Wartime Ambience

Because much of Charlie Wilson's War takes place in Afghanistan, the sound team had to be mindful of filling walla tracks with the right languages. Supervising Sound Editor Ron Bochar also added subtle desert-air tones to the tracks. All Photos: Francois Duhamel. Copyright: © 2007 Universal Studio.

There's a lot more to the audio for Charlie Wilson's War than meets the ear. The Mike Nichols-directed film about America's first experience with Afghanistan was penned by Aaron Sorkin, whose rapid-fire dialogue style, honed on his television hit The West Wing, is reprised — and then some — in the film. Combine that with multiple sources of production dialogue and reams of sound effects and sound design, and you get an audio backstory almost as complicated as the politics the movie portrays.

“They used a lot of lavalier microphones on the production audio, as well as boom microphones,” says Lee Dichter, lead rerecording mixer for the movie, taking a break from the stage at Sound One in New York, where both he and Nichols live. “Lavalier microphones are great at catching the dialogue clearly and cleanly, but because they're positioned about 6in. from the actor's mouth, they have a kind of unnatural quality to the way they sound — everything takes on this sort of intimate chesty quality, and that's not the way most people hear most of the time. It's a struggle to sink [the dialogue] into the ambience of the rest of the scene.”

The issue is compounded by the need to intersperse lavalier recordings with production dialogue from the boom microphones, as well as with automatic dialogue replacement (ADR) tracks that were recorded six months after principal photography ended. “There's a hot-tub scene in the film, and you know they're not using lavaliers on that, so you have to live with the sound from the boom microphones. [Location recordist Petur Hliddal] did a great job recording the production sound, but the reconciling differences between lavaliers, boom microphones, and ADR is the hardest part of mixing film dialogue,” Dichter says.

The solutions reside in adroit application of reverbs. Dichter says he likes outboard hardware, using the Lexicon M480L and the TC Electronic System 6000 processors because they are multichannel and they can automate scene changes via timecode. Ron Bochar, supervising sound editor and co-mixer on Charlie Wilson's War, says he has become fond of plug-ins for Digidesign Pro Tools, such as Digidesign ReVibe, to recreate ambiences around both dialogue and effects. He also uses elements from Waves' Renaissance Maxx bundle and the Waves C4 multiband dynamics processor plug-in for dialogue.

In fact, Dichter says, sometimes the starkness of the lavalier's sound works in their favor, allowing Bochar to establish the ambiences artificially, thus making the process of recreating them when lines have to be cobbled together that much easier. And Dichter says that the lavalier microphones are well suited to Sorkin's snappy dialogue, noting that the film benefits from the sense of immediacy their sound conveys, as well as the fact that script rewrites even deep into postproduction are now almost a given. “A character's name was changed from ‘Howard Hart'' to ‘Harold Holt'' after the scenes had been shot,” Dichter says. “It happens in several places in the movie, and we would take the looped word and do some major EQ changes to make the tone fit or pitch-shift it to get the inflections to match. You really can get down to a fine level of detail.”

Another reason the dialogue on Charlie Wilson's War is so complex is that in addition to Sorkin's intricate verbosity, Dichter and Bochar asked for Hliddal's raw production tracks, which were recorded to an Aaton Cantar-X2 eight-track digital recorder. “We jumped immediately into the reprint audio — all four production tracks, instead of the mixdown that the production department film editors usually supply you with,” Bochar says.

The move was based on improving workflow. “We wanted to find out where the problems might be, where there was a lack of intelligibility, and if there was another source that we could pull that line from rather than take the time and trouble to loop it,” Bochar says. “It also laid the foundation for the actual mix by letting us develop volume maps and figure out the processing in advance, instead of getting the movie two weeks before the mix and having to do a number of temp mixes. We did all of two temp mixes for this film — that was it.”

Bochar adds that using as much production audio as possible confers a psychological advantage in the predub stage. “There's a tendency to want to edit around a bad line of dialogue before you replace it, and that means you're making decisions around a problem instead of going for a flow,” he says. “Our intent was to avoid that issue.”

