Awareness of the Interstellar sound-mix issues have been kicking around since before the Paramount release opened two days ago. (I first complained about it on 10.24, or the day after the first elite-media screening on 10.23.) You’d have to be deaf and blind not to have heard about them by now, but reporters for the trades and the major print outlets have so far been asleep at the wheel. It’s obviously a huge story — a major filmmaker mixes a film in such a soupy and muddy way that people across the nation and in parts of Europe can’t hear certain portions of the dialogue and are tweeting complaints left and right — but for whatever reason the pros at Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, TheWrap, N.Y. Times, L.A. Times, Wall Street Journal and other print publications aren’t touching it.
From HE’s “Actionman,” received today: “You’re not lying. Either the sound mix was terrible or the people at IMAX said turn it up and keep it up because at the Cinemark in Manchester, CT, in their Imax-lite, you could barely hear dialogue that should’ve been heard. I don’t understand how something like this could happen.”
From Cinema Blend‘s Sean O’Connell: “At our screening, the audio mix on the Interstellar presentation was so off, I had to ask a colleague if the speakers in our house were broken. There was a recurring buzz from the speakers in the mix. It would arrive during certain scenes, linger for a few minutes, then disappear. Our screening wasn’t an isolated event.”
From an 11.6 “My Two Cents” column by Digital Bits editor Bill Hunt:
“And a word about Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar: I don’t want to post a review of the film yet, because I think you really need to see it yourself and form your own opinion. I’ll just say that I had decidedly mixed feelings about the film. However, the one thing I do want to note is that Dr. Jahnke and I experienced a problem with the audio at the 70mm screening we attended last night (at the Cinerama Dome in Hollywood) and it’s apparently widespread. The problem is that the film’s score seems to be mixed too high, so that you lose lines of dialogue here and there – every so often, the character’s dialogue becomes almost inaudible. If you encounter this, report it here at the official website. Hopefully, that will encourage Nolan and company to get this fixed ASAP.”
