From Spare to Spectacular

Mixers Greg Russell, Kevin O'Connell, and Peter Devlin earned an Oscar nomination for Achievement in Sound Mixing for their work on Transformers. Supervising Sound Editors Ethan Van der Ryn and Michael Hopkins earned nominations in the sound editing category. Photo: © 2007 DreamWorks LLC and Paramount Pictures. All Rights Reserved. Hasbro,
TRANSFORMERS and all related characters are trademarks of Hasbro. © 2007
Hasbro. All Rights Reserved.

This is a slightly unusual year in the two Academy Award categories devoted to sound (Achievement in Sound Editing and Achievement in Sound Mixing). Of the six nominated films, three contenders — No Country for Old Men, There Will Be Blood, and 3:10 to Yuma — are most notable for their spare, almost minimalist, sound jobs, and the other three — The Bourne Ultimatum, Ratatouille, and Transformers — are flashier and louder, in a sense more like “traditional” sound nominees. Each of the six uses sound in effective and at times surprising ways, and each is emblematic of the broad range of the current state of the art.

When it comes to big-budget, big-action, popcorn entertainments, no one in Hollywood has the track record of mixers Greg Russell and Kevin O'Connell. They've been nominated as a team an unprecedented 12 times, with O'Connell nabbing another eight nominations for films without Russell. You might think they would have a “been-there, done-that” attitude after working on so many blockbusters, but that is far from the case — and the mega-hit Transformers was a recent favorite of theirs, for sure.

“I'm so thrilled to have been on this film,” Russell says from the Cary Grant Theatre stage on the Sony lot during the mixing of the film. “I've done just about every action-adventure kind of movie. I've done the space adventures, from Star Trek to the Stargates. And a ton that have standard guns and explosions and car chases and whatnot. But where else [but this film] do you have a car transform into a robot at 80 miles an hour on the freeway? It's something so absolutely out of the ordinary, and it opens the doors for endless opportunities with regards to sounds — and the sound editors and designers have gone out and recorded a ton of great material. This was the first time Michael [Bay, director] had worked with supervising sound editors Ethan Van der Ryn and Michael Hopkins [the Oscar-winning team behind The Lord of the Rings trilogy and King Kong, nominated in the sound-editing category for Transformers] and it was the first time we'd worked with them as supervisors, too — though Ethan's been a designer on many shows with us.” Also nominated with the Russell and O'Connell was Sound Mixer Peter Devlin; it's his second nod.

“Michael was really great on this film,” O'Connell says. “Over the years, he's really become a proponent of how much sound helps his movies because they're so visual-effects-oriented. He's matured into a fantastic filmmaker.”

For 3:10 to Yuma, the sound team tried to keep the soundtrack gritty to go along with the look of the film—including the gunshots, which were just the sound of the pistols they would be, with a little reverb for canyon echos.

The polar opposite of a film such as Transformers is the fine, relatively small-budget western 3:10 to Yuma, directed by James Mangold (Walk the Line) and mixed by Paul Massey (who earned his third Oscar nomination in row, sixth total, this year) and David Giammarco, with production sound supplied by Jim Stuebe (the latter two are first-time nominees).

“I love working with Jim Mangold,” Massey says from his usual haunt, the John Ford Theatre on the Fox lot. “He's always open to ideas about sound, and he doesn't like things to be locked down in predubs at all. He's very instinctive on the stage. He comes up with great ideas, and then we pursue them and he goes, ‘Yes,'' ‘No,'' ‘Yes,'' ‘No,'' and moves on. He makes decisions quickly, which is great.”

When asked about Mangold's approach to the sound for 3:10 to Yuma, Massey says, “He wanted a very western feel, obviously, and something that would pull you back into memories of old Western films, but brought into the modern era. He wanted it, to use an overused word, to sound organic, not synthetic — very natural and acoustic. He wanted it to sound fairly sparse and simple. With a lot of the gunshots, we didn't make them massively wide and deep and Hollywood-sounding. A lot of them were just the sound of the pistols they would be — maybe with a little reverb around them for canyon echo and such, but nothing too overblown. We were trying to keep it fairly gritty soundtrack-wise to go along with the look of the film.”