Charlie Wilson's War has a flow to it that the audio sought to maintain. “As a mixer, I don't want to make abrupt scene changes unless that's specifically what the director wants for a transition,” says Dichter, who adds that that's exactly what Nichols intended for several scenes towards the climax of the film. “We saved the dramatic cuts for the end, where they really have a greater effect.”

For most scenes, actors wore lavalier microphones, but for the hot-tub scene, location recordist Petur Hliddal used boom mics only.

Sound One's AMS Neve 72-fader DFC console was configured for the eight dialogue tracks that Dichter and Bochar had stemmed down to from the original 32. To that they added another eight tracks of walla in English and 16 more in various foreign languages. The mix of these tongues was critical in several ways. “Much of the film takes place in Afghanistan, so you need to have the right background languages,” Dichter says. “And the film will go to foreign markets, and some of them don't want any English at all in the backgrounds.”

These background walla tracks are incredibly complex and detailed, reflecting Nichols' obsession with precisely setting the tone. Care was taken to get exactly the right northern dialect of Pashto, with groups of native Pakistani and Afghan speakers assembled by ADR editor Deborah Wallach in New York and Los Angeles. (Overseas location shooting was done in Morocco.)

“You want to make it as real as possible,” says Bochar, who further layered the Pashto walla tracks with a sound design made from desert-air tones recorded on location and mixed with subtle mood tones drawn from his sound effects libraries. To recreate the barren landscape of a refugee camp in Pakistan, Bochar added drones from a keyboard synthesizer, which add a desolate note to the scenes and subliminally signal the pedaled drone strings of Middle Eastern instruments such as the sitar. Other walla tracks were also similarly contexted. In scenes that take place in the Capitol Building in Washington, D.C., reverberant ambiences were created to simulate the high-ceilinged chambers and hallways. “It's like foley — it's the backfill around the dialogue that gives you subliminal cues about where you are and what's going on,” Bochar says.

This philosophy extended to the mixing of these background tracks as well, with a subtle trick that viewers of The West Wing would likely find familiar. In a congressional hallway scene thick with foley, background voices, and sound effects — and with Sorkin's dialogue running at 90 miles per hour — Dichter and Bochar would carefully give certain cue words or phrases their own tiny space, allowing them to pop up for a half a second or so, interspersed with the main dialogue. “You'll hear the word ‘senator'' or the phrase, ‘Get this bill approved,'' here and there,” Bochar says. “They're just present enough to set the scene. [Nichols] always wants to hear a sense of ‘business as usual'' going on around the action. Sometimes you almost can't quite make out these words and phrases, but a part of your mind recognizes them unconsciously, and it adds to the reality.”

“Especially with close-miking used on the dialogue — there was no background ambience for a lot of it,” Dichter says. “It had to be created, and it was — in a very careful manner.”

Attention to detail in the sound effects covered the gamut from the minute to the epic. In one scene, actress Julia Roberts answers a late-night telephone call from her bedside. “We got exactly the sound of the phone, which was a Princess phone from the 1980s,” says Bochar. “But Mike felt the ring tone was too harsh for late at night. So we found one that was less distinct and then we added some additional tones to it that brought in the idea that you were also hearing it resonate through the wood of the nightstand.”

When it came to the battle scenes in Afghanistan, aficionados of military technology will be pleased to note that the film's sound comprehends the distinction between a Soviet-made helicopter with the NATO designation “Hind” and an American Black Hawk helicopter. “The Hinds have a very specific sound, and we happened to have a few in the library,” says Bochar, who goes so far as to suggest that the aircraft sounds in the film have a subtle, prescient link to the aircraft used in the Sept. 11 attacks.

But modern film sound reproduction reveals that the Soviet military in the '80s were, sonically, rather one-dimensional — Bochar had to add some Black Hawk sound effects to the mix to deepen the image; he further added a stereotypical “thwap” sound for the rotor blades using an FM synthesizer. “When you hear a jet-engine helicopter, the roar of the engine is so loud that it overwhelms the scene,” he says. “Adding the ‘thwaps'' gives the audience a sense of air being displaced, of movement of the rotor blades. It's another dimension you can get from sound.”

