The music in the film is barely audible. Why is that?
There’s no score in the film. There are some music cues, the scenes where characters are listening to music, or in bars and coffee shops in the background. We don’t use music to move the story along. And I think I realized just recently that sound is really important to me but I tend to think of what’s going on in the dialogue and the sounds in the room and the sound environment that we build on the film. In a way I think of that as a score. Certainly there’s rhythm and movement of the language and what’s happening. I’m relying on that to move the story. Do you know of other filmmakers who do that? To some degree, some of what I know about filmmaking, where my approaches come from, I’ve always been a big admirer of great cinéma vérité and documentary stuff. And where I studied film as an undergrad in college [Harvard University], we spent a lot of time working on documentary and thinking about those things. What’s great about doing documentaries is that it’s great training for a filmma
