Diksha Sundriyal
In ‘Disclosure Day,’ Steven Spielberg taps into the depths of human nature through a story about aliens. It begins with a whistleblower named Daniel Kellner, who is in possession of every document pertaining to the aliens that Wardex Corporation has been keeping secret from the world. He is working with a team led by another defector, Hugo Wakefield, but it is when Margaret Fairchild enters the equation that things pick up pace. While Hugo and his team had been working against Wardex for years, Margaret remained blissfully unaware of it until a red bird visited her in her house, leading her to unlock something that allows her to speak the languages she had never spoken before, especially alien. SPOILERS AHEAD.
Emily Blunt Came Up With the Alien Sounds
One of the most memorable scenes of ‘Disclosure Day’ is when Emily Blunt’s Margaret starts making weird clicking sounds on live television. We later discover that this is the alien language that she has somehow started speaking, along with Russian and Korean. In real life, Blunt cannot speak any of those languages, though she does harbor a love for them. She learned Spanish in school and has since had the desire to learn more. However, she didn’t have the time to become fluent in Russian and Korean, so she focused entirely on the dialogue at hand. She received help from multiple dialect coaches and focused on the phonetics, dedicated to getting them right and delivering the dialogues authentically.
To keep her options open, she even asked her teacher to record the lines in different emotions, like when they are angry or sad. She honed in on the different variations, finding the correct tone for Margaret, who is in a chaotic mindspace when she speaks those languages without even knowing she is speaking them. As for the alien language, she had much more freedom. She and Spielberg discussed what they wanted to do, and the actress experimented with making a range of strange and weird sounds. She remarked that she sent “endless voice memos of various bizarre sounds” to the director, who wanted “a kaleidoscope of noises.” She created a mix of clicking sounds, humming, strange breathing, consonants, and singing like Barry White.
During the recordings, the microphone was put on her mouth and throat, so the sounds she made were captured with different variations. Notably, Spielberg told her and sound designer Gary Rydstrom that he wanted the language to sound mathematical. He thought a click-based sound would deliver on that effect. He also noted that while he wanted it to be “strange and unsettling,” but not scary. Once Blunt had done her job, Rydstrom took over. He layered the actress’ sounds and fine-tuned them. He also found more sounds through animals. For example, they recorded some weird sounds being made by the cat of one of the editors. He even tried to capture sounds from his own pets.
At the same time, he also used inanimate things, like the hiss from his coffee beans canister. A mix of all these things allowed him to create a truly unique sound that eventually made its way into the film and became the basis of the alien communication. It also appears in the videos about aliens, which are played to Jane and then to the rest of the world. While there were all the experiments and the technical aspects to it, the one thing that Spielbeg had clarified in the beginning was that the sound of the film must reflect its core concept of empathy. Rydstrom and other sound designers kept that in mind while working on the sound, ensuring that the ripple of the story’s soul is felt throughout the film. All these details made the sound more real, guttural, and impactful.
Read More: Disclosure Day Ending Explained: What does Listen Mean?
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