Sound Direction: Roland Emmerich

Peter Cowie talks with director Roland Emmerich about the use of sound in film.

Roland Emmerich

German-born Roland Emmerich is the most successful European director at work in Hollywood today. His epic sci-fi movies have taken in well over a billion dollars at the box office internationally and have set benchmark standards for sound and special effects. Emmerich's blockbusters, which he often writes and produces as well as directs, include Universal Soldier (1992), Stargate (1994), Independence Day (1996), Godzilla (1998), The Patriot (2000), and The Day After Tomorrow (2004). He is currently working on a number of films, and Welcome to America, which he produced, is due to be released in 2006.

Is sound 50 percent of the moviegoing experience?

Sometimes. For example, in suspense films, the sound is almost more important than the picture. If somebody comes into a haunted house, the sound is vital. If you use sound as a character, then you do it right. If you only use it as noise, you do it wrong.

Before I embark on a film, I have a concept, and that concept is most of the time a mixture between picture and sound. In Godzilla, naturally sound was extremely important. You needed suspense, for example, when you heard the footsteps coming closer. We really played with sound, which was difficult because we had constant rain and thunder, so we had to play certain elements up, other things down, in a very extreme way.

On The Day After Tomorrow, we had one big problem: How does a city that's freezing over actually sound? We did so many experiments—at the beginning we had about 27 sounds, so we decided to really listen to them apart from the image. We had two or three different preferred sounds, and in the final mix we would switch off the picture and close our eyes, and decide which sounded better. In the opening scene, when the ice cracks in Antarctica, we had a foreground crackling, and then in the background a very faint crackling. Then we included a kind of howling wind, too. If the crackling had been too loud, it would somehow have seemed small. It all depends on the combination.

Has anything changed in your approach to sound in moviemaking during the past few years, with Dolby® Digital coming to be the norm and with 5.1 discrete channels?

Digital means that you can access every channel, whenever you want. I remember in the era of magnetic tape, we always had to premix. That became the mix. You just couldn't lift one sound up, and the other sound down. If you forgot about a particular sound, then you had to go into that tape and put that tape up in the main mix, and mix it back in. It was between Universal Soldier and Stargate that I was flabbergasted to find I could access every sound on the board at the push of a button, no matter if it had been premixed or not. I was so excited about that. You were no longer locked in to what you'd premixed.

You emphasized that your films rely on a collaborative process.

The most important thing for a director is to get a great sound designer. At a very early stage, you watch the first rough cut with your sound designer and your editor, and you discuss what are the signature sounds in the movie. And the sound designer then immediately tackles these sounds.

At the time of Stargate, I worked with Sandy Gendler as my supervising sound editor. Certain people have a certain talent, and they play around with sounds. They offer you four or five sounds, or they combine a couple of sounds, giving you the option to pick this sound or that one, or combine the sounds for the exact feel you're going for.

Recently, I've had an editor, David Brenner, who works on the Avid® to create soundtracks. When he finds a particular sound that he feels is driving the scene, he will sometimes recut it, because he'll tell me it works so much better with that sound. He'll show me both versions, and I'll go with whichever works better. Sometimes it really, really heightens the experience. Sometimes you do cut for sound.

Are you aware of a danger in postproduction that dialogue is swamped by the surround speakers?

When I hear a reel back after it's been mixed, I know every line by heart. Even if I can't hear it acoustically, I know it's there, so I always try to get some other people in who don't know the movie as well, and I ask them if they can understand everything. It drives me nuts in a movie when I cannot understand the dialogue! There has to be a dynamic in it, and I personally prefer movies with silent bits. The action scenes tend to be the loudest, and I like to create hills and valleys in the level, so the audience doesn't get numbed.

Are there any films that affected you from a sound point of view when you were embarking on your career?

The first time I listened to a film as much as I was watching it was Lawrence of Arabia. There are passages when you hear hardly any sound at all, out in the desert, maybe just a camel. It's so wild. And there are other parts where you only hear the wind. [David] Lean was very, very selective of the sounds he put into that movie.