Posted by Vincent at ac9c75d5.ipt.aol.com on May 13, 2001 at 14:52:40:
In Reply to: Vincent: ABP Questions posted by Drunken Uncle Hal on May 13, 2001 at 14:07:56:
: 1) I have a question about the Skywalker sound mix. I was talking to my friend Rob about the film a few days ago. He was with me the last two times I saw ABP: once with the old sound (NYC), once with the new sound (Vulgarthon). He commented that the film somehow seemed much more violent the last time, and I agreed: for some reason that we couldn't put our fingers on, the violence seemed more... gruesome, I guess. And the audience's reactions to the violence were bigger than the other times I'd seen the film. Rob thought the difference might've been due to the sound mix; he particularly thought that at the end of the locker room fight, when the bully (Todd?)'s face was slammed down, there was more noise to go along with the impact.
: So, are Rob and I right, or are we just stupid? I'd love to be able to compare the sound mixes in the violent scenes, to see how much of a difference there is.
Yeah, the new sound mix did make the film more violent. In particular, a couple effects that never quite worked now have a lot more impact. The worst was when Barret clocks Ryan in the head with a rock at the end- that always got a nervous chuckle with the old sound mix, but at Vulgarthon 2000 with the new Skywalker "thunk" sounds added, no such chuckles were heard.
Also re: the locker room fight. I cut two shots out of the scene where Ryan is realy pummelling Todd- these always got nervous laughter, and I think by elliminating them and making the fight REALLY quick and to the point, it has a lot more impact. I also cut a close-up of Barret's father lying dead on the ground in the opening. As contradictory as it sounds, sometimes by cutting actual screen violence, it makes the film seem MORE disturbing and effective.
: 2) I just saw those screenshots on News Askew. Which scenes are those with the sound mix comparisons?
The opening of the film up until it cuts to Ryan (so you can also see how the opening scene plays with and without the close-up of Barret's dad as noted above), the scene in the High School courtyard (not much crazy sound effects or surround action here, but I wanted to show how Skywalker was able to almost entirely elliminate the LOUD, DRONING sound of the high school air conditioning system that was all over the dialogue tracks for this scene), and the scene where Todd attacks and beats up Ryan on the beach, probably the film's showstopper when it comes to sound design (and again, you'll be able to see one of the more subtle changes I made in making the director's cut- the addition of the 2-second clip of Young Ryan finding his dead parents ater the cut to black and before the fade in the next day).
: 3) Can you tell us what the deleted scenes are, or should I just shut up and wait until June? I was trying to see how many I could identify; I got the one where Ryan buys the gun, the one where Ryan talks about books and Barret talks about life, and the one you've mentioned which would've been Augustine's final appearance, when she sees that something's wrong with Barret.
: Love love love.
One is a scene between Barret, Augustine, and Eddie that would have occured right after the high school court yard sequence with Ethan Suplee. It's a funny scene that solidified that Eddie has accepted Barret into his fold, but it was unneccessary overall to the film so I cut it for time.
One is an uncut take of Ryan spouting off his world view in the Mortar Battery, which is a lot more extreme and vicious and way over the top.
As noted above, there are three scenes that were in the festival prints but that I cut or trimmed for the new cut. One is Barret's "Reginald Freely" dialogue after Ryan talks about Sartre, one is the first minute or so of the Barret and Augustine walk-and-talk, and the longest is the big gun buying scene.
One is the scene between Augustine and Barret where she realized something is troubling him and tries to get him to talk about it, but he won't and they get into a big fight and she overhears Ryan on Barret's answering machine. This is easily the most unfinished scene and you HAVE to watch it both with and without the commentary to get what's going on, since we never recorded Ryan's dialogue for the answering machine and these segments are silent with Augustine and Barret reacting to nothing, plus there's a shot missing.
There's another one that was left off those thumbnails accidentally but is being added, and is a short bit of dialogue between Barret and Ryan during the climax that I cut.
Vincent