#i know the people i've surrounded myself in are the folks that are on board

[cinema-tv-etc]

Here's Why Movie Dialogue Has Gotten More Difficult To Understand

(And Three Ways To Fix It)

I used to be able to understand 99% of the dialogue in Hollywood films. But over the past 10 years or so, I've noticed that percentage has dropped significantly — and it's not due to hearing loss on my end. It's gotten to the point where I find myself occasionally not being able to parse entire lines of dialogue when I see a movie in a theater, and when I watch things at home, I've defaulted to turning the subtitles on to make sure I don't miss anything crucial to the plot.

Knowing I'm not alone in having these experiences, I reached out to several professional sound editors, designers, and mixers, many of whom have won Oscars for their work on some of Hollywood's biggest films, to get to the bottom of what's going on. One person refused to talk to me, saying it would be "professional suicide" to address this topic on the record. Another agreed to talk, but only under the condition that they remain anonymous. But several others spoke openly about the topic, and it quickly became apparent that this is a familiar subject among the folks in the sound community, since they're the ones who often bear the brunt of complaints about dialogue intelligibility.

"It's not easy to mix a movie," says Jaime Baksht, who took home an Oscar for his work on last year's excellent "Sound of Metal" and previously worked on Alfonso Cuarón's "Roma." "Everybody thinks you're just moving levers, but it's not like that."

This problem indeed goes far beyond simply flipping a switch or two on a mixing board. It's much more complex than I anticipated, and it turns out there isn't one simple element that can be singled out and blamed as the primary culprit.

"There are a number of root causes," says Mark Mangini, the Academy Award-winning sound designer behind films like "Mad Max: Fury Road" and "Blade Runner 2049." "It's really a gumbo, an accumulation of problems that have been exacerbated over the last 10 years ... that's kind of this time span where all of us in the filmmaking community are noticing that dialogue is harder and harder to understand."

Join me and these industry experts as we sort through that "gumbo" and identify some of the most prominent reasons it has become more difficult to, in the paraphrased words of Chris Tucker's Detective Carter in "Rush Hour," understand the words that are coming out of characters' mouths.

It's A Purposeful Choice

When it comes to dialogue unintelligibility, one name looms above all others: Christopher Nolan. The director of "Tenet," "Interstellar," and "The Dark Knight Rises" is one of the most successful filmmakers of his generation, and he uses his power to make sure his films push the boundaries of sound design, often resulting in scenes in which audiences literally cannot understand what his characters say. And it's not just audiences who have trouble with some Nolan films: the director has even revealed that other filmmakers have reached out to him to complain about this issue in his movies.

Donald Sylvester, who took home an Oscar for his work on "Ford v Ferrari" and is currently serving as the supervising sound editor of "Indiana Jones 5," says Nolan is a singular figure in this regard. "I think Christopher Nolan wears it as a badge of honor," Sylvester declares. "I don't think he cares. I think he wants people to give him bad publicity because then he can explain his methods to everybody and we can all learn. But I don't think other people actually understand it."

Baksht thinks the complaints about Nolan's work, specifically the hubbub about unintelligibility surrounding last year's twisty action thriller "Tenet," are overblown. "I think in the case of Mr. Nolan, with ["Tenet"], the characters have a mask, and he wants to keep the original sound because I think for him it's more real," he says. Presumably, that mentality also extends to "The Dark Knight Rises," in which Bane's mask muffled a significant percentage of that character's lines.

Thomas Curley, who won an Oscar as a production sound mixer on "Whiplash" and previously worked on "The Spectacular Now," has also seen this type of mentality at work. "Not everything really has a very crisp, cinematic sound to it in real life, and I think some of these people are trying to replicate that," he tells me.

Baksht says that type of creative aesthetic does not need to permeate an entire movie — it can sometimes change from scene to scene depending on the director's goals in telling the story. Although, as this anecdote illustrates, its effectiveness remains debatable:

"In the case of Alejandro González Iñárritu, he did a movie ['Biutiful'] where all the dialogue was really dirty. They were in Spanish, but you weren't able to understand much. When I asked his sound designer about this issue, he told me the reason they wanted to keep the dirty dialogue was because the situation was so awful in the life of the character that it helped the feeling of depression. I told him, 'Yes, I think the audience got depressed because they couldn't understand anything!' But when [Iñárritu] did 'The Revenant,' the dialogue was pristine and perfect."

