The following is a transcription of an interview Ann participated in for the BBC. It is transcribed here for your convenience. However, if you would like to listen to the interview, then I encourage you to visit Ann’s site. The interview can be found on her “Credits + Talks” page under the “Radio Interviews” heading. Don’t forget to sign up for the live chat with Ann, taking place this Saturday.
BBC: “Eraserhead” may have quickly become a cult movie, but the cult was awfully small. That would change when the faithful were joined by an unlikely convert. It was as if Cecil B. Demille had taken holy orders, when the comedian Mel Brooks hired David Lynch to direct “Elephant Man.”
[soundclip from “The Elephant Man”]: Life…is full of surprises.
BBC: Once again, Alan Splet and Ann Kroeber created the sound.
Ann Kroeber: It was just such an extraordinary move from “Eraserhead.” At the time, David was still delivering Wall Street Journals. It was just incredible. I mean, he was living in just this little, little, teeny, tiny apartment…It was just amazing that Sir John Gielgud, Anne Bancroft and John Hurt…I mean, it was…ah!
[sound effect clip]
One of the things was working out the kind of abstract connection between an elephant and the Elephant Man, in the beginning. So I spent a lot of time at the zoo; it happened to be the Chessington Zoo.
[sound effect clip]
David wanted to recreate the sounds of England back then. He loves industrial sounds: gadgets and gizmos and steam and radiators and mechanical devices.
[sound effect clip]
Basically what I did, is I would go out and record, and then Alan would play with the material and David would hear it. Sometimes, actually, Alan and David and I, all three of us, would go out together and record and play together. Like one time we were up in this bell tower outside of the Eastern Hospital. We just happened to see this incredible bell tower and figured out a way to get up into it.
[field recording clip]
Nobody was looking. So we started just playing with it, and it was just this wonderful collaboration. One would take the recorder, one would do the moving the thing and the other would jump up and down.
[field recording clip]
The British film crew had cut a whole alternate soundtrack for the movie, because they just could believe. You know, there was this new director and these crazy Americans were coming in, “They were ruining the picture. What were they doing?” We were making all these noises.
[sound effect clip]
So, they cut the proper kind of “clip clops” and, you know, horses on cobblestone, birds tweeting and then a nice little train going down the way…and thought that David would come to his senses.
[sound clip from “The Elephant Man”]
It was heard from the Elephant Man’s perspective.
[sound effect clip]
David expresses, kind of, his subconscious. It’s not intellectual at all. He doesn’t go and think, “Well, I’m going to do a layering soundtrack.” It’s a very emotional thing, and I think that sound is a direct link to that. And so, the feelings that come out of it are very organic. And all of David’s films, the bases of the sounds are organic. They’re not synthesized. They’re altered and changed. There’s kind of a natural organic quality that comes out of it, and then it gets played with. It’s all mood…a feeling that gets to you in some other place. Sound is so subliminal. They say that it’s the first sense that a baby has, and it’s the last sense to go.
[sound effect clip]
BBC: Hearing the right sound in your head is one thing. Finding it quite another, and recording it a question of choosing the right microphone…maybe a new kind of microphone, that hears the world differently.
AK: While I was over in England, actually, working on “The Elephant Man,” I was watching a BBC show one day. A guitarist and a drummer were right next to each other, and there was this contact microphone on the guitar. And you couldn’t hear the drummer right next to them. I thought, “My God!” And that’s the problem with recording sound effects, is that you’re always having to isolate sounds. I found out that the man that had invented it actually lived right here in San Francisco, and he designed a special microphone for me…for recording sound effects. It’s called a FRAP. We worked back and forth for about three months. And I’d listen to it and I’d try it…and I’d say, “No, no. It not quite…it doesn’t have quite the timbre here…” or whatever, until finally we got it. The thing about this microphone is that it records the insides of things. It’s this little tiny microphone. I could show it to you. It’s about the size of my little finger.
[sound effect clip]
I talked to Alan about it. He was, you know, interested in letting me go off on this project. I just went on these serendipitous excursions…
BBC: Around the building, or around outside?
AK: Around the building, around this are where I work. It’s kind of an industrial area. When I put it up on a ventilator, it was just amazing. The sounds that would come out of this ventilator…you just don’t hear it with the naked ear. You just hear, you know, “whooooshhhh.”
[sound effect clip]
We used that sound in Dune, for the emperor’s palace.
[sound clip from “Dune”]
The thing that was so interesting about this microphone, is that you just never knew what you were going to get. And often, Alan and I would say, “if you do such and such…” And we’d have these great ideas, and it would just be of no interest. And then something else would be just exciting. Oh! For example, on “Dune,” the sounds of the worm… The sound of them actually moving, these gigantic worms, how to get that sound of going through sand?
[sound effect clip]
I went in a children’s sand box, and I put a piece of plexiglass over sand. Then I put the microphone underneath the plexiglass…because it conducts a certain way on plexiglass, it’s very neutral…put a bunch of sand over the top. Then I ran my finger over that sand. Then by slowing it down, it just made it so much bigger…and you get this very intense, close up, sound. Alan slowed down rumbles from thunder.
[sound clip from “Dune”]
BBC: After the disaster of Dune, the worm turned. Determined to outface his critics, David lynch again dug deep down into his roots in small-town America. He created poetry in the cinema; an American poetry that repays a debt to Edgar Allen Poe. Tales of the unexpected somehow ambush our imagination and set in train dark thoughts half in love with peaceful death. A masterpiece…
[sound clip from “Blue Velvet”]
AK: Reading the script on “Blue Velvet,” and how it unfolded…it was so different from how I would have imagined, or anyone would have imagined. It was so one-dimensional, the script, and it came alive with the improvisation of David and the actors on set.
[sound clip from “Blue Velvet”]
Well, the movie starts off with a song, and then it goes to the dad watering the grass. So he’s…it a suburban setting, and there’s a man watering the lawn. And it’s very primary colors. You hear the sound of a sprinkler going. It’s a, “Pa-cheh, cheh, cheh, cheh,” of a sprinkler. And then, all of a sudden, the man has a heart attack. Then the camera goes down underneath the lawn, this beautiful green lawn, and you see all these insect eating away.
[sound clip from “Blue Velvet”]
Alan worked up this whole thing of insects. And we went to a lab here in Berkley, and talked to some entomologists. I put a contact microphone on the outside of a beaker of mosquitos.
[sound effect clip]
A whole bunch of them going at it inside this beaker.
[sound effect clip]
[sound clip]
BBC: Alan Splet died of cancer in 1994, but his achievements live on on the world-wide-web. As for the sounds that he made to shadow David Lynch’s images, thanks to his widow Ann Kroeber, they too echo on on a set of CDs…proof that you need ears as well as eyes at the movies.
[sound clips]