SUNDANCE FILM FESTIVAL - Short Shot, Salt Kiss

Q & A : Noise
By Sarah Keenlyside

Bring your earplugs ‘cause Noise is probably one of the most appropriately titled films at the Festival this year. Australian director Matthew Saville takes the audience on a sonic journey in his first feature, a unique twist on the crime genre. Brendan Cowell plays Graham McGann, a young police officer with tinnitus, an infuriating condition that causes sufferers to hear a constant ringing sound in their ears. This complicates his life as he becomes entangled in a horrific mass murder investigation of seven people slaughtered on a commuter train. McGann gets stationed in a van near the crime scene to interview passersby for possible leads to the crime, and must interact with members of a terrified community that is torn up by suspicion, anger, and guilt over the tragedy. The filmmaker used multi-layered and innovative sound design to get inside McGann’s head. At the moments of his greatest confusion or stress, the audience suffers along with him – the ringing sound in his ears filling the theater.

Director Matthew Saville, Noise. -- Photo By Jason Squires

"You’ve got to somehow convey to an audience something that can’t be recorded by a film camera and can’t be recorded by a microphone."

Saville answered questions after a recent screening about his inspiration for Noise and the reasons why the film is so darned noisy.

Q: What was your original inspiration for the script?
Saville: About nine years ago there was a very troubled young man called Martin Bryant who walked into a café at a tourist resort in Tasmania – not dissimilar to Park City – and opened fire and killed 35 people. He was later captured. I remember the day after, there was just this great pool of regret and guilt that consumed the whole country. I felt it again after Sept. 11, 2001, but I felt it internationally then, so I wanted to make a film and tell a story that was a humanist film that kind of explored the notions of the aftermath of crime. So many films devote themselves to the actual crime and not the consequences, or just the consequences of the victims, and I think that everyone of a society is a victim of a crime within that society. So I wanted to tell that story.

Q: Why do you use noise as a motif in the film?
Saville: It’s half of the audio-visual medium – the first half, actually. It was something that I wanted to explore, I saw it as a metaphor for confusion – well, not even a metaphor but it reflected the confusion on a wider scale, which is where – unfortunately – I think is where we’re at still as a society. It was a notion that came to me when I first started writing the script and it just developed. My scripts are written with the visuals in mind, but I also deliberately force myself to write an aural description, so even in the big print we hear somebody walking into the room.

We do perceive the world aurally as well, and it’s not necessarily expressed cinematically, so I wanted to put noise first.

Q: With the sound design being so loud at certain points – I know some people had to cover their ears at times in the movie because it was so loud – was that your intention?
Saville: Yeah, and I suffer for my art, and now it’s your turn. Look, that was actually in the brief; really, really early on Laszlo [Baranyai, cinematographer] and I talked about it for a year before we started shooting, and the word we were always saying was ‘subjective,’ how do you get inside someone’s head? You’ve got to somehow convey to an audience something that can’t be recorded by a film camera and can’t be recorded by a microphone. Again, it was about making a point and not being pretty and not pulling the punch, and so I do apologize for any discomfort.

There are people [with tinnitus] that have actually said they liked the tinnitus sound [at the end of the movie] when the image cuts to black, and that it really is an accurate depiction of the tinnitus that they’ve got. And I said, ‘There’s nothing there. It’s completely silent. It is your tinnitus.’