How They Created Silence in A Quiet Place | BAFTA Sound Session

When I was watching this film, I remember reading an article years ago about John Cage talking about finding this container that he walked into that apparently had no sound in it. And when he was in there, the sound became incredibly noisy and he realised it was his own heartbeat. And watching this film, I just thought, this isn't just a film that doesn't have much sound in it, there are layers of various levels of sound. And Eric, I've read an interview with you and you said every little sound is actually a big sound in this film. No, that's right. And the device that you're talking about, that John Cage mentioned, it's called an anechoic chamber. And these are the quietest places on earth that you can go into because they're completely sonically isolated from the outside world, not just with sound actually, but with radio frequencies. They're often cased with lead, so even electromagnetic waves don't even come in. And you can walk into these things and what's fascinating is the first thing that happens is you lose your balance because there's no, even the sounds you're making are not reflecting back at you. So, and people forget that we use our ears to orient ourselves and balance. So, you're asked to sit down in an anechoic chamber. The second thing that happens is that after a few minutes, your ears kind of start to open up and you start to hear your own body and that's the circulatory system, the blood coursing through your veins, the cavity of your chest breathing and these small sounds become really big sounds. And that was kind of the effect we were going for with A Quiet Place was to create a track that opened the audience's ears up and eventually put them into the shoes of these characters and create kind of a sound experience. And that's what our director, John Krasinski, wanted to happen and we knew it would be a huge challenge to try to achieve that. It's interesting you bring up the John Cage reference because when we started working on the film, the first thing we did is we saw the first assembly, basically, of the movie. And I think what both Eric and I connected to most strongly was the love between these characters that you feel. And we thought, how can we lean into this, the intimacy that you feel between these characters and this tangible love between these members of this family that are so desperately trying to survive? And so the first thing we started doing was stripping out music because there was basically wall-to-wall tent music. And once we did that, we realized how can we get closer to these characters? And with the daughter, Regan's character, she's deaf in the movie and she's played by an actress who's deaf in real life, Millicent Simmons. And John described to us how Millie, on set, became kind of the spirit guide for the actors. She taught all the actors American Sign Language, which they use in the movie. And so when we started working with the sound design on the film, we were thinking how we wanna get closer to these characters. We wanna feel what they're feeling. And with Millie's character, we were like, okay, she's deaf. This is a world where sound is everything. If you make too much sound, you will get killed. And so in a way, Millie became our spirit guide for sort of unlocking the sound design to the film because we had a description from John of Millie's experience of how she experiences the world when her cochlear implant is turned on. And she described it as being sort of a low rumble, almost hearing as touch in a way. And Eric and I immediately related it to our own experiences being in anechoic chambers where, as Eric has described, what you really hear once your ears open up after five or 10 minutes is the sound of your own body, your heart faintly pumping in the background, your nervous system sort of buzzing away. And so we based the sound design on those experiences for these moments in the film when we're in Millie's sonic perspective and she has her cochlear implant turned on. And then, as you know, there's three moments in the film where she actually turns it off. And these are the three moments in the film where we go to complete silence, digital zero, which, you know, if you think about it, when do any of us in today's world ever have the chance to experience total and complete silence? So the first time we tried that in our editing room, we were both like, you know, literally took our breath away because it's such an unusual experience to have. And also in the context of the movie, it immediately connected us in such a deep and powerful way with her experience and her vulnerability that it became very moving and it, in a way, sort of unlocked all the potential in the story and in these characters' experience.