At the Recent Media Production & Technology Show in London, Resurface co-founder Ben Nemes had the opportunity to discuss the sound of The Deepest Breath, Netflix’s much talked-about feature documentary, with the film’s composer Nainita Desai and Re-Recording Mixer Greg Gettens.
A full transcript of their conversation, along with the audio recording, is below.
Ben Nemes: Well, good afternoon everyone, thanks for being here for the last session of the day here at the Audio Theatre at the Media Production and Technology Show 2024. My name is Ben Nemes, I’m the chair of this session today. So without further ado, let’s get into it. I’m joined today by Greg and Nainita to talk – about the sound specifically – on a really amazing piece of work that many of you may have seen.
Actually, let’s do that. Show of hands: who watched The Deepest Breath on Netflix? Very good. And so you’ll no doubt agree with me then that it was, it’s one of those things that sort of stays with you. It was, it’s a bit of a gut punch at times.
It’s, in equal measure, really quite disturbing and really quite beautiful. And, because of that, we thought we’d talk about the approach to the sound of The Deepest Breath, because the sound on that show does a lot of that work.
Why don’t we start with, particularly for those who haven’t seen it, why don’t we start with a clip. It may be self-explanatory from this clip, but it’s set in the context of an extreme sport called free diving, in which people do insane things.
This is the opening titles, essentially, we’ll be seeing. So one more little announcement I should make is that there are going to be spoilers. I don’t think we can really have some of these conversations without some plot points, but statute of limitations on spoilers has elapsed, right?
Nainita Desai: It’s nearly a year. Coming up a year.
Ben Nemes: So, sorry if you haven’t seen it. But you know what? I watched it again recently, in the run up to this (because I’m a professional!). And actually, even though you know what happens, it still does it. It still kills you.
So I’m unapologetic about that. First things first just to define roles and sort of terms of reference. In what you’ve just seen and in the show overall. Can we talk about, it may seem obvious, but it isn’t to everyone, to talk about your roles. Nainita, why don’t you go first? I mean, composer, I think everyone understands, but just from what we’ve just seen, pick apart your part of that, I suppose.
Nainita Desai: Well, let’s go straight for the jugular with the opening titles. So, I spent about a year working on this film. We were in the edit for about a year before [to Greg] you were on it for a while. Yeah, about 12 months before we got serious. So one of the briefs, well, it’s a love story and I’ve never scored a love story at heart.
The score had to cover a wide emotional dynamic range, a wide range of emotions. You’ve got the stunning seascapes – I’m a very visually inspired composer. So the cinematography, the re-enacted dramatic reconstructions that you’ll have, which are absolutely beautiful, scattered throughout the film that had to have an epic sonic landscape.
It’s the power of, with the opening titles, the power of nature. And so we brought in these big thundering drums to evoke, to mirror that. And alongside that, it’s the story of Stephen and Alessia. So the score had to encapsulate these two parallel stories. And then within that, amongst that, the thrill and the dangers and the perils of freediving itself as a very dangerous sport, without it falling into the cliches of let’s do a Red Bull sports documentary.
Ben Nemes: It’s an extreme sport. But, Yeah. Let’s not go down that road?
Nainita Desai: You’ve got the deeply interior nature of the journey of the free diver, and how do you get across that stillness and the immersive beauty of being inside the diver’s mind under the water, and what they’re going through.
It’s the antithesis of an extreme sport, which is traditionally very adrenaline based. With this sport, you have to be, it’s meditative. You have to be at one with yourself and you’re slowing your heartbeat right down.
Ben Nemes: It’s all about slowing down, not about speeding up.
Nainita Desai: Yes. So the beauty of nature amongst the perils of the deep, that all had to be encapsulated into this score.
Ben Nemes: There’s also some themes, you’ve touched on already, that you need to cover off, that we’ll come back to as well, because there are several themes in the film, that are kind of self evident when you think about it.
On to you, Greg. Your role in this is re-recording mixer.
Greg Gettens: Yeah, so I was head of a massive team that was working on the film from about 12 months before we mixed it. Unusually for this one, because we have a relationship with the editor Julian Hart, he was very into the sound from the word go. So we were watching cuts probably about 12, 11 months before giving them sound ideas and things like that to help them fine-tune the cut.
So unlike Nainita, when I get it, I have people who work and do sound design. We listen to what Laura [McGann, Director] says.
