‘No One Will Save You’: How Lack of Dialogue Created Abundant Opportunities for Superb Sonic Storytelling:

Sci-fi/horror film No One Will Save You (now streaming on Hulu, or Disney+ internationally) tells an intense story – all without the use of dialogue. Here, award-winning supervising sound editors/re-recording mixers Will Files and Chris Terhune talk about recording and cutting an extensive and expressive breath track, designing mysterious sounds, making an impactful mix in Dolby Home Atmos for a streaming audience, using sound as an effective storytelling tool, and much more!

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Interview by Jennifer Walden, photos courtesy of 20th Century Studios; Hulu. Please note: Contains some spoilers

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Sci-fi/horror film No One Will Save You (produced by 20th Century Studios, and distributed by Hulu) has only one line of dialogue in the entire film. It was a bold choice by writer/director/producer Brian Duffield – one that works exceptionally well. The story is told visually, of course, and through its expressive use of sound. The breath/reaction track communicates so much of protagonist Brynn’s emotions, while the foley brings you into her experience of the world, including her encounters with out-of-this-world visitors. The aliens (aka, the grays) have their own language, and ‘talk’ to each other using a variety of different sounds that express different emotions. In fact, the grays do more talking in the film than the humans do!

Here, award-winning supervising sound editors/re-recording mixers Will Files and Chris Terhune talk about their early sound work on the film which helped the VFX team to create the visuals for the aliens, how they created the sounds for the aliens, what challenges they had in mixing without having a dialogue track as an anchor, and what freedoms that afforded them. They talk about the production sound and the ADR session to record breaths. They also share what went into their favorite sound storytelling moments in No One Will Save You and more!

No One Will Save You | Official Trailer

When did you get started on No One Will Save You? What were some of the first things you tackled?

Will Files (WF): We got started before director Brian Duffield even went to shoot, which was great. That doesn’t always happen and it’s always cool when it does. Luckily, some of our friends at 20th Century Studios got in touch with us early on and said, ‘We’ve got this cool project, with no talking, and it seems like it’s up your alley.’

We got started before director Brian Duffield even went to shoot, which was great.

We had a chance to meet with Brian at that point, to read the script and talk through some ideas about how to approach it, which is super cool because that’s always the dream, right? We had a chance to interact with the director before he even went to shoot the film, to talk about ideas beforehand, because sometimes it might even influence the approach on set.

Chris Terhune (CT): The first thing I remember is after our initial meeting, they linked us up with the visual effects supervisor. They were creating assets based on Brian’s initial concepts, workshopping some ideas he had for the different kinds of aliens (aka, grays). They were rendering and addressing notes – going back and forth – and then we got involved.

I started creating sounds in a vacuum, just talking to Brian about how the different aliens could sound, and that we’d need to create this language for them. It was like throwing paint at a wall.

Then we got in touch with the visual effects team and started creating assets for them. We got into this creative feedback loop.

Then we got in touch with the visual effects team and started creating assets for them. We got into this creative feedback loop. For instance, this vocal is undulating so maybe the alien’s neck is doing this vibration thing through its chest. These things were really key to dial in early on in the process, especially for VFX to have a better direction.

It was a unique situation to be involved that early with the VFX.

WF: It’s very seldom that we have a chance to impact the design of the creatures themselves, which was cool. More so than on any other film we’ve done, the sound was leading the VFX in many places. I remember there were times when the VFX people were actually waiting for us to finish our sounds before they could finish their work. Usually, it’s the other way around!

More so than on any other film we’ve done, the sound was leading the VFX in many places.

CT: It’s funny because that’s when I realized that we’re on the hook for the performance, right? Often there would be an early rendered visual of this thing that’s not really moving around in this shot. And so they’d ask us to have sound do something. It could be anything. So Brian and the picture editor Gabriel Fleming would get involved. We’d say, ‘Here’s a performance, but don’t look at this image because it’s not doing anything.’ You have to rely on their creative opinion on how this thing is moving based on sound, and the vocalizations. There are a lot of people involved, but everyone has to have a hand in it for it to really work.

What went into the sounds for the aliens? They make a large range of sounds that are meant to portray a varied range of emotions. Did you use a vocal artist? What else went into the sounds?

CT: Usually for things like that, I get a mic and turn the lights off and just get super weird. I usually try some candid performances and start to create a library of my voices. Then, I cut a track of my voices and slowly replace things or dovetail from my voice into some creature sounds. There were so many different versions of things that we sent. My voice is in a lot of it and ended up being some of the gray, but it’s mostly parrot sounds.

I cut a track of my voices and slowly replace things or dovetail from my voice into some creature sounds.

