whose team were Oscar nominated, too) used innovative techniques to build up the film’s soundscape.
After each take, Becker would approach Ahmed ‘and put a microphone against my chest, and record my heartbeat; or ask me to lick my lips, or swallow, or even blink — so the entire soundscape places you inside Ruben’s experience.’
In addition, audio blockers were placed deep into his ear canals. ‘They would activate them, so I couldn’t hear anything — including the sound of my own voice,’ he said. ‘And that is disorienting. But it gets you listening with your body.’
The film’s a remarkable achievement — not least because ‘it’s miraculous it got made, man’, as Riz put it.
‘We did lose all our financing the night before the shoot started,’ he told me. Marder made some calls and pulled a lot of strings. ‘It was an against-the-odds kind of tale,’ the actor said, with respect. But luckily, some people with bucks heard their cries.
Amazon Prime will release Sound Of Metal on April 12. But UK distributor Vertigo are also keen to show it in cinemas — where we used to sit together in the dark, gazing up at a giant screen . . . remember that?! — hopefully from May 17.