We had Molinare’s foley department doing all the watery sounds because, as you can imagine, not much is able to be recorded in that environment. So when it gets to me, we have to put it all together, and Nainita’s score, it’s about finding how we carve out for the viewer the most important thing – which was trying to immerse them in the incredibly dangerous world of freediving.
And that was important from a sound design point of view, because there’s only maybe 10, 15. Less people have done freediving than have climbed on Everest, so not many people know what it sounds like, so we had to create everything from scratch working with Julian and Laura, and then try and work out how to weave the sound that we had done to Nanita’s wonderful score, and work out which should take precedence: When we should be forward in the sound and when we should be back.
Ben Nemes: I think that’s a big part of it. And one of the reasons why I wanted to have you both on the same stage at the same time is to explore that dynamic.
If we start off separate and then we’ll converge. So if we talk a little bit about, actually, Greg, you just touched on it. The sound design brief for something that’s occurring 104 meters (as it turned out), below the surface of the sea.
That may as well be the moon. As in, as you rightly say, there’s a handful of people that have ever heard what that sounds like, and for many that have, it was the last thing they ever heard, I should imagine. If you are hearing what it sounds like a hundred meters down, you’re in a certain amount of trouble, generally speaking!
So from a sound design point of view, it may as well be science fiction. But then there’s part of it we do know. We do know what the difference between being above and below the water sounds like, we’re all kind of familiar with how sound changes as we’re immediately immersed in water from swimming pools and seas and whatever else. If you can tell us a little bit more about how you approach that, given you don’t have sound effects libraries, other than from about three meters down.
Greg Gettens: Well, the whole thing about what we tried to achieve is that we spoke to Laura at great length, because she does have experience in the freediving community, and she had spoken to the divers and what we try to get across is that at the top, it’s all very nice and sort of sort of bubbly sounds and it feels really good.
It’s underwater, but the opening shot in the film is about six minutes of one diver going down. Now, how do we keep that? The shot was amazing, but how do we make the sound exactly the same brilliance as the shot? So as they dive down, we’ve got millions of layers coming through. At the top, it’s all nice and bubbly.
Then as you go down, as Alessia explains, the sound sort of dissipates, and you get a darker, more tonal and textured sort of sound. And then as you get all the way to the bottom, Laura said it’s important that we feel the pressure. So at the top, we’ve got very high frequency, sort of thin soundscape, but as we go down to the bottom, you’ve got the big rumbles and the sort of whales going on and things like that.
And then the reverse on the way back, but lots of EQs and different techniques to get you right the way down there. And then the reverse on the way coming back up. But it was trial and error, because we would do something and she’s like, no, that you wouldn’t hear that down there. I’m like, okay, well, I thought you’d hear certain things…
Ben Nemes: Who knows?
Greg Gettens: Exactly. But it had to be from the divers perspective, and it had to be as authentic as possible, whilst being entertaining. Because in reality, when they’re down there, Alessia, it was like, it’s silence. There’s nothing, you can’t hear anything! But we can’t do that, so we have to create the silence through very, very low frequency stuff.
Ben Nemes: It seems to be that both of you have a part in this. And, again, we’re going to come to how you intertwine those, but as you go deeper, as you go beyond what any of us can (I almost said ‘fathom’ there, that’d be really bad pun). Beyond what any of us can understand, you have to portray this sense of threat and of jeopardy and of pressure.
The physicality of it is, that at that depth, your lung is the size of your fist, kind of thing. And that comes across really well. Nainita: As a composer, do you get words like that in a brief? Do you say, well, we need to understand how your lung is the size of a fist? How does that manifest in music?
Nainita Desai: Well, I was just going to say, Greg talking about the low frequencies, I think one of my pet sonic hates in my career is doing films and shows set in underwater landscapes, because it’s such a technical challenge. So, as well as having to score while thinking about the sound palette, I had to think about the frequency ranges that I could sit comfortably with.
So there is a scene towards the end of the film, we call it the fatal dive…
Ben Nemes: Whoah, whoah! Spoilers!
Nainita Desai: We just called it the fatal dive! You don’t know what’s going to happen. But there’s a very complicated series of events, that happen in this 12 minute sequence, and it’s very difficult to see visually as well. And when you watch it, you won’t realise that there’s music all the way through it.
But, it’s scored in sympathy, knowing that the priority has to be the sound design, and also where these two characters are on the screen, and what’s going on, and the time is also very important. You’re racing against the clock, and what’s happening time wise.
