Israeli Oscar hopeful knows the sound of Sandra Bullock’s heart
Niv Adiri, who grew up in Kfar Vitkin, is one of the four-man sound team nominated for an Academy Award for ‘Gravity’
Debra writes for the JTA, and is a former features writer for The Times of Israel.
Niv Adiri, the only Israeli nominated for an Oscar this year, grew up on a farm in the sleepy town of Kfar Vitkin in central Israel, often running to the village disco after classes to deejay. His childhood was pastoral, but it was punctuated by an obsession with sound and music — an obsession that eventually led him to the team of four sound engineers who produced the groundbreaking, ear-tingling audio of “Gravity.”
“I had this thing when I was younger that I wanted to know how to do one thing properly,” Adiri says in a phone interview from England, where he lives with his British wife and their two sons. “Everyone should know how to do one thing properly, rather than just going through life knowing things sort of.”
And what Adiri knows is sound. Like many Israelis, he headed to Tel Aviv as soon as he finished the army, and until the age of 25 worked as a DJ and sound mixer. The idea of sound — where it originates from, how it stirs people, and what components exist when it is broken down — has always fascinated him, he says. The curiosity served him well, when, after working on such blockbusters as “127 Hours” and “Slumdog Millionaire,” he and his team were tasked with mixing and creating the out-of-this-world sound for “Gravity.”
The film, in which Sandra Bullock plays an astronaut lost in space, has been hailed for its sound quality, and the ability of its production team to dream up an audio palette that is both realistic and stirring, despite the fact that in space, there literally is no sound.
The key, Adiri says, was parsing sound down into its barest vibrations.
“First we had to create the background to space, where there is no sound, but we had to fill it up with something,” he says. “It’s a sound that you hear but you don’t know you’re hearing it.”
What came on top of that were heavy vibrations, teased out from the high frequencies that humans hear and parsed down to their barest components. Bullock’s heartbeat, and the strange, almost “Star Wars”-like effect of her breath in a space suit, are so pure and spot-on that for the first time, film critics of “Gravity” found themselves focusing first on its sound and second on its acting.
“You never really expect it,” Adiri has said of the flurry of accolades. “Sound is always such a big part of a film, but from very early on, it was obvious that the film would be big and we knew it would be pushed, because it is sort of breaking new ground.”
Next on tap for Adiri and his team is the Holocaust-set “The Book Thief” and the British thriller “Black Sea,” starring Jude Law. But Adiri, who has lived in England ever since moving there for school at age 25, is trying to take it all one step at a time.
“I was born in a little village and used to milk the cows before school. This is all surreal for me,” he says. “You just do what you love doing and keep on doing it.”
The Times of Israel Community.