I saw Mon Oncle for the first time in Sweden in 1999. I bought it on video. I’ve since seen Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot and Playtime.
I’ll be honest, it took me a while to get into Tati’s movies. I think he’s an acquired taste.
From what I read, he shot his films silently and composed the sound track afterwards he would build the sound landscape from scratch.
In Playtime, for example, the sound effects are equal on the soundtrack as speech, which meant the background are often as loud on the soundtrack as sounds coming in the foreground.
But with his films, the sound really dominates and can border on cartoonish.
So starting with Falling for You, my first feature, and continuing with my next two films, sound design was something I was really conscious of.
With Late Winter, the medium length film I made, I tried to think about how I could take the soundscape beyond the realistic sounds we’re used to hearing in a lot of Hollywood/western films.
So it became more experimental. As the character I played felt his isolation encroach on his day to day existence, I played with bringing the outside sounds into the house. I also wanted to try to capture when his loneliness or sadness would take hold of him. So I would add in white noise.
Then I was basically a conductor. Choosing when the sounds would overwhelm and when they would recede. Towards the end, the sounds build into a crescendo and are all happening at once.
Late Winter, so far, is my most experimental film. I want to carry those lessons learn from Tati, and enacted in this film forward into future films. But being mindful of naming sure the sound design matches the style of the movie.
