Part of that development process involved both of you traveling to Ireland, to experience it ahead of production. How did that initial trip, and your first impressions of Ireland, inform your work on the film? What did you come away feeling, and how did you use that?
Davis: We actually went there a few times. When we first read the script, we decided we were going to Ireland, because you can’t really make a film if you know nothing about the place. We visited Shane, lived with his family, explored the community, and got a sense of it. What does the air smell like? How are the seagulls different, and what do they sound like? It was about absorbing the environment, this atmosphere, and understanding what it meant to live in this place. That initial trip was about observation, as well as working with Shane to build out the story in that environment.
Holmer: We’re very sight-specific filmmakers. And we needed all of that sensory information to start to understand how you’d move through the world: the space, the light, the sound. The thing that I remember most is that we did quite a lot of driving around, for observation, but we brought a Zoom recorder with us — because sound is so important to how we tell stories. There is a sound recording from that first trip, of the wind going through a small shack on a pier, out on a cliff. It sounds like a woman wailing, and also like a flute, and that sound is 100 percent in our movie. It’s this quality of natural sound, instrumentation, then emotion. It was this vibration, and we just needed to tune into that.
We also went out on the oyster farm. This feeling of being completely insignificant as a human relative to the scale of this force, this body of water, is very profound. And as that tide is rising, realizing you are in the middle of the ocean is really beautiful. We were obviously shooting in different locations, but we tried to bring with us that power of transformation. In Ireland, oysters are farmed in tidal bays; a sandy beach, hours later, will be completely submerged. That transformation, and how a place could look completely different, was something we tried to understand and capture: first in the screenplay, and then eventually on set.
The sonic landscape of “God’s Creatures” is so immersive. It’s immediate and active, but there’s something ancient about it as well: the way clanging factory machines give rise to the sound of drums, for example. In collaborating with sound designer Chris Foster and composers Danny Bensi and Saunder Jurriaans, what did you set out to achieve in terms of sound?
Davis: On “The Fits,” we collaborated with Chris, Danny, and Saunder; we were lucky enough to work with them again. Chris sends Danny and Saunder sounds that were picked up on set, and then they think about how they can bring them into the music. We had initial recordings from our trip to Ireland, and we would just send them to Chris: “Listen to these birds. Listen to this wind.” That’s the beginning of the process for him, where he starts to see our ideas and question how to incorporate them into the film.
Our philosophy to sound, especially within this film, is that it starts in a more natural space. We wanted this authenticity to the place. We were thinking about that wind, how we could have it constantly present throughout the film. Even when you may not know it’s there, it’s in the background, battering against the windows, and you can hear the waves in the distance. That was the starting point: “Let’s build this natural world and this place, and then let’s break it down.” As the film progresses, we’re using certain sound design elements in a very different way. Like you said, the factory machines lead into the music, and the oyster shells sound a little different.
Sarah’s singing, also; you witness that at the funeral, and it’s very natural. There’s a later moment when Sarah’s singing, though, and we affect it and transition it into the [score’s] composition. All of that is meant to reflect Aileen’s interiority, what’s happening within her. Sound design is key to telling that specific story. Beyond the visuals, it’s how we go within her psychology.
Holmer: And working with Danny Bensi and Saunder Jurriaans was a fun process, as it was on “The Fits,” too, given their [sense of] discovery and playfulness. One of the most important elements of the score in this film was [deciding,] “When does it begin?” And that was something we talked [about for] a long time and were often on the fence about. The score comes in quite late, but it’s important when the movie is cued, with the title “God’s Creatures,” to have it almost begin at the start.
In the end, for us, [the key] was that there’s a haunting already here. It is not Brian who initiates this story; these cycles are bigger than this one man. This unease is already here, and so we knew that the score would begin before we even meet any humans in “God’s Creatures.” And that voice of the sea, this mythic and out-of-time calling from another place, was something that we were playing around with. We experimented quite a bit.
