We’ve been fans of Sound of Violence since we caught it at SXSW earlier this year. Written and directed by Alex Noyer, and based on his short film, Conductor, Sound of Violence marries gore, music, and character work together in a most unholy manner. Starring Jasmin Savoy Brown as Alexis, the story follows her mission to achieve her life’s ambition – the perfect song. It doesn’t really sound too horrific does it? Alexis spent part of her childhood without hearing and gained it back in the midst of a violent trauma. Not only can she now hear again, Alexis also has synesthesia, a condition that grants her the ability to see sounds, well those created by violence at least. After becoming worried that her hearing may be about to fail her once more, Alexis ups the intensity of her mission. Cue brutal carnage across the city.
It’s a great premise for a genre film and Alex Noyer has managed to pull off the crazy story brilliantly. Ahead of the UK premiere of Sound of Violence at Arrow Video FrightFest over the Bank holiday weekend, I sat down with Alex to dig into the project a little more.
Sound of Violence started out as a short [Conductor]. When did you realize that you weren’t done with this character and that you wanted to continue to develop her?
I was developing another feature at the time and it got delayed, and I was reminiscing about my documentary 808 and drum machines, and a light bulb came on – I should kill somebody with the drum machine – and I made this short. It was very much as well to prove to myself that I could switch as well from producer to director. Then we started touring it [the short – Conductor] and the reviews and the response in festivals were really, really interesting. The questions started to come in about her, about Alexis, who’s very elusive in the short, but becomes sort of the core of the questions. So it motivated me to go back and really explore her backstory. So I wrote her backstory, her origin story, and the opening scene. I was almost considering doing that as a second short, as a follow-up, but then I started to come up with further murders, discarding what happens in the short and using a whole new gateway and creating this environment. It really kind of grew organically and so, you know, as I said, the more people were asking me, the more I felt, “okay, there’s some sort of gravitas around it”.
It happened surprisingly fast. I wrote the first draft of ‘Conductor Feature’ now Sound of Violence in January 2019, and we shot it in October 2019. In movie terms, that’s a minute, because not only did it come together very quickly and when I went to Cannes in May after the feedback, I rewrote the script in four days. Then we were really in good shape. The financiers got it. I was just… I was going around with one sentence, “It’s the story of a killer who makes music through murder”. That was my pitch. It was amazing because when I was going around Cannes with that, people were immediately like “yay”, “nay”and that made things go faster.
I run a Clubhouse about going from short to feature, and I give advice. I always give the advice, “try to see if you have that one sentence that just tells you everything they need it to do.” Simple ideas sometimes work. I was talking with Jed Shepherd and he pitched his idea of Host to Rob [Savage] by saying ‘Zoom seance’, it’s clever.
There was the short, but this is your first-time feature and you have some high profile cast members. What do you think it was about this project that attracted them to it?
I think it’s because it was a bit mad. First of all, Amey René our casting director suggested Jasmin [Savoy Brown], and I was immediately like, “I love Jasmin!” She’s in The Leftovers, I’m a huge fan of The Leftovers. We met and she had read the script before meeting, and she really loved it. She came back and we joked about who was more nervous that day, and I can tell you it was me, but on the back of it, I felt like I had met Alexis and I felt that Jasmin wanted to give her voice and being to Alexis. It was amazing chemistry immediately.
I’ve followed Lili’s work for a while and she’s been in a lot of shows that I love. I also love Bone Tomahawk, so we checked and she was not available, but then she became available and she read the script and she liked it. Then she met with Jasmin and the chemistry between the two of them was crazy. And then James. I can say that James was one of the actors I thought of when I was writing the role of Duke as a sort of way I wanted the person to be. Then when I met him, he was exactly like that and we hit it off. What sealed the deal is we support the same football team.
All three were so cool to work with. You’re asking me what drew them to the story…I think genuinely the script did something to them because their commitment to this script was not just, “we show up, we turn up, we do our job”. We were chatting every day, we were very collaborative. English not being my first language, there was a little clumsiness in the dialogue that we fixed together. They were also committed to working at night after the long days of shooting, still like messaging, “okay for tomorrow…” This is my first feature as a director and they trusted me just because they read the script and believed in it. James was saying when he got it, he did a skim read first, but he started skim reading it and he was like, “okay, wait a second”, and he goes back. When I met with him he even said to me, “when I read the ending, I was mad at you” and I’m like, “good, you should be!”
I still don’t think I’m quite over that ending. Was that something that came early in the script?
No, it came quite late because I had written an ending that I was very unhappy with, there was something in there that somehow just made it less emotional. And then this finale came to me in a dream. I dreamt it up. I just saw it. It was one of those dreams where I was more of a spectator. I woke up and I sketched it, and I sent that sketch to the producer, Hannu Aukia, and then to Robert Bravo, who I call my blood wizard because of the practicals. I was like, “guys, I got it!” They looked at me like I was possessed and they were in shock, awe, and excitement actually about it because they were like, “if we pull this off, this is going to be something nobody has ever seen before.” It nearly didn’t come together. It was an incredibly technical scene to shoot and, without spoiling it, I can say that we had to… the first version I saw I cried because there was just something missing emotionally, and then the editing skills of Hannu came together to fix what was there. Then we had one day of reshoots where we added something that really made the difference.
Again, the commitment I got from everybody based on the scene… Everybody wanted to get it right. It was one of those scenes. This is something that might create cosplays one day you know, whether it will or not I don’t know. I’ve been reading as well, a lot of people guessed what movie influences which part of the film and about the finale, and I can say that absolutely zero movies have influenced the finale. There’s many influences that I can completely live up to throughout the movies. There’s also big homages about various movies. Like, at the very beginning there’s a shot that’s a homage to Battle Royale. There’s an Easter egg to Chopping Mall. There’s all sorts of things. But that finale just came to me in a dream and as you can hear every time I speak about it, I get excited about it again because it’s one of those moments where you’re like, “did I just come up with that? How?”
