Requiem for a Dream - Sound Design

Throughout Requiem for a Dream , there is very rarely any silence, more often or not you can hear electronic sounds bubbling away. This is a very effective as a tension builder and carries the story along nicely and reflects the dark tone of the film. The sound design also reflects the almost surreal side of the film, for example when Sara Goldfarb is opening the lids on her pill bottles, the noise heard is a very over exaggerated pop, it is almost comedy like. This works wonders in showing the film to be in almost an alternative reality, showing the effects the the drugs are having on the characters. 

I’ve seen Aronofsky mention placing the sound of an airplane passing overhead in the background of those sequences. He got the idea after being inspired by jumbo jets flying over New York from JFK. How often do you use sounds that “don’t belong?” In other words, how devoted to realism were you in the project? It’s a movie with lots of surreal and absurdist overtones, so how do you deal with that as a sound designer?

I’ll go on a limb and say that it’s common for good sound designers to do. Which lends itself to what I was saying before: intelligent choices of sound don’t necessarily fit, but they always have some sort of impact. The sound of say, a jet, the rising tension of it, is maybe exactly what’s required to make that impact—to say here’s the heroin, here it goes into the body’s system. The sound itself is so dynamic; it has that push, that rush of moving air to it. We routinely do stuff like that, where you’re juxtaposing things. Sometimes trying to jam a square peg in the round hole is exactly what you need. 

This is a short section from an article that I found on the sound design of the film, I found this to be massively interesting in way that the sound of a jet taking off is compared to someone shooting up heroin, although it does sound absurd it does make a lot of sense. I found that this could be a great way for me to get across the pain and thrill that the main protagonist in Edgeplay will feel. I want to try and create parallels between an everyday occurrence or machine that could draw similarities to the dark tone of my film.