20 Things You Didn't Know About Interstellar

11. Dialogue Was Used "As A Sound Effect", Rather Than The Main Audio Track

Interstellar ship
Warner Bros. Pictures

The strange audio mix found in 2020's Tenet sparked a heated debate about artistic vision versus, well, being able to hear what the characters are saying.

And with Tenet still fresh in the mind, it seems relevant to revisit a similar backlash that occurred around Interstellar's release - another Nolan movie that received criticism for its muddy soundscape.

Amid complaints that some of the dialogue in the film was inaudible, Nolan described the sound mix as "adventurous and creative", while also offering an explanation for why the dialogue is difficult to hear. Basically, he used it as a sound effect, meaning that it was mixed underneath a lot of the surrounding noise:

"There are particular moments in this film where I decided to use dialogue as a sound effect, so sometimes it’s mixed slightly underneath the other sound effects or in the other sound effects to emphasize how loud the surrounding noise is."

Fingers crossed that we can hear the characters in Nolan's upcoming atomic bomb movie, eh? That one does sound like it could be fairly loud.

Contributor
Contributor

Danny has been with WhatCulture for almost nine years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. He has been writing and video editing for 10+ years, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers and uploading them to YouTube (they're admittedly a bit rusty by today's standards). If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order or to tell you about the making of 1988's Remembrance of the Daleks, Danny is the person to ask.