SoundWorks Collection Interview Series - Geoffrey Patterson - Sound Mixer of "Beasts of No Nation"

This week we talk with sound mixer Geoffrey Patterson who worked with Director Cary Fukunaga on his most recent film “Beasts of No Nation” which is currently available on Netflix.

Geoffrey’s additional film and tv credits include True Detectives, House of Lies, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, Deadwood, The X Files movie, Twister, and The Usual Suspects.

ABOUT BEASTS OF NO NATION:

With war approaching their small West African village, the mother, sister, and baby brother of the principal character, Agu, a preadolescent boy, leave for the capital, but Agu and his father, older brother, and grandfather stay behind. All the men in the family are shot dead by the army except Agu, who flees to the bush. He is soon found there by a battalion of the rebel Native Defense Force, which first threatens to kill him, but coerces him to join them as a child soldier.

Soon after subjecting the new recruits to a bloody initiation, “Commandant”, the battalion commander, forces Agu to kill an unarmed man. That becomes the first of numerous violent acts Agu is forced to perform. As Agu is forced to leave his childhood behind, he reminisces about the past: his family, his childhood, and how he used to read the Bible every day. He fears that God hates him for killing others and befriends a mute boy named Strika. Together, Agu, Strika, and their NDF comrades face the crimes and hardships of war: looting, rape, killing, and starvation.

Commandant meets with Dada Goodblood, the supreme commander of the NDF, who originally promised to promote the commandant to general, and who promised to have him leading the battalion to take the capital, is instead demoting him, claiming that this is a battle for public image, and that obedience is all that the commandant has.

Agu loses track of time, understanding only that he was a child before that war but has become a man in a seemingly never-ending trial by fire. He wants to stop killing but fears that so doing will get him killed by Commandant, a brutal man who manipulates Agu.

Commandant eventually leads his men to break away from the NDF and seize land and natural resources for themselves. After several months spent fruitlessly mining for gold in their new territory, Agu’s battalion, starving, diseased and out of ammunition, abandons Commandant and surrenders to a United Nations armed forces patrol. Agu and the other children are placed in a rehabilitation sanctuary for child soldiers who were traumatized by the war. Agu tells his counselor that he has done some terrible things, but he won’t go into detail. Instead he tells how he used to be a good boy, how he came from a good family, and that his family had loved him. The final scene shows Agu finally joining the other boys as they swim and play in the ocean.