Made for a relatively paltry $17 million, John Krasinski's science-fiction thriller A Quiet Place has made $328,505,730 worldwide and has also earned a 95 percent approval rating on RottenTomatoes.com. It's currently streaming (and still playing theatrically in some markets) and it comes to Blu-ray on July 10.
The movie's success is more astonishing after considering its simple but challenging premise: The Abbott family: Evelyn (Emily Blunt, Krasinski's real-life wife), Lee (Krasinski), Regan (deaf actress Millicent Simmonds, Wonderstruck), Marcus (Noah Jupe, Suburbia) and Beau (Cade Woodward) survive a post-apocalyptic world by keeping their mouths shut.
The family already uses American Sign Language (ASL) because Regan is deaf and because speaking attracts ravenous giant insects that will eat them if they speak English or any other tongue.
"This movie is all about sound and how being too loud can get you killed," said supervising sound effects editor Ethan Van der Ryn.
He has won two Oscars for his work with Peter Jackson (The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, King Kong). On A Quiet Place, he's teamed with Erik Aadahl, who has worked with Van der Ryn and Transformers director Michael Bay (who produced A Quiet Place) on several projects as well as Tree of Life and Argo.
Over the phone, the two came off as giddy -- maybe because it's often easy to take their work for granted. Sound editors compile the noises that are used in a movie, from mundane ambient tones to the otherworldly clicks the monsters make as they literally try to make a meal of the Abbotts.
When asked why the giant bugs make those sounds, Aadahl explained, "The clicking sound that you referenced was inspired by real-life predators that are also blind. Essentially the creatures in this film are blind, but they have super acute hearing, so they use their sense of sound to navigate through the world and hunt their prey. We based their clicking sounds on other blind creatures who use echo location like bats and dolphins. Those little clicking pops were inspired by that. That's the sound when they're searching for our main characters."
Because the characters utter so few spoken lines, Van der Ryn and Aadahl say that their task was more challenging than usual. Audiences often take the work they and their peers do for granted unless they've recently seen either an old Godzilla movie or an Italian gladiator epic where the English dialogue has been awkwardly added later.
The two filled in more gaps than usual.
"This is a movie where the smallest sonic details, people are paying attention to than they would in most movies," said Van der Ryn. "The smallest sound details can become very important. What's the sound a bare foot makes stepping on sand? What's the sound a bare foot makes stepping on a floor board? All of these kind of very small details became very, very in this film whereas in most films where people are speaking all the time, there's a lot of music playing, all these details might not feel as important."
The two also supervised a pair of sequences where the audience experiences the same silence that Regan goes through when her hearing aids and cochlear implant don't work.
"This film for us was really about exploring all these different levels of sound and of quiet: How many different shades of quiet can we paint? When you get down to the complete, total silence of Regan's point of view, when it's turned off, it's sort of taking that idea of exploring different levels of quiet to its sort of ultimate conclusion. So, that was really exciting for us. I think those turned out to be some of the most intimate and startling and memorable moments in the film," explained Van der Ryn.
Aadahl added that they wouldn't have achieved the dense final mix if they'd simply stayed in Los Angeles.
"Production happened in upstate New York and, actually, there's very little production sound recording used at all in the movie. There's just a little bit of movement that was used, and there's a few movements that we've used and, of course, the few scenes where we've used characters who are speaking and not using sign language," he said.
"Most of the sound work we did back in our shop in Los Angeles, and that's where we did our sound design and all of our sound editing. And in Toronto, we recorded the Foleys, which was the footsteps on sand, delicate cloth movements, hands touching skin, those very intimate kind of details. Now, with the Internet age of technology, we're able to move around massive amounts of data and audio very quickly. Logistically, it wasn't as challenging as it might seem. And then we did our final mix in New York. It was truly all over the country."
Because of the unique nature of the movie -- how many horror films can you name where characters survive because they sign instead of speak? -- it's not surprising that the two men were brought on board early in the process.
Aadahl recalled, "We were brought in before production began, actually, while the script (by Bryan Woods, Scott Beck and Krasinski) was still being refined. So this was really more than a year before the film came out. It's an accelerated schedule. We were pulled in by private producers to meet with John Krasinski. We had just read the script in progress, and we were thinking, 'Man, this is a sound designer's dream.
"And before we could say anything, John Krasinski told us, 'This is a sound designer's dream.' (laughs) We were so excited that he was on the same page as we were to take some risks and to take the sound as far as it could go."
Even though their Internet Movie Database pages indicate Aadahl and Van der Ryn have moved on to other projects, like the Transformers-theme Bumblebee, their work on A Quiet Place still seemed to be ongoing. They spoke to me from Minneapolis last week, where the two had visited an anechoic chamber.
That's a room that absorbs sounds and electromagnetic waves.
"It felt like we were almost in the point of view of Millicent Simmonds' character in the movie," Van der Ryn explains. "[Because she's deaf] what she hears in the movie with her (cochlear) implant turned on is basically the sound of her own body, the blood rushing through her own veins. Standing in the anechoic chamber, that's what we started hearing: the sound of that our own bodies. That was a really cool experience."
MovieStyle on 07/06/2018