A wife begins to suspect there are sinister happenings at her husband’s workplace in Director Olivia Wilde’s thriller, Don’t Worry Darling.
Wilde’s film finds 1950s couple Alice and Jack living in a utopian experimental community for the workers of a top-secret project. But when cracks in her supposedly idyllic life begin to appear, Alice can't help questioning exactly what is really going on in this paradise.
On September 20, after the DGA membership screening in New York, Wilde discussed the making of Don’t Worry Darling during a Q&A moderated by Director Reed Morano (The Rhythm Section).
During the conversation, Wilde spoke about her inventive mixture of sound effects and music in the film. “Skip Lievsay, who also did my last film Booksmart, was part of our rerecord team here in New York. On the first day I said, ‘Skip, now we get to play,’ because this film was in so many ways more abstract, and sound could become this character and we could have a lot of fun with it and really take risks. So, we played with so many different ways to use the music and the effects. It's a big reason I really want people to see it in the theater. Sound makes such a huge difference. So much of it is like that subliminal rumble that is completely imperceptible on an iPad. It was a real joy to understand what character all of those sounds and that the music could play that felt so essential to the story and sometimes not have to rely on dialogue or even the visuals in some moments to communicate. It was like, just allow people to kind of feel the emotions almost subconsciously because of sound.”
Wilde’s other directorial credits include the feature film Booksmart; music videos for Red Hot Chili Peppers and Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros and the short film Free Hugs. She has been a DGA member since 2018.
You can listen to Wilde's Q&A by clicking the podcast episode embedded below. You can find more DGA podcast episodes here.