The Sound of "Inception"

The July’s Issue of Mix Magazine includes an article about the sound of “Inception”, the upcoming film of Christopher Nolan. The article contains some spoilers, so maybe would you like to see the film first.

Becauseof the overwhelming success of Batman Begins and The Dark Knight, Christopher Nolan is viewed in popular circles as a premier “popcorn movie” director, delivering crowd-pleasing action flicks for summer crowds. But even the least discerning movie-goers can’t miss the darkness and weirdness that courses through both of those films (especially the latter), as well other Nolan works, including The Prestige, Insomnia and especially his brain-twisting early masterpiece, Memento. Nolan has become a brilliant visual artist, but he has also always been skilled at depicting the strange interiors of the human psyche, and that would seem to be his main motive for making the films he does.

In Nolan’s latest thriller, Inception, he gets to delve into the human mind in a different way: The contemporary sci-fi story—details of which have been closely guarded prior to the film’s July 16 release—revolves around a character (played by Leonardo DiCaprio) who is adept at entering, sharing and even manipulating other people’s dreams, and then extracting information from those deep subconscious states for nefarious commercial exploitation. In Nolan’s inimitable way, he blurs the line between dreams and reality, memory and imagination. The film contains a number of depictions of often fantastical dreams (aided by a combination of CGI and some specially designed sets), which Nolan treats as current reality rather than as strange, hazy, barely recollected visions we faintly recall the next morning. “You don’t question the reality of a dream while you’re in it,” explains supervising sound editor and sound designer Richard King, who is making his third film with Nolan after The Prestige and The Dark Knight (for which he was awarded a Sound Editing Oscar). “So that’s how we approached the soundtrack. You don’t always want to point out the fact that they’re in a dream while still being true to the story that’s unfolding and the visuals we’re seeing. A slight shifting of reality is appropriate, but we didn’t want to make it too obvious.”

Download: Mix Online – July 2010 (Inception’s article is on page 28)

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