By Ashleigh Stevenson
Sound is an integral part of a film, whether it’s the musical score or the way that the dialogue is presented, but when it’s always used in the same way, it becomes banal.
“We live in a world now where you see all these movies, like Marvel movies, and there’s so much sound going on, so many explosions,” A Quiet Place director John Krasinski told The New York Times about his choice to innovate with sound. “I love those movies, but there’s something about all that noise that assaults you, in a way. We thought, what if you pulled it all back? Would that make it feel just as disconcerting and just as uncomfortable and tense?”
Locally, Warwick Thornton’s film Sweet Country stands out like a mirage in a desert: a stirring true story, unexpected flash forwards and flashbacks, the reimagining of the Western genre, and most subtly but importantly, using no musical score.
Thom Kellar, Folklore Sound’s Sound Designer and Re Recording Mixer of Sweet Country, explained what took its place: “We were doing things like using manipulated insect sound – using local cicadas and pitching them down which brings the audience into the scene; bringing winds in that are really dark, creating tension and then easing off when the tension eases off. It’s exactly what a score would do, but we’re doing it in a way that’s making the audience feel it, but not notice it.
“And that was the key thing we had in our heads when we were designing the sound – it had to be bold enough to make an impact on the audience, but not overt enough to pull the audience out. We worked closely with Warwick to incorporate audio cues from the landscape,” Kellar explained.
From the opening of the film, you hear a billy boil. You can also hear a fight off screen, you hear in the distance “you black bastard”. White sugar is added to the tea and the fight begins to intensify. As the fire crackles, the sound of the cicadas in the background intensifies.
A chase sequence encapsulates Thornton’s unique use of sound in Sweet Country. In the sequence, Sergeant Fletcher is hunting the main character Sam for the murder of a white man. Kellar explained that himself and collaborator Lachlan Harris used the sounds from Central Australia to determine the pace of the chase, how far Sam and Sergeant Fletcher were from each other during the chase and the views of the ‘hunter’ and ‘hunted’.
“We always wanted Sam to feel like he was in a different place, a different zone, even when the two parties in the chase were close together,” explained Kellar. “So, you’d get that sense of proximity through a cue like a cockatoo crying as it flew over Sam’s head, and when the shot switched to the posse chasing Sam, we would hear the same cry very close by. So, they can’t see each other but the soundscape is very similar.
“For the two opposing perspectives of the landscape, we played with things to make it harsher and more aggressive for those chasing Sam, yet for Sam it was beautiful. To do this, the sound of the insects was manipulated to give a slightly harsher feel. On the flipside we’d use the call of finches to evoke life and water. It’s all very subtle, and built into the fabric of it, so it all sounds like the bush.”
