The Sounds of 'Drive' - NYTimes.com Early in the awards season, the thriller "Drive" seemed poised to earn a few Oscar nods, namely one for its supporting performance by Albert Brooks as a menacing crime boss. In the end, that performance was ignored by the Academy, but the film did receive a nomination in the sound editing category. With a number of scenes propelled by dialogue-free moments, sound plays a significant part in "Drive," directed by Nicolas Winding Refn. He worked with the company Soundelux and one of its founders, Lon Bender. Mr. Bender and Victor Ray Ennis worked as supervising sound editors on the film and helped layer the many sounds that take the lead character, the Driver, played by Ryan Gosling, on physical and emotional journeys. Mr. Bender's credits include a number of Hollywood films like "Blood Diamond," "Braveheart" and "Shrek." But he said his experience on "Drive," an indie, gave him a new perspective on editing. Speaking by phone from Los Angeles, where he is at work on "The Hunger Games," Mr. Bender said he tried to use sound as a supplement to the narrative, a way to portray a character's mood and feelings. "Instead of dealing with the words and the structure of a scene," he said, "we deal with the subtext of what the characters are hearing, what the audience is hearing and how that expands on the goals of a scene." Select a Nominee...The ArtistExtremely Loud and Incredibly CloseThe DescendantsThe HelpHugoMidnight in ParisMoneyballThe Tree of LifeWar Horse With "Drive," Mr. Bender said, the European aesthetic of Mr. Refn, a Dane, made for an interesting experience. "It's different from an American director's aesthetic, insofar as he really wanted to home in, with laser efficiency, on a specific thing the main character was experiencing and he didn't want to have the world expanded beyond that," Mr. Bender said. Intent on putting the audience directly into the mind of the Driver, Mr. Bender and his team used isolated sounds and, sometimes, a lack of sound. An example is this early scene, in which Mr. Gosling's character is at the wheel of a heist getaway car. "You expect once the guys who are inside with the guns come to the car that they would race away with engines blaring and skids skidding," Mr. Bender said. But the scene wasn't built that way. Instead, working with Mr. Refn, the sound editors fashioned a scene that portrayed the Driver as a fish, while the police searching for him were sharks. And the sound simulates his psyche. When he pulls away from the heist, Mr. Bender didn't use engine noise but that of tires on the road. "You see the shot of a cop car in the distance," he said. I came up with the sound of just the tires going over a manhole cover. And that's all you hear. The sounds get more intense later in the scene, when the Driver heads onto a bridge and is seen by a helicopter. At that moment, as soon as he's spotted, the assault on his mind and the adrenaline he feels from being caught is all of a sudden portrayed in the sound. Everything just goes huge, with super loud sounds: engine shifts, helicopters, mayhem. Mr. Refn's involvement changed how Mr. Bender works. The process usually involves meetings and consultations during which sounds are played for the director, who provides feedback. Changes are made and a new version is brought back to the director. But for "Drive," Mr. Refn came to the studio and sat with Mr. Bender while he worked, tweaking the audio progressively. "All of a sudden I was doing performance art as opposed to offline art," he said. It was the beginning of more than a week of full-time, all-day experience with him involving the sound of that movie. Mr. Bender adopted this method for "The Hunger Games." Below the Line This series singles out behind-the-scenes players and their contributions to films competing during the movie awards season. Read More  Additionally, the sound editors were able to be a little more interpretive, as with the chase sequences. "In the sound world, there often is a propensity to want, at least for things like car chases, guns or weapons, to use sounds of the real weapons or the real cars," Mr. Bender said. "But when I went to Nic to talk about car engines and the specificity of the kind of cars they were, he said, "I don't even have a driver's license and I've never driven a car. I don't care what they sound like! They just have to sound exciting."" Mr. Refn asked Mr. Bender to look at the Claude Lelouch short film "C"était un Rendez-vous," shot from the point of view shot of a car racing through the streets of Paris. He wanted to mimic that kind of thrill, without being concerned about whether those sounds were always accurate. "We have several scenes where the Driver has his right hand on the steering wheel and clearly could not be shifting, but the sound of upshifting, downshifting and skidding sounds are happening," Mr. Bender said. And I never would have done that before. It was one of many ways Mr. Bender and his team used audio to create a sleight of hand for the audience.