Zero Dark Thirty is already lighting up the box-office with $229,000 from five theaters in its first two days and adding another $115,000 on Friday, on its way to a potential weekend with a $69,000 per theater average. Not too bad eh?
I watched the film again a couple days ago and one thing that struck me the same way it did in theaters is the film’s use of sound, largely in the final 40 minutes during the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound and the sound of the stealth helicopter blades and the sounds of gunfire and explosives used to open locked metal doors.
Right now, in my Oscar predictions, I have Zero Dark Thirty in the #1 position in Sound Editing with Flight my favorite in Sound Mixing, though I’m beginning to second guess that prediction as chatter surrounding the film is seeming to die out and so much of the attention seems to be on Denzel Washington and nothing else.
Nevertheless, when it comes to sound in Zero Dark Thirty, Kathryn Bigelow again turned to her Oscar-winning Sound Re-recording Mixer and Supervising Sound Editor, Paul Ottosson, whose work on The Hurt Locker was astonishing.
In the following video from the Soundworks Collection he discusses his work in Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty, how he had to use sound to make a scene work since Bigelow doesn’t rely on score as much as some directors, how he went about finding sound for those stealth helicopters and much more.
Give it a watch below.
