Netflix’s The Killer marks sound designer Ren Klyce’s 13th collaboration with David Fincher on a project spanning film and television. Their creative partnership resulted in Klyce receiving six Academy Award nominations, most recently for 2020’s Mank. (Klyce also received three other Oscar nominations for Disney-based work.) His work with Fincher excels creatively based on a shorthand gained from decades of idea sharing and artistic challenges that often redefine the relationship between sound design and the audience.
But Fincher’s creativity and way of looking at a scene different can still strike fear in the hearts of his filmmaking partners.
Take the climactic fight sequence in The Killer between Michael Fassbender’s Killer and Sala Baker’s Brute. Traditional filmmaking and sound design would have incorporated fight-based vocalizations (grunts, etc.) within the audio.
But Fincher had different ideas for the scene.
“David all of a sudden realized let’s not have the vocalizations — another idea of David’s that terrified us in the sound. Once you take away that, then what do you have? You’re naked, if you will, in sound,” Klyce laughed. “So we had to fill in the absence of the vocalizations with other sounds that were very aggressive. What’s so great about David is that he comes up with these ideas that immediately make people like me very uncomfortable creatively.”
It’s that style of rising to meet the challenge artistic constraints placed upon Klyce that makes him one of the very best working in the industry.
Without traditional grunting or large amounts of lighting within the scene to characterize The Brute’s size and strength, Fincher relied on Klyce to provide key character information in vastly different ways. For example, Klyce underscored the weight discrepancy between the two characters (The Brute at 250+ pounds; The Killer at under 150 pounds) by using low frequency, heavy base sounds. Since the fight occurs in Florida in a house on stilts, Klyce layered sounds of glass shattering and objects breaking with sounds representing vibrations or buckling within the house itself. Fincher even wanted a moment where a character punches a hole through the wall to be supported by individual sounds of the drywall hitting the floor. All of that elaborate sound texture pushes this fight sequence into new territories for the filmmaking team, even if a few grunts were inserted into the final mix.
But these collaborative ideas are typical of a relationship honed over decades of a filmmaking partnership between Fincher and Klyce. The Killer offers a seemingly standard assassin story that ultimately subverts the genre by twisting expectations, and the crafts behind it similarly subvert expectations of how traditional action sequences are made.
For example, outside of his voiceover performance, Fassbender’s Killer only has around 10 to 12 lines of dialogue in the entire film. His assassin character is an observer, a patient man impossible to read. A blank slate. Given his preference for silence, the world of The Killer becomes extraordinarily sensitive to its sounds or even absence of sounds. In fact, it’s the absence of sound in one specific sequence that reinforces the perspective from which the audience views the action.
“David and Kirk [Baxter, editor] were trying to figure out the architecture and the rhythm of when we would hear the voiceover. In the very beginning of the film when we’re in Paris, we hear him speaking inside of his head for a really long time. What David and Kirk figured out was the there were shots where we’re looking at The Killer and then there are shots looking through The Killer’s eyes,” Klyce explained. “They discovered that it was much more interesting to never hear the voiceover when we were looking through his eyes. When we look through his eyes, whether it’s through the scope or looking down at the Paris streets or wherever he may be looking, that would have a different sound, usually really loud music from The Smiths. Then, it gets really quiet. Then, it gets really loud, and it gets really quiet again. David started falling in love with this idea of the crazy loud / quiet thing. That started a whole other progression of sound whereby the sound effects and the sound textures that we’re hearing would change dramatically, depending on those perspective cuts.”
One sound theme closely related to the character of The Killer is that of metal. Sound designers like Klyce love metal sounds because it’s a very expressive sound with a variety of textures and tones. Of course, there are the expected metallic sounds associated with an assassin: guns, cars, storage shelters, license plates, and so forth. But The Killer’s fastidiousness and obsession with detection avoidance leads him to drink throughout the film from a metallic cup, resistant to fingerprints. The sound design needed to include interactions between the cup and other metallic surfaces or even an airplane fold-down tray.
Something as simple as the persistent sounds of a watch alarm provide a great deal of subtext about who The Killer is as a person. He’s constantly monitoring his heart rate throughout the film, looking for a resting heart rate beneath 60 beats per minute. That allows the appropriate timing queue during which he can fire his gun between heart beats. Later, just before the fight with The Brute, his heart rate increases rapidly, alerting the audience to his fraying nerves in anticipation of the massive fight. He even takes the watch off and hangs it from the rear-view mirror to avoid the stress-inducing sound. These sounds may appear to be innocuous details of the film, but they serve to deepen our experience with The Killer while giving Klyce and team ample challenges in their sonic landscape.
A sequence toward the end of the film primarily dominated by Tilda Swinton’s monologue as The Expert posed significant opportunities to underscore the overall sense of dread within the scene.
“David wanted to have it feel like she’s just getting in right before the closing time, and the kitchen is about to close soon. He wanted to have the scene busy enough but then slowly getting quieter. As that quietness dissipates, it would be interrupted by what I like to think of as the escape hatch of her fear,” Klyce revealed. “There’s a noise that comes in and out that David wanted to have, which was the kitchen door opening up in this explosion of freedom, if you will. People are in the kitchen laughing and cleaning up, and they’ve got their own music playing back there. They’re having a great time, but she’s begging someone to notice her. The sounds that intersperse throughout that sequence were really interesting things to place.”
Klyce is also celebrated for his work in the Pixar world, most recently on this summer’s Elemental. While both the worlds of Pixar and David Fincher strive for the same excellence in filmmaking, there’s something unique about Fincher’s attention to detail. He allocates a longer production window to challenge his creative partners with fine tuning the film in unique ways. The goal is to create a luxurious cinematic experience filled with rich, character-defining details.
And it’s that challenge, that creatively vital artistic constraint, that keeps Klyce and team coming back for more.
“The artistic constraint is what makes you excited. It’s exciting because you have limited tools, and then you have to make do with that. It’s almost a survival instinct in a way, which is fun if you allow it to be fun.”
The Killer streams exclusively on Netflix.
