Sound Of Metal

DARIUS MARDER CO-WROTE the Oscarnominated screenplay for Sound Of Metal, in which Riz Ahmed’s drummer suddenly loses his hearing and struggles in the aftermath. The result is one of the year’s best films, a meticulously constructed depiction of one man’s battle with the five stages of grief. Here, he talks us through some of the key moments.

THE OPENING SHOT

Sound Of Metal begins with a shot of Ruben Stone (Riz Ahmed), one half of metal duo Blackgammon along with his girlfriend Lou (Olivia Cooke). He’s sitting at a drum kit, waiting to launch into a song. He’s poised, thrumming with anticipation, vibrating with nervous energy. The one thing he isn’t, is peaceful. “He’s naked to the waist but he’s got a lot of armour up,” says Marder. “He’s surrounded by feedback, noise, the sound of metal, and darkness.”

LOSING THE HEARING

“We wanted this to happen when you least expect it,” says Marder of the moment when Ruben’s hearing suddenly disappears, plunging him into uncertainty. It happens in the most mundane of settings, as he’s setting up Blackgammon’s merchandise before a gig. “If you look at story structure, this beat happens too quickly,” says Marder. “It’s before you expect it. And you’re thrown into this super-real moment. You just have to deal with it as an audience, with Ruben.”

HEY JOE

For Marder, Ruben’s deafness, and his dealing with that, is not the film’s plot. “It’s probably more about addiction than deafness,” he explains. “The unveiling of the plot comes later when you realise he’s an addict.” That comes to the fore when Lou takes Ruben to a Deaf community run by Joe (Paul Raci), a former addict who becomes something of a mentor to the reluctant Ruben. “He’s been through 12-step programmes before, but he hasn’t ever had a Joe, or dealt with a character that sees him in the way that Joe does.” That relationship, in which Joe cajoles and confronts Ruben to overcome his demons, forms the heartbeat of the film’s middle section as Ruben slowly but surely learns how to negotiate the non-hearing world.

JOE OFFERS HIM A JOB

After spending around five months in Joe’s community, learning ASL and working with a local Deaf school, Ruben seems as close to acceptance as he’s going to get. Then Joe offers him a job, and a sense of permanence, and the unintended side effect is that it sends Ruben into a spiral. “It’s interesting how we resist those moments of help when we’re not really there yet emotionally,” says Marder. “Ruben’s first instinct when people get close is that he’s gonna lose something. It’s that abandonment reflex that makes him want to grab onto the thing that

he has, which is music, which is Lou. He didn’t see it coming, and Joe didn’t intend for that.” Almost immediately after, Ruben decides to purchase the cochlear implants that might return his hearing to a semblance of normality.

JOE KICKS HIM OUT

In the film’s pivotal scene, Ruben returns to the community after getting the implants. There, he finds Joe who, after a lengthy, heartfelt exchange, asks him to leave; in a community that doesn’t see deafness as a disability, Ruben’s surgery is a step too far. Joe’s actions can also seem cruel, but Marder doesn’t see it that way. “As soon as Ruben walks in the room, Joe sees the whole story,” he says. “He knows it from his own life. He’s met a hundred Rubens over the years, but Joe’s not going to play out a codependent dynamic. He knows that this guy is going to have to walk down that road alone.” As the film was shot in chronological order, it was Raci’s last scene, and those tears are real. “For Paul, boy, that broke his heart. Every time. It was beautiful, and palpable.”

TURNING ON THE IMPLANT

A few weeks after getting his cochlear implants, Ruben has them activated. Suddenly, sound rushes back into his world. But it’s distorted, buzzy, jagged — and, as the light fades in his eyes, it’s clear that it’s not what he had hoped for.

“I had a very, very clear idea about how that should sound,” says Marder. “Riz had actual implants that he wore that blocked sound. And there’s a physical process that’s happening when those implants turn on, and there’s a noise in his ears while it’s happening. But emotionally, it was devastating. Riz reminded me recently that I came in, and looked at him. And we looked at each other for a while, and then I got up and left. That was my direction. There’s an emotional truth to the scene and it didn’t need to be spoken.”

SAYING GOODBYE

After flying to Paris to rekindle things with Lou, she tells Ruben what he knew, deep down inside, even before he arrived in Paris: that they must go their separate ways. “It’s such a loving scene, but it’s a reckoning,” says Marder. “It can hit you over the head in a way, where you recognise that you’re trying to hold on to this thing and protect the person that you love so much that you’re actually hurting them. That’s a very special thing to show on screen for me.”

THE CLOSING SHOT

The final shot sees Ruben finally meet Joe’s challenge head-on, and find that elusive moment of stillness. Turning off his implants, he sits down on a bench and, hearing absolutely nothing, achieves true peace for the first time. It’s a deliberate echo of the opening shot, down to the last sound Ruben hears — distorted church bells, akin to the looping feedback of loud guitars. But it took a while for Marder to get there. “The entire process was about earning that ending, because the ending is the removal of everything,” he says. In a film that rightly won an Oscar for its sound design, Marder wanted to lean into the absence of noise. “It was the simplest part of the sound mix,” he laughs. “There was nothing there.” Well, it’s a far cry from nothing.

SOUND OF METAL IS OUT NOW ON DVD AND BLU-RAY