For all its complexity, the sound for Charlie Wilson's War is fairly confined to the front array, with the dialogue rarely deviating from the center channel — which is kind of like home base for Dichter. “I try not to move my dialogue around a lot, even in 5.1,” he says. “Unless a shot absolutely calls for a voice off screen or way to the left or right, I find that it's distracting. Not only does it suit narrative better, but I think that [the tonality of] dialogue holds up better when it's right down the middle in bigger theaters.”

That seems like a good moment to ask Dichter about his feelings on movies with big sound moving from those big theaters, past the home theater and DVD, to the cell phone and the PDA. His response is simultaneously philosophical and pragmatic. “It bugs me if I have to hear my mixes through an iPod,” he says, “but today, it's all about reaching a wider audience through different mediums. That's the trade-off: bad sound but a bigger audience. Hey, you can't fight progress.”

Ron Bochar, Charlie Wilson's War supervising sound editor and co-mixer, has been involved in some great films and television with unique audio. Here's his top five list:

• CAPOTE (2005 — sound rerecording mixer and supervising sound editor): “Probably the most powerful sound in the film was silence. We created a very complex, organic prison background — everything from pipes groaning, pipes with running water in the walls, prisoners talking, processed winds moaning, thunks and clunks, and guard movement off camera. Plus a boatload of design, like vari-speeded breaths, rusty hinges, and winds. Yet when the killer began his confession to Capote, we slowly peeled the sounds back, so when he reveals the truth there is only the room tone, dead-center mono, and his voice, followed by blackness on the screen with simple piano notes from the score. We break it all back to reality with shotgun shots in flashback. But getting to that silence and the void it presented is what sold the scene.”
• ANGELS IN AMERICA (2003 — sound rerecording mixer and supervising sound editor, which won Bochar a Cinema Audio Society sound award and an Emmy Award): “Here was a six-plus-hour stage show adapted to on-location in New York City. Mike Nichols wanted the city to be a character as much as any living creature, and the tone of the film — the arc of the story — dictated moods. We start quiet and rather reserved — interiors are rather mild, the city intrudes softly. As we go, a storm breaks it up, voices from the streets get intrusive, cars and traffic enter the scenes no matter how high up in a hospital you are. The story gets complex, and so does the sound. And we had fun with Angel's wings, which I created mainly from winds. I heard her as displacing the space around her, [rather than] ‘flying'' with flapping sounds.”
• AMERICAN SPLENDOR (2003 — sound rerecording mixer): “The first feature I mixed entirely in [Digidesign] Pro Tools. I made a lot of mistakes, learned a lot of tricks, and will never mix in any other way again, given the opportunity. Splendor allowed me to truly take the philosophy of, ‘The edit is the mix; the mix is the edit,'' and exploit it to the fullest. I use that method for every temp mix I do, and all those decisions follow into the final.”
• YOU'VE GOT MAIL (1998 — sound rerecording mixer, supervising sound editor): “Nora Ephron presented me with an issue where the music she wanted to use for the opening wasn't long enough to follow the visual effects they were using, so I took a lot of phone-dialing sounds, made them work with some of the musical themes in the movie — [touchtone sounds played as melody], computers' start-up sounds, modems, the ‘ether'' of the Internet sounds, synthesized buzzes, and tones that I Dopplered — and ending with a consistent computer beep that turned into the rhythm of the opening notes of the song Nora wanted … thereby giving her music cue an opening that followed the images and integrated it in. It's short, but very sweet.”
• PHILADELPHIA (1993 — supervising sound editor): “When Andy [Tom Hanks] is on the stand being cross-examined by the evil lawyer, he's beginning to space out due to his illness. I processed additional dialogue tracks to accompany his basic track, with phasing, close-room reverb tones, and ringing notes. The mixer, Tom Fleishman, combined them in various ways during the mix to alter the voices that Tom was hearing, as well as his own voice through his point-of-view shots. In addition, we altered his room tone in his POV shots to include the sound you get if you stick your ear into a shell.”
  — D.D.