Later on, to give it an oral posture so it felt as though the sound was actually coming out of this alien, we started using talk boxes. We’d run sounds through a talk box, so we could manipulate them with the shape of our mouth and perform it that way.

WF: It gives it more of a language component. One of the things we talked about with Brian early on was that the aliens should feel intelligent. They’re not just supposed to be scary; they’re supposed to feel as though they’re speaking a language, even if we can’t understand what it is.

So one of the tricks we used was to take these exotic sounds from parrots and koalas and all kinds of other things, integrate them with the sounds that Chris was doing with his own voice, and then run that through these talk boxes and formant filters to give it the sense of intelligent thought so it’s not just random sounds.

…the aliens should feel intelligent. They’re not just supposed to be scary; they’re supposed to feel as though they’re speaking a language…

That also helped us tie together all the different variations of the aliens because there were lots of different sizes and configurations of them. In Brian’s mind, they were all of a similar race and would all speak the same language, but they were just different. It’s almost like a beehive in that there are different roles that each type of bee plays, but they’re all still bees. It was the same kind of idea.

One of our challenges was to give them all their own character, but also still have them feel like they’re somehow tied together from the same DNA.

CT: For the alien we called ‘Daddy Long Legs’ (the main, big alien), we mostly used koala sounds. They have these crazy sounds when they’re in heat. They’re growly and they get really resonant. So we leaned on that. Even the breathing was mostly sourced from koalas, and we ran that through a talk box.

For the alien we called ‘Daddy Long Legs’ (the main, big alien), we mostly used koala sounds.

The loud screaming, when the alien is on the roof making that low conk, conk, conk sound, was created using wood being stuttered on different surfaces and then processed, limited, and distorted. But the majority of it was mostly sourced from koalas.

WF: We used a few mixing tricks to make that alien sound feel massive for a streaming audience. Even though we mixed in a theatrical mixing environment, and we mixed it quite loud, we knew people would be listening to this at home. Those big moments still had to feel big for home viewers who might not be listening at the same SPL we were listening to on the dub stage. One of the biggest audio tricks we used was reverb and echo because any sound that’s big enough to echo through the trees is going to naturally be pretty damn loud. Your brain just automatically understands that.

Another thing we did to make it feel big was to add a certain amount of distortion and saturation to the sound…

Another thing we did to make it feel big was to add a certain amount of distortion and saturation to the sound – giving it that type of sound as if a microphone was being overloaded because it was so loud. That gives your brain the sense that the sound is really loud and powerful, even though it isn’t necessarily super loud in terms of sound pressure. So we’re doing a lot of tricks like that throughout the film to try to give the sense of power and scale to sounds without having to just rely on sound pressure.

CT: It’s also tricky to think about the low end, especially because many people watch on their TV, so you can’t just lean on the subwoofer. You have to really think about incorporating low frequencies that just go through the mains and not just to the subwoofer (on its own sub path). That might feel good in a big room but then once you watch it on TV, all that low energy is gone.

WF: Obviously, for anyone who does have a sub, we’re going to want to shake the room, but we’re also paying a lot of attention to the low mid-range and adding harmonics in that range. This also creates the perception of sounding full and bassy, even if the speaker can’t really reproduce anything in the actual low-frequency range.

What format did you mix this in first? Was it Dolby Home Atmos? Or 5.1?

WF: We mixed in Dolby Home Atmos. Most people have 5.1 – that’s by far the most common format – but the good news is that Dolby Atmos mixes down very well to 5.1. We’ve actually found that, in a lot of ways, the 5.1 mix sounds better if you start mixing in Atmos first. It’s like if you shoot a movie in 4k and then watch it on a DVD, it’ll still look better. Even though you’re not getting the full resolution from the DVD format, all the resolution that it was captured with is still represented in some way.

…the 5.1 mix sounds better if you start mixing in Atmos first.

I feel it’s the same way for sound. If you’re mixing in a higher resolution format and then funnel that down to smaller and smaller formats, you still get the benefit of all the extra care that was put into panning things around the room and making the choices that we made when we were in the mixing theater.

Since you didn’t have dialogue to act as an anchor for this mix, what kinds of challenges did that pose?

WF: Mixing the dialogue and editing the dialogue was actually surprisingly difficult on this film. Even though there wasn’t any dialogue, there was still a ton of vocalizations and breathing from all the other characters. And they did shoot production sound; the whole film was shot with full sound. We had a dialogue editor and she actually worked really hard to clean things up, to try to salvage as much of the original on-set performance as possible. Actress Kaitlyn Dever (as Brynn) had quite a lot of emotion happening in her breathing and her exclamations, and we wanted to keep as much of that as possible.