I understand his point, although I take issue with using "The Revenant" as an example of pristine dialogue because that film features Tom Hardy in a supporting role, and Hardy is one of the most notoriously difficult-to-understand actors working today.

It's in the Acting

Hardy occupies a unique position in film acting these days, having developed a delivery style that's frequently so indecipherable it's as if he's purposefully challenging audiences to lean in and understand what he's saying. But what about actors who aren't quite on that level of unintelligibility?

"It seems to be a little bit of a fad with some actors to do the sort of soft delivery or under your breath delivery of some lines," Curley says. "That's a personal choice for them. Our job is to record it as well as we can regardless."

Mangini says that in the old days, "you could count on an actor's theatricality to deliver a line to the back seats." But acting styles have changed so dramatically over the years that it has become much more difficult to capture great sound on the set. When actors adopt that more naturalistic style, "it's even harder for the production sound mixer to capture really quality sound. Now we get those compromised microphone positions here in post-production, reaching for a dialogue line that is barely intelligible or maybe even mumbled because it's an acting style, and already, we're behind the 8-ball in trying to figure out a way to make all of those words intelligible."

Karen Baker Landers, whose credits include "Gladiator," "Skyfall," and "Heat," among many others, has her own term for it. "Mumbling, breathy, I call it self-conscious type of acting, is so frustrating," she says. "I would say a lot of the younger actors have adopted that style. I think the onus also falls on the directors to say, 'I can't understand a word you're saying. I'm listening to dailies, and I can't understand.' No amount of volume is going to fix that."

That naturalistic performance style might feel right for actors in the moment on set, but it can be hell for the sound professionals who have to clean it up afterward. "We're very careful to make sure there's clarity," Baker Landers says. "You go in and you volume-graph up a vowel, or one letter. You go in and you surgically – maybe if it's not right on camera, you slow it down. There's all kinds of things we spend hours trying to do that may help a performance. We really strive for that."

But they can only do so much.

Sound Isn't Respected Enough On Sets

Miranda July in an interview setting Criterion

Another ingredient in this complicated gumbo is how the sound team is treated during the process of filming.

"What we see from our brothers and sisters in production is a never-ending [complaint] that they don't get the respect they need to get the microphone where it needs to be to capture the sound clearly," Mangini says. "That's because as movies have matured in the last 15 years, movies have become more visually exciting. And because of that, it is less likely that you're going to be allowed to put that boom mic right where the actor is, because it's probably going to drop a shadow because it's in front of a light that the camera team insists has to exist to get the perfect look of the shot. So [the visuals have] taken precedence over what we hear."

Sylvester agrees with that sentiment. "If the sound guy goes, 'Can you get one more take for me?' they go, 'Nope, we're wrapping. We've gotta move on to another setup.' It's because pictures are the most important thing, and we do a good job fixing sound at the end of the day. So they go, 'We'll fix it in post.' That's literally their go-to answer. 'I just need to get this.' 'Yeah, we'll fix it later.' And we do, unfortunately. But it's not because we want to. It's because we have to."

Another "Whiplash" Oscar winner, Craig Mann, acknowledges that less time on set can have a negative effect on the sound crews. "There's more demand on crews to do many setups a day, and that could be a contributing factor," he says. "The production sound guy is the tip of the spear in terms of our first line of defense, and oftentimes if there are problems, the good ones will approach the director or the AD or the DP and say, 'Hey, this isn't working, you're going to miss this.' Oftentimes it gets handled. But on the other side, sometimes there are a lot of production sound guys that do not feel empowered or have had a bad experience about speaking up in the past, or whatever the reason is, and the material gets back to the cutting room and it's a mess, and [they say], 'Well, we thought everything was fine!'"

"I would blame it more on schedule and budget and maybe trying to rush," Baker Landers says when this topic arises. "It's an art form to be a dialogue editor. It's an art form to be a great production recordist. Then to be able to get the clarity of dialogue in a mix with everything else going on and have the dialogue feel natural and not forced is another art form, all of which take time. Budgets and schedules are crunched on a lot of projects, and some of these are amazing films."

