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For years, the sometimes muffled dialogue in Christopher Nolan movies has been something of a standing joke among cinephiles. When Bane’s mouth was hidden in The Dark Knight Rises, so the audience couldn’t take visual clues, many complained that they were unable to understand him.
The issues seemed just as present in Tenet, even without masks.
For years, increasingly shrill Nolan defenders claimed there was nothing wrong with the dialogue sound mix in his movies. This was blown out of the water and left them looking rather silly, as Nolan admitted that this happens for very pure performance reasons.
Firstly, he prefers to use the recording straight from the take he uses in the finished film. He won’t ask his actors to return to re-dub via ADR. As he said, he likes:
“…to use the performance that was given in the moment rather than the actor revoice it later.”
The second reason was that he uses IMAX cameras a lot, and they are incredibly noisy, leading to a requirement to do strange things with the mix.
IMAX – big
In an interview with Empire, as part of their special feature on The Odyssey, he speaks about how they had to address this for the movie, as it is the first movie shot entirely on IMAX.
For this, they created something called the ‘blimp’, a new casing to surround the IMAX camera and massively reduce the noise of their operation. Also, the new generation of IMAX cameras is smaller and lighter than previous iterations.
The result is that you can now use the cameras better in scenes with dialogue, including smaller, more intimate moments of performance:
“You can be shooting a foot from [an actor’s] face while they’re whispering and get usable sound. What that opens up are intimate moments of performance on the world’s most beautiful format.”
In the same article, Nolan said they tested this by having a child recite lyrics to David Bowie songs while they recorded. He said:
“We never would have been able to get those shots before.”
So, does this mean the sound problem in Nolan movies is solved? Will Nolan Bros now be able to finally admit it existed? We will find out next July when The Odyssey arrives in theaters.
The post THE ODYSSEY Solves Sound Issues? appeared first on Last Movie Outpost.