And what was beautiful is that you could build all these elements, and [Bensi and Jurriaans] were quite collaborative. They’d send over cues and stems and allow us to play around, strip it down. “What if it’s just the reverb of the flute? What if it’s only this drum hit?” We actually get our hands into the material, not as musicians ourselves but to utilize it as a tool. Early on, we have quite an exploratory process with them; it’s really about finding the sounds, tuning together, coming to this common language, then having them start cueing from there. They’re passing sound samples back and forth with Chris, whether it’s oysters falling off the conveyor belts, or the shaking of the bags, or breath — which we use as a percussion instrument itself. That’s not sound design. That’s actually part of the composition of the score during the songs we see.
And so there is just this flexibility and fluidity, but it’s something that Saela and I find extremely cinematic. It’s a way to activate the subconscious of your audience or to almost work against the visual. You can undermine a visual by offering sound design as a counterpoint or an opposite. There’s so much you can do. We put sound in our treatments. When we pitch on projects, we have a page about sound. It’s one of our tools.
Davis: Again, I’d just say we’re so lucky to have the collaborators we have, because they’re generous during the editing process. We’re getting elements and can still play with them as our editors are editing.
Given the waves crashing along the coast, and in particular, tides ebbing and flowing around the steel trestles of the O’Hara’s oyster farm, I wanted to ask about your approach to evoking the permanence and motion of water — both directly, in sequences you filmed out at sea, and indirectly, through the rhythms and flows of the film’s editing, on which you worked with Julia Bloch and Jeanne Applegate.
Davis: It’s funny, because that’s something we talked about: the movement of the water in the ocean, and how the closer you are to shore, the water moves more slowly in and out. But, as you go deeper and deeper, the waves are more chaotic and crashing. We thought about that, in terms of structure. There’s slower pacing, and then there’s a turn in it. You have that music hit, the pacing changes, and it’s mirroring the movement of waves. We talked with our editors about a more impressionistic style, as the film goes on. Our film is not focused on the details of these events; it’s focused on the emotions. With the editing, how can we punctuate those emotions and put the viewer in the mind of Aileen? What she’s feeling inside can be reflected back through the editing.
Holmer: We also talked about breath in tides. Tidal frequencies differ from the human breath, but there are often times when we’d be talking with Julia or Jeanne about how you carry movement, or breath, from one scene to the next. That actually started at the writing stage. Sometimes, with Shane, we would work with cards. We would draw wave lines over groups of scenes; there is a movement, an energy, that is happening, and how do you on the page say that we’re continuing to go forward. In the edit, we’d say, “The wave hasn’t broken yet, so we can’t release tension in this scene. We actually need to carry it to the next scene.” It’s building, and you have to figure out where the release is. Oftentimes, it’s a literal exhale, and you have to ask, “When do we exhale? Is that inside the scene, or is it not a human exhaling but instead another release of tension?” There’s this fluid feeling that you’re always trying to tap into. And then the great thing about establishing the language is that you can break it. When you start to teach an audience and give them a rhythm, it’s even more powerful to truncate that rhythm, not provide it, and break your own rule.
The silence and denial of the village has this implosive impact for Emily Watson’s Aileen, who’s caught between patriarchal, familial ties and a moral, feminist responsibility. Her final conversation and confrontation with Paul Mescal’s Brian is such a devastating scene, the tide coming in as this mother reckons with all that’s been raging inside her. What can you say about working with these actors, capturing that sequence with them both, and the emotions you sought to evoke in leaving their characters where you do?
Holmer and Davis: We storyboarded this sequence to have a firm logistical understanding of how we would capture Brian and Aileen’s final moment, so that when we were on set we could allow Emily and Paul to stay within the emotionality of the scene for as long as possible, without delays. In rehearsals, we discussed physicality. Brian is moving away from Aileen. He is the one who wants to look forward and move on, while Aileen is walking toward him, wanting to confront the issue head-on. Ultimately, for Aileen, this is a moment of catharsis and great sadness. She must let go of the dreams they were both invested in, the legacy of the family farm. She must let go of the version of Brian she thought he was. And she must let go of a part of herself.
“God’s Creatures” will open in select theaters and on demand September 30, from A24.