Ben Nemes: Time is a big theme of that fatal dive.
Nainita Desai: So just to help with driving the story forward and the narrative forward, I had to signpost things. This was a challenge in the edit. We spent months editing this scene where we go, well, what is going on?
We don’t know. And it’s like working out a big action sequence where you don’t know who’s fighting who, where is everyone in the choreography of the scene. So that’s something that I had to help signpost musically using specially constructed sounds, knowing that I needed to stand out against the bubbly stuff that was going on.
Ben Nemes: I think it’s maybe time for another clip because, for those who’ve seen it, and those who haven’t (spoilers): It’s fundamentally a love story set in the context of an extreme sport. The two central characters, Alessia and Stephen, have their own backstory they come to this with, and they ultimately fall in love and come together. And then there’s a dive at the end where their fate is intertwined…and something happens.
There’s a point where they meet, where Alessia has got to a certain level at this sport, but is kind of thwarted in her efforts to be the best, and needs to raise her game a little bit. And she enlists the help of Stephen to get her to the next level. And so their relationship begins as they start training together.
Their training involves holding your breath and going a hundred meters down, and not dying, which is kind of all you can do. I think this kind of brings us a lot into the sound design that we’ve just been talking about – about depth and breath and air – and the music works as they go deeper and then they emerge.
I think that clip’s really demonstrative of what we’ve talked about so far, and everything we’ve chatted about is in there. I don’t know what to go with first. Well, Greg, let’s talk about it, because it’s more of a pragmatic level, which is talking about the sound design of depth, and as you get shallower and then emerge, because we talked about themes that are in this, there’s love, there’s danger, there’s death, and it sounds kind of obvious because of the title of the piece, but there’s breath, there’s air.
And that’s really apparent in that, because there’s that moment when you breathe again. From a sound design and a mix point of view, and then from a musical point of view. And then we’re going to get into how you two interact.
Greg Gettens: From a sound point of view that’s a great clip you’ve shown, because there’s three bits that are original sound in there.
And that is when Alessia just talked to Steve and says, “Oh, I did it”.
Ben Nemes: This is archive. This is production sound from there.
Greg Gettens: Everything else in that two minute clip: The sound was being created through sound design, through foley, the splashes on the sea. Lots of raindrops, that was all created in post because that was 99 percent mute.
So as you’re going down, that’s all created by the sound, for the surface sound of a nice splashy sound, we had a couple of people in a hot tub over a weekend, making all those sounds. So you can kind of see the challenge we were up against, because the film is an hour and 50 minutes, and it’s all like that.
And as you say, at the very top, all nice and bubbly. But, hopefully as you saw from the clip, as you go down, the high frequency sounds dissipate. It’s mixed in Dolby Atmos, so it makes a lot more sense when it’s all around your head. But you get down to the bottom and there’s a pulsing sort of sound, and there’s a lovely pulsing in the music as well which is there, but it’s just about making you feel that in those 15 seconds, she’s actually doing 104 meters and then coming back up.
And trying to keep you always feeling that there’s a danger, a lot of danger there, they’re not just diving to the bottom of the swimming pool, they’re going all the way down to the bottom of the ocean of at that point.
So we had that and, from that clip, you can see where the music takes over from the sound. We’ll start off with the sound on the surface. Everybody’s in the shot. Everybody’s listening. Everyone’s talking. And then we go underneath. All the frequencies go out a bit. We’re with sound for the first sort of 20, 30 seconds and then the majesty of the score takes over.
Ben Nemes: I think on the score front, this is where the two characters’ stories collide. So, Nainita, I’d love to know a bit more about how you establish the characters, and where they are in their lives, and how this is really probably one of two moments of intersection.
Nainita Desai: So the score you hear at the end of that scene there, actually carries on and takes over for another two and a half, three minutes, I think. And that is one of the pinnacle moments in the film – it’s their love theme.
And it’s the first time you hear it. So the early discussions that I had with Laura, we never lost sight across the year that I was working on the film, in the core discussions that we had on the conceptual side that we evolved: which is to have two different sound palettes. Two different styles of musical approaches: One for Alessia and one for Stephen.
Ben Nemes: So they had their very own… And this is some way into the film, right?
Nainita Desai: Yes, so we established very early on that, why don’t we use the sound of: She’s a woman, she’s a freediver, why don’t we use the sound of female voice?
