Can someone explain the sound mixing style that drowns out dialogue?

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Why?

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“We got a lot of complaints,” Nolan said about the “Interstellar” sound design. “I actually got calls from other filmmakers who would say, ‘I just saw your film, and the dialogue is inaudible.’ Some people thought maybe the music’s too loud, but the truth was it was kind of the whole enchilada of how we had chosen to mix it.”

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Nolan added “there’s a wonderful feeling of scale” that can come by experimenting with sound design and “a wonderful feeling of physicality to sound that on ‘Interstellar’ we pushed further than I think anyone ever has.” For “Interstellar,” Nolan and his team “tapped into the idea of the sub-channel, where you can just get a lot of vibration.”

“A lot of it was the music where Hans [Zimmer] had this organ and he used the absolutely lowest note, which would literally make your chest drop,” Nolan continued. “There’s certain low end frequencies that automatically get filtered out by the software. He took all of those controls off, so there are all those sub-frequencies there. And we did the same on the dub stage. It’s a pretty fascinating sound mix. If you see it particularly in an IMAX theater, projected, it’s pretty remarkable.”

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Over the last decade, Christopher Nolan‘s sound mixing has become as hotly debated as Christopher Nolan’s storytelling. “Tenet” is no exception. One of the biggest complaints against the director’s $200 million espionage epic is that its over-bearing sound mix makes important dialogue unintelligible. It’s a criticism Nolan has often faced, notably with Bane’s dialogue in “The Dark Knight Rises” and the overpowering “Interstellar” score. Many moviegoers even complained the explosive sound design of “Dunkirk” was deafening.

“I don’t know what Chris Nolan has against dialogue,” Forbes critic Scott Mendelson writes in his “Tenet” review. “What was a glorified joke with Tom Hardy’s masked monologuing in ‘The Dark Knight Rises’ and a relative annoyance in ‘Interstellar’ becomes a clear and present danger in ‘Tenet.’ Yes, film is a visual medium, but ‘Tenet’ is an espionage thriller with copious amounts of exposition…Once again, the audio mix emphasizes music, key sound effects, and seemingly irrelevant background noise over dialogue.”

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Mendelson adds, “For a film that’s supposed to show audiences that theatrical moviegoing is worth saving, ‘Tenet’ will probably play better on Blu-ray with the subtitles turned on.”

Are Christopher Nolan movies too loud? It’s a question IndieWire’s Chris O’Falt attempted to answer in 2017 just as “Dunkirk” was taking off at the box office to an abundance of complaints about its sound design. That each of Nolan’s last four movies have been met with the same sound mixing criticisms means that Nolan’s sound design is here to stay whether moviegoers like it or not. And there’s a reason for it, too, at least in the director’s eyes.

“There are particular moments in [“Interstellar”] where I decided to use dialogue as a sound effect, so sometimes it’s mixed slightly underneath the other sound effects or in the other sound effects to emphasize how loud the surrounding noise is,” Nolan said in 2014 in response to the “Interstellar” sound complaints, proving to his fans that the divisive sound mix was purposeful and not some audio mistake.

“I don’t agree with the idea that you can only achieve clarity through dialogue,” Nolan continued. “Clarity of story, clarity of emotions — I try to achieve that in a very layered way using all the different things at my disposal — picture and sound. I’ve always loved films that approach sound in an impressionistic way and that is an unusual approach for a mainstream blockbuster, but I feel it’s the right approach for this experiential film.”

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“Chris wants that dense, like punk-rock kind of vibe,” Nolan’s longtime sound editor/sound designer Richard King told IndieWire in 2017. “Not trying to present an idea of how something is, but try to convey the actuality of it within the realms of how we could do it.”

Nolan also admitted in a 2017 interview with IndieWire that his team decided “a couple of films ago that we weren’t going to mix films for substandard theaters,” adding, “We’re mixing for well-aligned, great theaters.” For this reason, seeing “Tenet” or any Christopher Nolan movie in a theater with substandard audio equipment won’t make hearing his dialogue any easier. Nolan understands his films put a pressure on theaters to keep up with the best sound and projector systems, and he can’t mix his films to please every exhibitor.

“At a certain point, you have to decide if you’ve made the best possible version of the film and you’re trying to account for inadequacies in presentation,” Nolan told IndieWire. “That’s chasing the tail. It doesn’t work. I will say, with our sound mixes, we spent a lot of time and attention making sure that they work in as predictable a way possible.”

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“Chris wants that dense, like punk-rock kind of vibe,” Nolan’s longtime sound editor/sound designer Richard King told IndieWire in 2017. “Not trying to present an idea of how something is, but try to convey the actuality of it within the realms of how we could do it.”

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Can someone explain the sound mixing style that drowns out dialogue?

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