In Netflix’s new movie “The Guilty,”Jake Gyllenhaal portrays Joe, a street officer who is demoted to desk duty following an accident. He is at work in the middle of California’s latest wildfire disaster. Joe is only able to answer 9-1-1 calls. Joe jumps to action when he gets a call from Emily (Riley Keough), a kidnapped girl. With the film’s action being played out through Joe’s headset, the film’s sound design is placed front and center, acting as the driving force for the story.
Director Antoine Fuqua entrusted his many long-time collaborators to create his sound team. Mandell Winter and David Esparza, sound designer and re-recording mixer respectively, were to be his sound editors.
Winter explains, “It started with Jake and the cast on set, but all of the callers were remote. It was designed that way because of the pandemic. We came up with a conference call that was piped live into Jake’s headset so that he could hear and perform against the actors.”
With the likes of Keough, Peter Sarsgaard, Ethan Hawke, and Paul Dano providing voice work, sound designer David Esparza was tasked with building the sonic elements that surround the vocal performances so that the audience believes the calls are coming from the streets of Los Angeles rather than an actor’s home.
Actors working remotely meant that the audio production of actors on set could not be recorded in a normal way. Esparza said that there was no audio track, and only voices, so everything had to be made from scratch. “The jostling movement of the phone, cradling the phone, moving it from one hand to the other, even those little subtle movements or somebody shifting in bed, everything down to those little details were all painted in to help create the illusion that these people existed in these environments. And that the movement was actually occurring on the other side of the phone.”
The process of creating the familiar, unmistakable scratchy sound from an action performed via a telephone required much trial and error, multiple passes, and expert manipulations of the sonic bandwidth.
“We had to walk between sounding realistic on the phone versus being visceral enough to actually tell that story on the other side of the phone in the detail that was necessary,” Esparza adds.
To create the film’s rich and textured sound design, each element present was given detailed consideration. From a storytelling perspective, the team sought to infuse tension with chaos between the obvious things like the sirens that sound in the background and wind. Esparza said that these included subconscious details such as the van’s low noise giving the impression of fear and the hypnotic nature the windshield wipers emit.
A key part of the sound design was also exploring Joe’s emotional state through the sounds around him.
“Antoine wanted to give the impression that the city was sort of spiraling out of control a little bit. And that feeling sort of permeates the film in general with what’s happening with the characters that Joe’s talking to as well as Joe’s own psyche,”Winter.
Joe is more and more obsessed with the mysterious caller as the story progresses. He becomes determined to save her. The tension builds — what began as softer sounds become sharper, more visceral and more engrossing, designed by Winter to enhance the emotion in the performances.
“The sound gives us the opportunity to really get inside of Joe’s head. It’s representative of this enormous pressure that he’s under. We used devices like the ringing in the ears, or the absence of sound to give a subtle, subjective weight to the moment,” Esparza says.