Even though there wasn’t any dialogue, there was still a ton of vocalizations and breathing from all the other characters.

We also did a full ADR pass of efforts and breaths for Brynn and all the characters in the film, which we then layered on top to hit certain emotional beats.

Mix-wise, it was really difficult because normally you do have dialogue as the anchor of the mix. And in this case, it was probably more anchored around the sound effects and to some degree, the music. I don’t want to say we were ever necessarily lost, but it was an interesting thing to navigate around, to find what’s our reference point here.

CT: I do feel the absence of dialogue gave us some freedom to do something we don’t usually get to do, which is to pan the dialogue. Since the main character was not talking, we had the freedom to move around her breaths and sounds (from production and ADR), and not just keep her in the center of the screen. As a result, there’s a ton of ambience fill in No One Will Save You.

Once you start panning the dialogue…you often have to reduce the noise more than you might otherwise.

Will and I were really watching each other’s panning and then performing it together as she was moving around. That was a lot of fun to actually take the production and just move it.

WF: That, of course, creates a whole bunch of other challenges. Once you start panning the dialogue, especially if there is noise on it, you often have to reduce the noise more than you might otherwise. Then you have to backfill the center channel so that it doesn’t feel like it’s going away. You have to build multiple layers of fill so that you can pan things around without it feeling like the noise of the world is just getting sucked out as she’s being panned from one side of the room to the other.

There’s quite a bit of sleight of hand happening to give us the freedom to pan her all around the room.

CT: Yeah, it’s a dance with effects, foley, and production, just trying to be accurate with the panning so you don’t feel like anything’s disconnected. That was a really big challenge for the dialogue and effects mixing on its own.

WF: The foley moved around just as much as the breaths and exclamations. We almost treated the production like sound effects. We would often pan the dialogue and the foley together. As Chris said, we were either performing it together or sometimes I would do a pan and then send it over to his system so he could import the pan or vice versa.

The pans would match perfectly so that things wouldn’t feel disconnected because there are so many moments in the film that are so quiet, that you would actually be aware of any of those inconsistencies in the panning.

There are so many quiet and ‘heightened-awareness’ moments in the film, where the foley gets to play louder than normal because that’s how Brynn perceives it. For instance, Brynn is trying to slowly back up the stairs and she decides to slip out of her shoes to make her feet less noisy. The sound of her taking off her shoes played so prominently, giving you that feeling of panic, like, ‘Sssshhh, the alien is going to hear you!’

WF: That was an interesting moment because it was a question of how loud could we make this while keeping it plausible that the alien wouldn’t necessarily hear it.

You want it to sound heightened because she’s in this super-heightened state of listening. She’s taking her shoes off and the camera is right next to her shoes, so we wanted to play that up.

..you’re trying to be very specific with all her breaths and sounds, so even though we’re not seeing her, we can feel her holding her breath…

But we also wanted it to be shocking when she took a step back and the floor creaked. We had to leave ourselves somewhere to go on that, all while keeping it plausible that the alien wouldn’t hear her shoes but would hear the creak.

But we also wanted to play up the shoes as much as we could so that everybody was holding their breath.

So it was a bit of a dance and it took us a few passes to really get those levels so that it felt like we threaded the needle between all those ideas.

CT: On the other side, you’re trying to be very specific with all her breaths and sounds, so even though we’re not seeing her, we can feel her holding her breath and taking that beat – doing all those little things that you’re not really paying attention to, but it’s making you hold your breath as well. You’re trying to be quiet with her. So it’s a total dance of all those elements just to find that right balance.

Let’s go back to that breath track. For most films, the breath track is largely a subconscious element for the audience – one they don’t typically pick up on. In this film though, it’s taking the space that is traditionally reserved for the dialogue. What did the ADR session for the breath track look like? Was it a full day? Half an hour? How extensive was the ADR for this element?

WF: It was a full day. Brian was there directing her. It was a full pass with Brian and Kaitlyn digging in and figuring out what she would do here, how would she feel, and those types of things.

CT: I think they literally did a pass on the entire movie.

WF: Literally from top to bottom. I think there were a few places where they went through it a few times.

Even in the mix, there was often a question of, ‘What else do we have there? We need something more scared here,’ or, ‘We need something more confident here.’

There was a lot of thought and effort put into exactly what type of breath she should be having from moment to moment.

Dir. Brian Duffield made a bold choice of eschewing dialogue between the characters. The story is predominantly told with sound effects and the breath track. Sound really helps to tell this story, both on-screen and off-screen. What was your favorite sound storytelling moment in No One Will Save You?

