INCEPTION Sound Designer Richard King Keeps It Real

My brother and I are huge fans of director Christopher Nolan. Besides his Batman films, his mind-blowing film The Prestige convinced us that smart science-fiction still exists. The science-fiction film Inception, about a group of thieves stealing from dreams, opens nation-wide July 16th. Over the next few weeks, we’ll be doing daily posts on the development of the film.

PART 5 of 12

Richard King is an Oscar-winning sound designer for War of the Worlds, Master and Commander, and The Dark Knight. On Inception, he told Wired how he created the sound effects for a pivotal scene where a train crashes through the middle of a city street. “Starting with real acoustics gets audiences to believe in what’s happening onscreen – even when it’s a complete illusion.”

So, he added recordings of real freight trains to the car crashes, and other sounds. “I wanted to create this incredibly scary, heavy, huge-sounding machine running free of its usual physics,” he says.

It sounds like Nolan is giving as much care to the sound as he is to the images. It should be spectacularly loud.

Does Inception sound loud enough for you?