sound of metal
DIRECTOR Darius Marder STARRING Riz Ahmed, Olivia Cooke, Mathieu Amalric ETA 4 September 2020
When Darius Marder started writing his feature debut Sound Of Metal, it came with the blessing of his good friend, Derek Cianfrance. The Blue Valentine director had been working on a docu-fiction, ‘Metalhead’, involving two-piece metal band Jucifer, but never finished it. It piqued the interest of Marder, a co-writer on Cianfrance’s The Place Beyond The Pines. “Derek said, ‘Would you finish this film I started?’”
With Marder re-shaping the story, it now stars Riz Ahmed as Ruben, a drummer whose world collapses when he loses his hearing, putting his relationship with his partner and singer Lou (Olivia Cooke) in disarray. Inspiration also came from Marder’s grandmother, who “went deaf when she was young from taking antibiotics,” he notes. “She found herself trapped between two worlds – the hearing and the deaf world. And she really disintegrated.”
Innovatively using sound to replicate Ruben’s crumbling hearing (“I knew I was doing something that I hadn’t seen”), Marder also uses open captions at points to describe the muffled noises the drummer hears, and he’s hoping that this opens the film up to those in the deaf community. “There’s never been an open-captioned movie as a mainstream release that I’m aware of,” he says. “I’m really excited to challenge all of our ideas.”
GO BIG SCREEN Because the innovative sound design alone demands it.