Sound of Violence is one of the few that seem to be coming out at the moment that have a hard of hearing protagonist. What do you think it is about the way that the industry is shifting now that we are allowing these sorts of people to have their stories told?
I think it’s because… you know that there’s always a lot of pushback in studios when you’re not going for whatever is the first thought they have in their mind when it comes to characters, but I’m a big believer that we need to show a range in our characters so that we can show and address topics like that. There’s enough information out there for us to be able to research, to not arrive in a space of ignorance, but actually arrive within the space of open mindedness and open questions. And actually say, “okay, here’s how we want to heighten the experience of sound from a standpoint where she lost her hearing as a child.” So obviously we consulted with both the deaf community and the hard of hearing community to understand exactly how we should address that. So for example, we never use the word deaf in the movie, because she was not deaf, she had lost her hearing in an accident. Then she regains it again; it’s the idea of the tympanic membrane. We had conversations to get it right, the fact that she’s clumsy with her sign language is because she learned it late. The information is out there, great consultants are out there, it’s not whether or not people are refusing to take it on, but I was just like this was part of the core of my story as I wrote it. It was a question of, “do I want to shoot the story that I wrote or am I going to be lazy and make shortcuts”, when all I have to do is research and find authenticity in research. Find information that gives me guidance. Same thing about Synesthesia.
Frankly, it enriches the movie. It is not just about the portrayal of a disability. It’s also the framework that she’s not a victim. So again the dynamic and the identity of the character is not the reason she’s doing what she’s doing. There’s no reason why because she has a disability that she couldn’t be the antagonist / protagonist kind of mixture. I feel that representation comes from the ability to write the script with open questions and not for me to assume anything and just say, “Okay, this is how I see it. Now, what do I need to do?” I have a storyline related to the murders to all that, but I want the character to be her, to be Alexis, and I didn’t want to compromise Alexis. Yes, I got push back, not from my producing partners, they have been very supportive all the way, but you know, we obviously had some commercial meetings where people like, “but, can we just take that out” or you know, and I’m like, “no” and luckily at this kind of independent level, we have enough clout to still stand our ground and found people to back it. We were right to stand our ground and I’m very very proud. I’ve had fantastic conversations with journalists who either have hearing issues or similar and I was really, really humbled by their feedback. The fact that they felt that I was respectful, which obviously is important, but also that they could tell I treaded lightly, and that at the same time I wanted to not make it a gimmick or cliche. It’s one thing for me to tell you that, but when I’m hearing it as feedback, it obviously means a hell of a lot. I know that people tend to think that it’s a risk, but again, all you have to do is the research.
Sound of Violence almost has two narratives, you have your visual one, but then the soundscape itself is its own narrative. The first part of the film you’re almost in Alexis’ head, experiencing and hearing as she does, then suddenly it expands out. What made you want to approach the story from that perspective?
I felt that I needed to tune… It’s almost like a DJ… I had two tracks going on, one was the audience, and one was Alexis, and I realized, no, I have ONE that was important. So every moment that we are within and we are framed within this world of silence that she experiences in a very early moment, I needed to take the sound away from the audience because there’s no, you know, I couldn’t put like an overwhelming noise of tension for example. It’s silent with a slight tinnitus ringing, it allows us then further down the story every time we take it away, we also take it away from the audience. When the world expanded, as you said, when she regains it, I wanted it to feel big. This is where the amazing work of, not only our composers, Jaakko Manninen, Alexander Burke, and Omar El-Deeb, but also our fantastic sound mixer, Jussi Tegelman, who works with Sam Raimi. They were really there for that experimentation to get that.
Every time we were closed in and every time we expanded, we could not have done it if we had a track or score and then a track of the movie. And so that retraction and expansion had to be whole. In terms of really inclusive for the audience.
A big component of Sound of Violence are these elaborate ways that Alexis goes about producing her music. The finale came to you in a dream, but how did you devise the others, and which was the most fun to bring to life?
I researched weird instruments, but I also had instruments that I love. The drum machine is obviously something that I know having done 808, and it’s something that’s also in the short, so I stuck to that. After that I wracked my brain and thought what instruments fascinate me? I had my little book of madness where I was like, okay, how about this instrument? What could I do with a theremin? I got to research how each instrument functions, and find within the functionality of the system of the instruments, something that I was going to do. I was like a mad scientist. I really got to delve into… I’m not a musician and this is where, for example, Alexander Burke, he’s an instrumentalist. So when I was like, “okay guys, I feel like we’re going to use that instrument or this instrument.” I could see the panic in his eyes, but at the same time, the “ah” and I always had this sample of people who I could check back in with my crazy ideas.They were really thinking that I was crazier and crazier, which is fine because it’s true. But it was a process that started all the way back in the short.
Have you started working on what will follow Sound of Violence?
I’m writing a story that really taps into my Nordic origins. I’m in talks with a studio about and waiting to see exactly what’s going to happen with that. And I’m also in talks to potentially direct a PG-13 movie, a genre film, but sort of Young Adult horrorm which makes my two daughters very happy because they haven’t been able to see Sound of the Violence.
You have an Easter Egg for Chopping Mall in Sound of Violence. Remakes / reboots etc., are always in discussion for everything, is that your sneaky way of asking to take the helm should that project ever come to light?
I’m putting it out in the universe, please anyone give it to me. I need to make this. It’s my guilty pleasure.
Sound of Violence is available now in the UK on Digital HD, DVD and Blu-ray.
