Leslie Shatz and the scattering of my undead brainsssshhhh...

Leslie in studio..maybe recording pool table' sounds??!

In a moment of boredom at my parent’s house back in Italy I turned on the TV and started zapping through the tragedy of the Sky channels. Suddenly everything stopped and I snapped out of the room and found myself underneath a shower of broken glasses cutting through my brains. This is kind of what I felt the first time I watched the shower scene from Gus Van Sant’s Paranoid Park. Without taking away any credits from Van Sant’s amazing visuals, what makes this scene so special to me is the sound design and the resulting perfect synesthetic marriage between the image and the sound.  Searching through the imdb database I soon found out that the man behind this sonic magic is a regular Van Sant’s collaborator called Leslie Shatz. One of his first jobs was as dialogue editor for ‘Apocalypse Now’ and the year after for ‘Star Wars: the empire strikes back’. Since then it seems like he worked in loads of productions that I really enjoyed. As sound designer for The assassination of Jesse James, Gomorrah, The Road, Elephant, Dracula, and only as sound re-recordist for others, which are definitely not in my top 10 best films ever (Rambo 4, Van Helsing, Hidalgo). Finally I’m watching Paranoid Park from beginning to end for the first time. Because last time I started watching more than half way through, many things now start to make sense, but hey! If you didn’t watch it yet try to do it from the shower scene and then rewind to the beginning the second time around. So here’s a video of the scene. Enjoy. Ps Crank up the volume pleeease!!! Signing off..