While “Sound of Metal” marks the narrative feature debut for writer-director Darius Marder, this is a project that has been a long time coming for the film veteran. Having written the script for “The Place Beyond the Pines” for director Derek Cianfrance, it appears that the origin story for one of 2020’s most acclaimed features began well over a decade ago with a simple proposition, “What if a drummer blew out his hearing?” In our new special episode of The Playlist Podcast, Charles Barfield, Mike DeAngelo, and Brian Farvour talked with Marder about “Sound of Metal” and the birth of what is one of the best films of 2020.
“We actually spoke about [‘Sound of Metal’] 13 years ago after the first two minutes of meeting each other,” explained Marder about his discussion about the project with Cianfrance.
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Of course, the story goes that Cianfrance was going to make the film himself, but when he moved onto his other features, “Sound of Metal,” languished on the shelf.
“And then there was this beautiful child, left in an alley somewhere,” he continued. “And I picked it up and said, ‘It’s ok. It’s ok, buddy. We’re going to do this thing.’”
And to be completely honest, Marder raised that alley baby pretty damn well, creating “Sound of Metal.” The film has already been nominated for numerous awards and seems a constant fixture in the Best Of 2020 discussion. Over the course of our discussion, we also tackled the technical difficulties of making a film that is so dependent on sound design and why captioning made such a huge impact on the feature.
We also discuss his future projects, jokingly suggesting that he should follow in the footsteps of so many other indie directors and leap into a big-budget superhero film.
“I think you’re right about the Marvel world, always wanting to suck you into that abyss,” said Marder. “I’m not inclined to [do that]. I think we need more authored movies. I’m inclined to try to push the boundaries of what we do, of what American cinema can be. I know that’s an audacious thing to say, but I really want to do it.”
You can hear our full discussion with Marder below.
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