But also, the reason to have that is because the whole concept of this film is based on breath. It’s about freediving, so even the way that we used the human voice was in a very breathy, airy, textural way. So she’s the core sound.
There’s one scene earlier on in the film, a third of the way through, where you see the 12 year old Alessia. I actually cast a 12 year old singer, a girl, to sing for that particular cue, so that the age of the voice progresses as Alessia gets older through the film as well.
It’s a very subconscious effect on the score, but those are the decisions that we make. With Stephen, he’s on this emotional journey, this quest, he’s searching for himself.
Ben Nemes: He’s trying to find himself, doesn’t know what to do with his life.
Nainita Desai: Yes, and so there’s a lot of energy, there’s a kinetic energy to the score, we wanted to drive things forward, and we settled upon a very sort of organic sound palette of small chamber strings, and a cello sound for him, which you hear in there in that cue. And using subtle electronics, the human voice, and the piano. And that’s basically the entire sound palette for the score. So when you hear, and when you see Stephen, you have his driving strings when he’s traveling across Africa in the first part of the film.
You see Alessia, and you hear the voice, you hear the female voice. And then when they meet for the first time, and there’s this connection between them, you hear the collision of those two sound palettes coming together.
Ben Nemes: Because that scene we just saw, is that moment. That’s the first time. You’ve established – and we’re familiar with – Alessia and Stephen’s sounds. And then, this is fascinating, because this is when they come together, this is when they collide.
Nainita Desai: Yeah, and then you hear it in its full form again towards the end of the film, and it’s the big emotional culmination of their themes and what happens to them, but filled with positivity in a hopeless world towards the end.
Ben Nemes: So what I want to get to next is: Given how much there is going on. We’ve talked a little bit about the sound design and the mix and the weaving together of what you have in the way of archive sound, and what you have to create from scratch and imagine from scratch, and the amount of work the score does in telling the story of who they are and what’s happening to them and where they are in their lives and the danger they’re facing.
I mean, even on Netflix, when you hover over it, it says “Threat“. I think it’s a 12. It says Threat. There’s a lot more than threat in this film! There are people basically dying in this film, (warning!). So, I guess what I want to get to next is, given all of that, and given how intense that is,
How do you guys not trip over each other? How do you find that balance of making room for one another to tell this story?
Nainita Desai: Well, I supply stems to the dub. And there were lots of discussions about the very strong emotions in this film, and Laura was slightly concerned about not over-egging things emotionally too much. And that comes from the score.
So I had to show restraint. But sometimes, in the same way that the director wants to take the audience on an emotional journey, the music has to do the same thing. And so when we were in the dub, I would get rough cuts of the film over the course of the year. So I knew that I would be relying on Greg and his team to craft a beautiful sonic landscape.
Because the sound effects that I was given were a mess because they were rough, there was a lot of work that had to be done by the audio post team. So when we got to the dub, that was the first time that we heard everything in its full dynamic range and all the frequencies and all the different layers of elements.
So we had to, the team of Laura and Greg and so on, had to craft the score very carefully amongst all the other effects that were going on.
Greg Gettens: So as Nainita said, the stems were the most important part of the delivery.
Ben Nemes: We should probably, for those that don’t know, just define what we mean. It’s one of those words that gets misused a lot, bandied about.
Greg Gettens: Okay, so when you think of a piece of music, all you’re hearing is the final piece of music. When you work with Nainita, you get lovely stems, which are all the different ingredients, shall we say, all the constituent parts of the score, the kind of food groups, if you will. So there’ll be like 14?
Nainita Desai: Sometimes, yeah: Strings separated. Drums. Piano. Cello. Electronics… Everything’s stemmed out, everything’s separated. So particularly with the opening titles, that was a beast of a cue. A lot of time was spent on that. I did so many different versions and we brought down the viola melody halfway through.
You can hear it in its full glory on the soundtrack! But in the context of the film, that was brought down to carve out space. I think Laura didn’t want so much emotion in that particular opening.
Greg Gettens: So the benefit of having the stems is that you don’t just have to bring the music down.
You have 14, 15 different food groups of instruments and things so that if something in particular is – getting in the way is probably not the right phrase – but there are things that are occupying the same space. They’re both important, but they’re occupying the same space.