Technology (AKA The Jurassic Park Problem)

One high-profile Hollywood sound professional who wishes to remain anonymous points to the evolution of technology as an ingredient. "The reason people don't remember having these same audio issues with older films is that [now] we have more: more tracks to play with, more options, therefore more expected and asked for from the sound editors," they say. "If you listen to, say, 'Four Weddings and a Funeral,' you'll hear every word ... the sound was cut on film back then, and with limited time, track count, and budget, these are the results you got."

Thomas Curley concurs with that assessment:

"A lot of it has probably happened more recently because of the almost ubiquitous use of digital audio and digital cinema now. Part of the reason with that is because when everything was shot on film and edited with tape, it was a much more laborious process and it was much more technically challenging to do a whole lot with sound design. Everything had to be a very conscious choice and a very intentional soundscape that they create. Since it was so cost-intensive and labor-intensive, they wanted to make sure that the story got across first and emotion gets sort of directed with music, and that's about it. And every pass that you do with an analogue system depletes the quality as well: it's like making a photocopy of a photocopy. But now, they have much faster turnarounds and much more capabilities as far as what they can do with the sound design, including playing around with ambience and sound effects. To put a concrete reason on it is hard, but a lot of it comes down to 'I have this toy, so I'm going to play with it.'"

The anonymous sound pro also pointed to what they view as an increase in the amount of music in modern movies compared to older films, bemoaning directors' over-reliance on music as "pushing emotion" on audiences and the way music and dialogue are forced to jostle for prominence in the mix. "The technology we have today is so vastly improved that there is no limit to what can be added: whatever the director wants, for months on end. We literally have hundreds of tracks at our disposal ... in a final mix, we therefore have a lot to deal with. Unending score smashed up against hundreds of tracks, with the client asking to hear every nuance above every other nuance."

Curley sums it up beautifully. "It might fall into the realm of the 'Jurassic Park' thing: they spend so much time realizing that they can do all these things, but not thinking about if they should do all these things."

Familiarity/Passive Listening

All four of those contributing factors to dialogue unintelligibility are the result of decisions made on sets. But by the time a film makes it to post-production, editors can be afflicted by something Karen Baker Landers calls "passive listening." Donald Sylvester has another name for it – "familiarity" — and it's exactly what you think it is.

"What I mean by familiarity is, when we're making a movie, it takes a long time," says Sylvester. "It takes weeks and months. If there's something that's unclear at first and you turn to the guy next to you and go, 'What did he say?' and he's like, 'Bring the car around the garage.' The next time you hear it, you go, 'Oh, OK, got it. Bring the car around the garage.' But they get familiar with the bad sound to the point where they no longer find it to be a problem."

Mark Mangini puts it like this:

"The director is sick of talking to the writer and giving them rewrites, sick of talking to the actors and giving them line reads, and by the time you get to post, every single syllable is known by heart. So imagine what that creates in a sound mix where we're supposed to correct the dialogue. We're no longer critically listening like we should be. Because we're in fact zoning out on whether or not the audience is actually getting the critical information they need. We know what the critical information is: we've been dealing with it for months. So in a sense, we have to challenge ourselves daily – and we certainly do this in sound – to try to remove ourselves from that equation and re-inject ourselves with a fresh perspective to see if we're actually making clear dialogue such that the audience understands it."

In Craig Mann's experience, though, the idea of familiarity is not a widespread issue. "As someone that does this on a daily basis, I think dialogue clarity is the number one priority on the mixing stage," he tells me. "Dialogue, music, and effects, in that order, is usually the chain of priority. If you can't hear the dialogue, we're going to find a way to hear it. Just speaking of the couple things that we've done even this past year, I can say Joe Carnahan, writer/director, wants to hear every word. Tyler Perry, we just did something with him, wants to hear every word. Sean Penn wants to hear every word. So I don't necessarily agree with getting numb to it. I think it's incumbent upon us to have that fresh ear every time we show up."

Sylvester also points out that unfamiliarity may be an issue in some instances. "What I'm wondering is if, sometimes, some of these films that we see, people are saying words that we don't know what they mean, such as 'Dune,' where they start talking about characters and places that sound unfamiliar. They do it in such a way, offhandedly, where it's like, 'What did he say?' Some of it is the content."

