Indie Focus: The musical side of bulldozers

A small, determined cadre approaches a location — be it a hospital, bank, symphony hall or power station — not with destruction in mind, but creativity. In each place, members of the group use objects on-site to perform musical compositions. The group’s interruptions and shenanigans get its members labeled “terrorists” by the authorities, but their actual goal is anything but the spreading of fear: They want to turn the world upside down to find unexpected beauty in the mundane and everyday.

That’s the premise of the new movie “Sound of Noise” by Swedish filmmakers Ola Simonsson and Johannes Stjärne Nilsson, which opened in Los Angeles on Friday. It’s an extension of their 2001 short film “Music for One Apartment and Six Drummers,” and the feature combines musical numbers with a caper plot, a touch of romance and a deadpan sense of humor.

“It was something we liked when we started with the short film, combining music and crime,” Simonsson said in a phone call from Sweden, giving some sense of the origins of the film’s dry sensibility.

The filmmakers have known each other since childhood. Nilsson, 42, pursued a degree in art while Simonsson, 43, is a conservatory-trained musician, and “Sound of Noise” is a happy combination of their different fields. They share writing and directing credit on the film.

“It really started us on our experiment,” Nilsson said of the initial “Six Drummers” short. “We wanted to see if we could make good, snappy, preferably danceable, music from ordinary household objects.”

“We set up a kind of challenge when we did that short — we wanted to do something that put the music and sound as a main character in the film and that it played an equally important role as the image in storytelling,” added Simonsson. “So we brought some of these ideas with us when we started on the feature. We tried to make the sound of music very important for the story and make it like a character.”

The process of expanding the short to a feature was more complicated than they had expected. Working with a sound recordist, they created a library of more than 20,000 sound files that they shared with composer Magnus Börjeson — who appears in the film as the composer of the group’s music — for him to combine into the musical pieces heard in the movie. Another composer, Fred Avril, also created a more conventional score for those moments in the film that do not feature music by the location-based ensemble.

Though they initially had ideas for about 15 musical scenes, Simonsson and Nilsson pared down the number of interludes in the film so as not to diminish the impact of what they used. They didn’t want to turn the story into what seemed like a string of music videos. The creation of the character of a tone-deaf police officer named Amadeus, who comes from a musical family and now wants to hear only silence, gave them the spine they were looking for. Amadeus is played by Bengt Nilsson (no relation to the co-director).

“We had to get the story right,” said Johannes Stjärne Nilsson. “We didn’t want to have the musical scenes like in musical films, where the actors sing and dance for a bit and then the story continues. We wanted to have the music scenes inside the story. So there were some painful discussions before shooting.”

Each musical sequence required its own grammar of how to visually convey what was happening on-screen, with intense planning, storyboarding and choreography and shooting with multiple cameras.

“It is both like a music video but also an action scene and also storytelling and it all has to make sense,” Nilsson said. “If you can’t connect these sounds you hear to what you see visually, you lose the humor in it.”

The most ambitious sequence took place outside a symphony hall, with members of the ensemble playing construction equipment such as bulldozers and jackhammers. The sequence combines footage shot in an actual location with other footage created on a warehouse set that allowed more leeway for the destruction that was to be part of the performance.

“It was especially difficult to make the heavy machines musical,” Nilsson said. “They’re not really made for music, you know. It’s quite impossible to play it right.”

Nearly two years after “Sound of Noise” premiered at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival, Simonsson and Nilsson have remained actively involved in promoting the film — their first feature — as it has played around the world. Last year, they traveled to nearly 20 countries with the film, and the pair found it played remarkably the same to audiences anywhere, be it in France, Ukraine, the Czech Republic or South Korea. The music became its own language.

“I think there is some kind of logic to it,” Nilsson said. “There is a language that everybody shares in music; the recognition of sounds is really borderless. You have a relationship to sounds that you can suddenly explore as music.”

Simonsson and Nilsson have a few other scripts they have prepared and are hoping to shoot soon. Though they are leaving the drummers behind — “You have to move on,” Simonsson says with a laugh — they admit that their extended run with the film has not caused them to grow tired of it.

“It’s fine,” added Simonsson. “I still like the film a lot.”

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