CT: I like the rule we came up with when she’s in trouble and you can just feel everything shift. We did a lot of mixing with the backgrounds when it came to that. We tried to set it up with crickets and life and normal environment sounds that you get used to. Then once things started happening, we started slowly peeling things away until there was just one cricket left and you can feel that whole mood shift. There’s just something eerie about it, and it just makes you feel like she’s not safe. We started working that in the mix, and it was really effective. We started that in the first scene of the spaceship.

WF: I enjoyed the part near the end of the film when Brynn is in that trippy state. We go into her head and it gets more emotional. She’s remembering her friend and things are shaky and in and out of focus.

We effected the music so it starts swirling and almost melting a little bit – this supports what we were trying to do there emotionally…

We did a lot of stuff there that we normally wouldn’t get to do in a movie. We had a great composer, Joseph Trapanese, who’s game to do weird stuff with the music and we were putting sounds in the sound design that were helping to support her frame of mind at that moment. We were doing some cool treatments on the dialogue. This part is one of the only times you hear dialogue in the whole film, but it’s very echoed and twisted and weird.

The fun thing there for me was that we manipulated the music quite a bit as well, in ways that maybe the audience didn’t even really recognize. We effected the music so it starts swirling and almost melting a little bit – this supports what we were trying to do there emotionally, which is to get in her head emotionally and psychologically, to help the audience experience that with her.

This wasn’t one of those mixes where the music and the sound design teams were fighting. It was very much a collaborative, combined effort.

It was fun to have the freedom to do something as exotic as take Joe’s music and really mess it up. I was a little nervous when we played it back for him, but he was like, ‘Hey, that’s great.’

It’s fun when we get to work with composers like Joe and our music editor, Bryan Lawson, who were also very into the idea of blurring those lines between music and sound design. This wasn’t one of those mixes where the music and the sound design teams were fighting. It was very much a collaborative, combined effort. Both sides had a lot to contribute, but I don’t think there was ever a moment when one of them got in the way of the other one, which is great.

What scene was the most challenging mix-wise? What were your challenges?

CT: For me, it was the little alien that we dubbed ‘LF.’ He’s just so loud and so sharp. Most of his sounds were sourced from my dog, actually. But there were times when we would work on it for hours and have to just put it down for a bit.

WF: He’s meant to be annoying. The whole design of his voice was supposed to be like your annoying little brother. And, it’s annoying. It’s hard to grind on a scene like that when it’s a sound that’s designed to annoy you.

CT: On top of that, we have all the grays do ritual chants, too. I’m like, ‘Oh boy.’

It’s hard to grind on a scene like that when it’s a sound that’s designed to annoy you.

WF: There are a lot of crazy ideas that were thrown out throughout the mix. There was the spirit of, ‘Yeah, let’s try that.’ It was, honestly, one of those movies that we were so deep in it when we were mixing that by the end of it, we didn’t even know what we ended up with but hoped it was good.

CT: They forced us to stop at some point.

WF: The studio was like, ‘Okay, you have to stop.’ And they ripped it away from us because it’s the kind of movie that we could have probably kept mixing for weeks and weeks if there would have been the time and money to do it. It’s almost limitless in its potential because of the nature of it.

It was one of those films that by the time we were done with it, we had lost all perspective and we hoped it was good. And it was gratifying to see that when it came out, a lot of people responded to it positively – not only the movie but the sound too.

When you have fun while working on something, I think that comes through the work and people have fun listening to it…

WF: Yeah, and the movie is a weird wacky movie. It’s the kind of movie that doesn’t get made very often. I feel super lucky that they asked us to work on it and that we had such a great creative collaboration with Brian. He’s so full of ideas, both for sound and for storytelling. He’s our favorite kind of client because he really takes sound seriously as a part of the storytelling process and uses it for what it does well.

Brian wasn’t afraid to make a bold movie full of bold choices, and a lot of those were mix choices as well.

How has working on No One Will Save You influenced your thoughts on the use of sound in filmmaking?

CT: It’s just being really intentional with what your characters are doing and just understanding that this is a storytelling process. Don’t just have a sound there to have a sound, but understand how it will benefit the story and the emotion the character is having.

With something like this, it was so important to be very specific with every little thing you put in. I’ve carried that on to all my other tracks – if it doesn’t need to be there and if it’s not servicing the story, then I don’t think it’s worth going down that avenue of creating a track for something that’s not pushing the needle and helping that story to be told.

A big thanks to Will Files and Chris Terhune for giving us a behind-the-scenes look at the sound of No One Will Save You and to Jennifer Walden for the interview!

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