Building Sounds for ‘Killing Them Softly’

THE struggle to win in a nation consumed by loss is one of the themes at the center of “Killing Them Softly” (due Nov. 30 from the Weinstein Company), a crime drama set during the 2008 election season, as the economic crisis is unfolding. Presidential addresses and campaign speeches play on television sets in the background throughout a movie in which sound is used in uncharacteristic ways to augment the narrative.

Directed by Andrew Dominik (“The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford”) and adapted from the George V. Higgins novel “Cogan’s Trade,” the film is populated by small-time gangsters (including Scoot McNairy and Ben Mendelsohn in a cast that also includes Brad Pitt, James Gandolfini and Ray Liotta) who dream grandly but don’t always proceed wisely.

“Crime stories, to some extent, always felt like the capitalist ideal in motion,” Mr. Dominik said recently, speaking by phone from Los Angeles. “Because it’s the one genre where it’s perfectly acceptable for the characters to be motivated solely by money.”

A holdup at a mob-run card game creates tension and unease in the crime world, and an enforcer, Jackie Cogan (Mr. Pitt), is called in to restore order. This leads to takedowns, showdowns and one particular beat-down that has a stronger sting of brutality, primarily because every punch, smack, grunt and plea is precisely engineered.

In that scene, Markie Trattman (Mr. Liotta) is suspected of organizing the holdup. He is taken to an empty parking lot by two other gangsters (Trevor Long and Max Casella), and put through a savage interrogation. Here Mr. Dominik and the sound mixer, Leslie Shatz, discuss their ideas for the audio, including how flash bulbs, squeegees and Norman Mailer worked their way into a beating sequence. A multimedia feature including audio clips from the scene can be seen and heard here.

THE LOCATION Setting the scene in a parking lot with empty stores emphasized the recession-era time period, evoked not just by a “Going Out of Business” sign in a store window, but also by periodic news reports on TV and radio throughout the movie. But it also lent a sense of dread. “You see fight scenes a lot” in movies, Mr. Dominik said. “But you don’t see people systematically beating somebody else. The idea was just to make it really, really, really ugly.” He and his crew shot in New Orleans and had several abandoned shopping malls to choose from. “When we were on location scouts, we’d find out the next day that the place we looked at, there was a murder committed there hours after we’d been there,” Mr. Dominik said. The sequence has no music, just dialogue and sound effects. “What I prefer to do in films is not to use music as underscore,” he said. “If you’re dealing with movies that have a lot of ambivalence about them, music can take away so many layers of a thing.” Instead he uses sound to stir emotions that music often provokes.

THE CAR At the start of the scene Markie is ordered to get out of the car, and he reluctantly complies, knowing what’s coming next. During the beating he makes direct contact with the car, whether slamming against it or sliding down the side of it. Those sounds were made during the Foley process, in which the mixer records sounds in time with the movie footage. “In our Foley studio we have pieces of a car,” Mr. Shatz said, speaking by phone from Wildfire Post, his studio in Los Angeles. “So we will watch the movie and start banging on the car until we get the proper sound.” For a moment when Mr. Liotta’s character slides across the car they used audio of a squeegee across a windshield to achieve the effect. Another form of transportation, a train, also becomes significant, and its loud rush is used to bring the action to a climax.

THE PUNCHES Mr. Dominik and Mr. Shatz experimented with several techniques while developing the punching sounds in the scene. “You always try to make a punch that feels right,” Mr. Dominik said, “because if your punches are too big, they don’t seem real. But if they’re too small, they don’t feel violent.” In some of the hits they used the sound of flash bulbs, which provide a kind of tingly aftereffect. They also occasionally muted all the other sound at moments of fist impact and mixed the dialogue into multiple channels, with discrete sounds coming from different directions, forcing the moviegoer to experience the moment more intimately. Also Mr. Shatz drew on an unlikely source: Norman Mailer. When Mailer directed the 1987 film version of his novel “Tough Guys Don’t Dance,” he was unhappy with the way punches sounded in movies. So he suggested that Mr. Shatz record Mailer hitting himself. Those self-inflicted punches, in a recycled and modified form, became part of the punch audio for this scene.

THE RAIN Pounding and punishing, rain is heard in different ways and from different perspectives throughout the scene: as it hits the asphalt and the roof of the car and as it splashes on the faces of the actors. “Rain is one of those movie conventions where, if you really listen to what it sounds like when it’s raining, you can’t use that in a movie: it’s too light and indistinct.” Mr. Shatz said. “I have this recording of pouring water onto concrete, just splatting. It’s a very hard kind of sound.” That sound was looped (repeated into a sustained texture) and, when matched to the layers of sounds, became a discomforting underscore to the grisly proceedings. For the rain hitting the car Mr. Shatz used looped audio of water being poured onto metal. Also mixed in are rumbling thunder sounds. Mr. Dominik and Mr. Shatz also used a process called “worldizing,” in which they would take sounds, play them back in different environments, record the slightly altered versions and then switch between them to create an ambience.