Movie sound design, in my opinion, should be approached in almost all cases with an impressionist mindset rather than an ultra-realist one. What we’re attempting to do is rarely to make a sonic photograph of a moment, where every detail is evident and exactly as you would expect to hear it. Instead, we try to give the audience a strong impression of a place or an action, an impression that will be made even more powerful by omitting or subordinating lots of details. Our tendency is to assume that everything in a scene that could be making a sound IS making a sound. But the way we experience films is absolutely not identical to the way we experience life. A film is much closer to a dream. When we remember our dreams, we don’t remember more than a few details, and they are almost always the most interesting/compelling ones.

The mixes I’ve worked on have received their fair share of criticisms, a lot of them justified, but one compliment I’ve gotten consistently over the years is that my mixes sound “clean,” “precise,” “uncluttered,” with “lots of detail.” That seems ironic, given that I’ve just said I believe in getting rid of tons of details.

The solution is all about choosing the details carefully, rather than splashing buckets of them into the speakers. It’s about featuring the best, most evocative details, and that includes background details. A distant-sounding bird, or car-by, or wave-lap, strategically placed between lines of dialog will read as a background.

But, you say, what about “air?” Don’t we need “air?” Sometimes we do, though less often than you might think, and less complex than you might think. “No Country For Old Men”, directed by the Coen Bros., is a master class in the use of simple, uncluttered air. Hats off to Skip Lievesay and the Bros. I think our team did a reasonably good job on the Bob Zemeckis film “Cast Away” of keeping the ambience on the island simple but powerful.

There are never more than a couple of sounds being heard at once, but they’re evocative and completely plausible as a sonic atmosphere.

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Obviously, you should give directors whatever they want if you would like to get hired again. But in my career, “too much sound” has been their critique a hundred times more often than “not enough sound.” Often, the dynamic will be that they will seem to want lots of simultaneous sounds initially, but as post progresses and the mix progresses, less becomes more, especially with those thickly populated background ambiences.