So all through the film we had to do probably the most amount of stem work that I have done, and that’s not because of any other reason other than the music was so brilliant and we wanted to keep it up as much as possible. But if someone’s speaking or we need a big rush of water or the bubbles are getting in the way, then we can just take down the offending stem.
And that means that we can keep the music really, really high and without clashing with voices. Because there’s a lot going on in the whole thing.
And you have to remember that the story is told by Alessia and Stephen and the other participants. You have to give them the respect. So that the people at home can hear the story.
Ben Nemes: I guess you need that flexibility as well, in terms of mentioning the most stem work you’ve done, because the story takes place sonically at so many different parts of the frequency spectrum. It’s not all set in the desert.
Greg Gettens: Laura was very particular about the different parts of the music that should poke through at specific points.
Ben Nemes: You can be quite quite surgical about where you need to be and what you you need to make room for?
Nainita Desai: When I’m working on this on the score, I don’t know what I’m going to be hearing sound wise. So sometimes I’m overcompensating musically for all these elements that are going on. And then when you hear it in its full context with the sound it’s “Oh, right. Okay”.
So there is conflict sometimes sonically. So on a technical level, we’re having to give space. And the most important thing always is the story and the characters.
So that’s what’s leading, and dialogue is always king as well. You’ve got to hear what’s going on in terms of dialogue and the story. So I’m amazed when I watch it, I can’t fathom [!] how the score punches through so much, because score is important and the sound is important as well.
Ben Nemes: A really good example of that is in the opening titles that we showed at the beginning, where the score is in full effect and at the same time, a whale comes into shot. And those two things are going to be in conflict. Whales are famously quite loud.
Greg Gettens: I think that really set the tone for the mix, because that’s the first piece of music that comes in, and I think it’s about nine or ten minutes into the film.
Everything before that had been sound, and then we’ve got this glorious title music that we had to thread sound effects through. So I think that was probably about half a day just doing those two minutes, because the sound was working brilliantly, the music was wonderful, but putting the two together – you just had to find the passage that you could get through, because you need the waves crashing at a specific point at the same time as the piano is coming in.
That’s where our crossover really happens. Nainita is right up to the wire composing, because the final cut is 2 or 3 weeks before we actually start the final mix. And so we won’t have heard what Nainita had done, and she won’t have heard what we’ve done. So the crossover is working out ‘what are we going for there’.
We’ve got quite a bit of the same sort of sound sonically in there. So are we favouring that stem or that music, or are we going to go just on sound there? And that’s why the stem is vital. And as I said, it was mixed in Dolby Atmos. So the 14 stems were brilliant to have because we had a different upmixing plugins on every single stem so that we could put things in different places.
Ben Nemes: It’s making room as much as anything else? Not just ‘that should be over there’. It’s giving everything space. Coming back to this air, breath, motif we’ve had all the way through this. It’s giving things time to breathe.
So this is Spoiler City again. But quite apart from the exquisite work done throughout the whole show in creating and then knitting together all this stuff, there’s a big moment in the show where (and I mean this in the nicest possible way), it’s silent. There’s a moment, there’s a beat of silence which is as powerful as anything. It’s not what you put in, it’s what you leave out, I guess?
Greg Gettens: Well, that is the culmination of the dive, the fatal dive.
There had been lots going on there. I think it was a very long sequence where they go down, lots of sounds, and it culminates with them breaking the surface and then someone saying “I had to see what had happened”. And so the decision there: They faded to black. So it was a very emotional moment.
And Laura just wanted nothing, except for the person who is going to be speaking next. Slight sniffle, slight breathing, and out of the darkness you can hear coming out of the silence, and see who it is. A huge moment.
There were a couple of versions of that. But obviously this is the best one. But when I watched the digi cut, because of the nature of the story and the clever way it’s told, you don’t really know what’s gonna happen.
And then, at that moment of silence, where you do feel like you’ve held your breath for the last five minutes, silence.
You hear some sniffling, hear some breathing, then the fade up to the reveal, and then you arrive at… ah.
Ben Nemes: We haven’t really given it away. You know what? Even if we did, it doesn’t matter. I swear, if you’ve seen it, watch it again. If you haven’t seen it, watch it!
We’ve run out of time for today, sadly, but it remains only to thank you all for coming and to thank Greg and Nainita for spending time with us this afternoon to explain their approach to this extraordinary piece of work.
Thank you very much indeed.
Thanks to The Media Production & Technology Show, which returns to Olympia London on May 14th and 15th 2025