Mixing For Cinemas

One of the most fascinating things I learned when speaking with these folks is the gulf in quality that can sometimes occur between what a film sounds like in the mixing stages and what it can sound like when it plays in a multiplex. Mann says this isn't a new problem — it's actually been happening for decades:

"You mix it at your level in the mixing room, and theoretically, that is supposed to be the same level that is represented in the movie theaters on the Dolby Cinema processors, therefore giving you an exact translation, more or less, of what you've done on the mixing stage. But what's happened is, particularly in the '90s, because that felt like the time when they were doing the loudest mixes – I didn't mix in those times, but the stories were that mixers and maybe directors would want stuff mixed at a level that was just ear-bleeding. And what would happen is, that would get to the theater, there would be complaints from the patrons, and the theater would be compelled to turn down the mix. And when the next feature came in the next week, the level was never reset, and now that level is playing way low for the regularly mixed movie. That's a problem that vendors have been dealing with for many years. I know [it's still happening]. For example, the Landmark Theater chain does not play their theaters above 5.5 on the cinema processor, where the set standard is supposed to be 7 on that processor.

The idea that a significant theater chain would purposefully ignore industry standards for something as crucial as sound is genuinely shocking. I reached out to Landmark's customer service and asked them directly about this issue, but they did not respond in time for publication.

Thankfully, I have not heard any similar stories about AMC Theaters, the largest theater chain in the United States. However, I was curious about the configurations that occur when a new sound system is installed in an AMC cinema, how frequently their systems are upgraded or replaced, and how the company maintains quality sound conditions across its vast empire of theaters. I reached out to AMC, and they responded with this statement:

In general, our guest feedback, both recently and stretching back the last several years, does not match your assessment about dialogue becoming more difficult to understand. Among guest feedback, which is tracked through survey results and through incoming contacts from guests, there has not been an increase in complaints as a result of the audio, regardless of the type of movie. Regarding your questions about our sound equipment, our speakers and sound systems are calibrated upon installation. They are routinely checked, and recalibrated whenever necessary to ensure the best possible sound quality.

Additionally, for guests who would like to follow the dialogue on screen, AMC now offers Open Caption showtimes at 240 of our locations, and in every major market in the United States with at least two AMC theatres.

Read More:

https://www.slashfilm.com/673162/heres-why-movie-dialogue-has-gotten-more-difficult-to-understand-and-three-ways-to-fix-it/?utm_source=pocket-newtab&utm_campaign=clip

[jimlingss]

What do you think about fan fiction? As an English lit student, I find the reaction towards fan fiction a bit hilarious sometimes because so much literature is ‘fan fiction’ of other pieces of literature, eg paradise lost is a fan fiction of the bible. I guess because a lot of ‘women’ and/or members of the lgbtqia+ community (not to be confused with iffany trump’s lgbqia+ community) write fan fiction so people don’t view it as legitimate and view it as something stupid and retarded. (1)

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omfgggg when did this blog become a critical commentary on social issues and perspectives ahhahaha. What do you think I think of fanfiction? I’ve been writing it for over four years, if I wasn’t on board then I’d be the one with issues LOL

okay on a more real note, I agree. It’s actually pretty fucking sad that fanfiction gets such a bad rep in main media. I get it though. There’s a LOT of shitty fanfiction out there, gross ones, badly written ones, literal incoherent ones. and they often get the limelight because it’s ALWAYYYS more fun to shit on something than to praise it. that’s why when youtubers ever read fanfiction, it’s the poorly written ones because that’s what’s gonna get the views. It’s actually also the reason I NEVER tell anyone irl I write fanfic because to me, I take it pretty seriously and I love it. But I know the general consensus out there is to be weirded out and to think it’s bad. Writing is personal to me so I don’t want to be insulted or have to spend time to justify it, hence I don’t ever talk about it.

Fanfic doesn’t even always have to include smut, taking me for example and so many other sfw writers I know and support. 

Anyway, everyone’s gotta start somewhere. It’s not like first time writers are gonna start off writing their own book and freaking publish it. And sometimes, people don’t want to start writing original characters of their own. Fanfics are AMAZING. it’s a great way to start. it’s a great way to combine writing with whatever you like most. In my case, I love BTS and I love writing - so to be able to combine those two, for me, it has always been a privilege.