This year’s awards contenders feature no shortage of scenes with snappy dialogue, powerful speeches, spectacular action sequences and ear-popping musical numbers. But many of the most powerful moments were those that unfolded without a word.
In “Past Lives,” writer-director Celine Song tells the story of South Korean childhood sweethearts reuniting after years apart. She often communicates their mutual longing using silence in the way a composer might utilize a specific instrument.
“I really believe that a movie is a piece of music,” says Song. “So the whole film has to move like a piece of music. So much of it has to do with the rhythm of it.”
Song indicates that her work as a playwright prepared her for these types of moments. “I am used to building in beats and silence into my own scripts, so all the silences were scripted,” she says.
The two main characters, Nora (Greta Lee) and Hae Sung (Teo Yoo), haven’t seen each other since they were children, before Nora left for Canada and then New York. When they reunite as adults, there’s much to be said, but their inability — or unwillingness — to express their feelings verbally simultaneously keeps them at a distance from one another and binds them more tightly.
“There’s a level in which it’s meant to be uncomfortable. It’s meant to seem like these two people are not of the same world — and they’re not,” Song says. “The way that these silences have to work, we need to know what was said before and after. There’s no literal language, but there is the language that is happening in their performance, on their faces.”
Unspoken moments also play a big part in David Hemingson’s script for director Alexander Payne’s “The Holdovers.” The story of a teacher (Paul Giamatti), student (Dominic Sessa) and cafeteria head (Da’Vine Joy Randolph) stranded together on the campus of their New England boarding school over holiday break features lengthy dialogue-free scenes that evidence how the characters behave when they believe no one’s watching them while also underscoring their mutual isolation in the 1970s-set film.
Inspired by one of his all-time heroes, Hayao Miyazaki, who conceived the notion of “ma,” or a moment of rest in a story, Hemingson credits the animation legend for his use of silence when writing. “The choice to slow down and be silent in an animated film seems almost antithetical to the medium,” he says. “But it’s a narrative technique which allows the audience to catch up, and weights certain things in a way that grounds the fantastical and amplifies the emotional. The more you clear out the dialogue, the more you leave room for feelings.”
Hemingson points to a scene in the film where Sessa’s character Angus sits alone in the school’s chapel, unknowingly observed by Randolph’s character Mary as she contemplates her son’s death.
“It’s almost like music — musicians work with a canvas of silence, how they fill that silence provokes these certain emotions,” says Hemingson. “I wanted it to be a rest in this symphony, where everything got quiet and we allowed this thing to happen and we have these two beautiful soloists [Randolph and Sessa] filling that silence without speaking, they’re filling that silence with emotion.”
Randolph noticed the silent moments on the page when she first read the script.
“You’re seeing dialogue and then there’s a moment in the script where it turns into prose, sort of like a novel almost,” Randolph says. “It’s a deeply descriptive narrative for the silent moments.” She spoke with Payne about how to approach these moments, and he emphasized how important those opportunities were to him to drop in on characters during moments of solitude.
“My favorite scenes to direct are not only wordless but often involve directing one person at a time,” says Payne. “I like the old maxim, ‘Character is who you are when no one is looking.’”
Payne says he immediately recognized that the detail Hemingson put on the page would translate easily to the screen. “There is an extremely important connection between production design and performance. The actors must be made to feel that they know their environments,” he says. “We always hear about actors creating their characters from the ‘outside in,’ but that ‘outside’ doesn’t stop at articles of clothing and hair arrangement.”
Echoing Payne, Randolph says her room “wasn’t just a set piece. It was an atmosphere, very well lived-in and highly detailed. I then had to learn how to become comfortable and own the space.” She indicated that Payne’s unhurried direction gave her ample opportunity to portray Mary. “Everything was given the appropriate amount of time, if not more, to give what the moment required.”
Silence also provides a connective tissue between audiences and characters in stories where the traditional rules of naturalism or realism do not necessarily apply.
Adapting Taichi Yamada’s 1987 novel “Strangers,” writer-director Andrew Haigh’s “All of Us Strangers” depicts a young man named Adam (Andrew Scott) vacillating between an imagined past with his deceased parents, and the tentative present of a new relationship with his neighbor Harry (Paul Mescal). Haigh explores themes of loss, loneliness and redemptive love without descending into the common tropes of time travel or ghost stories.
Editor Jonathan Alberts worked with Haigh to leverage unspoken moments that bridge Adam’s transitions from one reality to the other. “A lot of those conversations had to do with dialogue and the absence of dialogue,” says Alberts, a one of Haigh’s frequent collaborators. “Focusing more on this kind of a wordless dream state and creating a kind of a tone poem, we wanted a certain amount of dislocation.”
Exercising subtle effects like off-synch sound, lighting, focus and other elements, Haigh, Alberts and cinematographer Jamie Ramsay created a sum from these transitions that added up to something greater than their individual parts.
“Because they’re not just transitions to get from one place to another, it was always about what is happening emotionally for the character,” says Alberts. “Where do we want to start and where do we want to land?”
Recognizing his specific responsibility to capture not just image and motion but emotion, Ramsay worked with Haigh throughout production to craft powerful moments, some utilizing a full panorama of techniques and others scaling various elements back. “I feel that there’s so much strength in what’s being held back. People underestimate the intelligence of the audience, and I feel very strongly that we shouldn’t do that,” he says. In the end, Haigh, Alberts, Ramsay and their fellow artisans worked successfully in concert with one another to convey the complexity of Adam’s journey — perhaps ironically, by amplifying the film’s silences.
“Trust that shadow means as much as light, silence means as much as noise, stillness means as much as moving around,” Ramsay says. “All of that is so important.”
