The 2019 MovieMaker Sundance Survey: Eleven Sundance-Selected Films, and Their Mountain-Bound Makers

The Sound of Silence (U.S. Dramatic Competition)

Who: Michael Tyburski, director and co-writer

Logline: A successful “house tuner” in New York City, who calibrates the sounds in people’s homes in order to adjust their moods, meets a client with a problem he can’t solve.

My favorite scene (or shot) in the film is: everything we shot in Central Park. I officially feel like I made a proper New York movie now that I’ve staged scenes there. Everyone knows Central Park when it’s lush in the summer, but I really wanted to shoot our scenes pre-spring bloom. The branches on the tress all look like massive black veins against the sky. It’s quite beautiful that time of year.

An audience watching my film probably won’t know that: the main character’s soundproof home and workspace was actually one of our noisiest locations. The most expensive thing in our budget was: professionally having to remove (and then rebalance) a pool table from a location that shouldn’t have had a pool table.

The biggest lesson I learned making this movie was: moviemaking is a marathon and not a sprint. It really takes an entire year to make one of these things, and there will (eventually) be time to get it all right.

A darling I had to kill along the way was: shooting in the Metropolitan Opera House. Years ago, I fell in love with the score desks at The Met—a section of seats that afford no view of the stage, but have a small desk and reading light where music enthusiasts can follow along. It’s the perfect secret space in New York City that our main character would know about. Co-producer Kristie Lutz and I tried hard to pull some favors and find a backdoor in, but we kept on hitting red tape. I finally settled on building a mini version of our own at one of our other locations. Fortunately, our incredible art department was able to recreate it better than the original.

When I heard we got into Sundance I: briefly lost feeling in my legs. I was definitely standing on both feet at the beginning of the call, but was on the floor by the end of it.

I would love to meet a distributor in Park City.

Michael Tyburski, director and co-writer of Sound of Silence. Courtesy of Sundance Institute