The sound in There Will Be Blood necessarily follows the development of Daniel Day-Lewis' character. Photo by Melinda Sue Gordon

Paul Thomas Anderson's gripping drama There Will be Blood posed huge challenges to Sound Designer Christopher Scarabosio and Supervising Sound Editor Matthew Wood, both first-time nominees in the sound-editing category. The film is set in mostly desolate rural environments as the story traces the rise of the oil industry in California from its infancy to boom times through an obsessive miner-turned-oilman played by Daniel Day-Lewis.

“Paul's aesthetic is that things should not be over-produced, and they should sound raw and real,” Scarabosio says from Skywalker Sound, where he was working on the forthcoming Indiana Jones film. “One of the big concerns was with how the oil derricks were going to sound. He was interested in capturing the rhythm of these derricks and using that throughout the film. So that was my first big task: getting this rhythmic element that also felt ominous and dangerous. One derrick might be newly built, one might be in the initial stages of starting to drill, and another's fully drilling and producing oil. … We wanted to create an offscreen sound backdrop of those, which was quite a challenge because you don't always see them, but you want to hear that grinding, that churning — the creation of the modern economic boom.”

Scarabosio says the sound necessarily follows the development of Day-Lewis' character. “He starts out as a silver miner alone in a hole chipping away, scratching a living off the earth, and we kept that very simple and natural,” he says. “Then, as the story and his life get more complex, so does the sound, as we bring in the derricks and all. We were always trying to stay in step with the character.”

The track for No Country for Old Men is often as uncluttered as the landscapes where most of the action takes place, and the silences are sometimes as important as the sounds. Photo: Richard Foreman/Courtesy of Miramax Films.

The third nominated film with a Western setting (albeit modern) was Joel and Ethan Coen's dark and violent masterpiece No Country for Old Men. The film marks the first two Oscar nominations for veteran Supervising Sound Editor and Re-recording Mixer Skip Lievsay (who says he was “thrilled beyond words” to be tapped by the Academy). Also nominated for the film were Re-recording Mixers Greg Orloff (Oscar winner for Ray) and Craig Berkey (also credited as sound designer) and Production Sound Mixer Peter Kurland.

Again, here's a case in which the track is often as uncluttered as the landscapes where most of the action takes place, and the silences are sometimes as important as the sounds. “We talked about the idea of not having very much music in the film and having a very stark, super-real track,” says Lievsay, who has worked on the Coens' films spanning their entire career. “The idea was to try to get to all the shock/scare things you might normally do with music and do it with sound instead.”

Indeed, there is a scene where every footstep, every floor creek feels menacingly loud and emotional, despite there being no music to heighten tension. “That's why dynamic range is important to movies,” Lievsay says. “You want to have portions where the audience is forced to lean forward to really listen; then you give them a big blast. That's how the traditional Hollywood shock sound has always worked.”

The sound team also worked on creating subtle sounds that worked as character motifs. “Craig Berkey created a motif for [the killer Anton] Chigurh, which was rumbling train sounds, but it's pretty subliminal most of the time. It's just another element that adds a little to the unsettling feeling of the film.”

The Bourne Ultimatum, which took home the Oscars in both sound categories, relied on precise foley recording to enhance the attitude and confidence of the main character. Photo: Jasin Boland/Universal Pictures

In the taut and frenetic action film The Bourne Ultimatum, directed by Paul Greengrass, there is a mixture of in-your-face realism in the magnificently staged fight and chase sequences and sort of dreamy, hallucinatory vibe in some of the flashbacks. Co-supervising Sound Editors Per Hallberg (Oscar-winner for Braveheart) and Karen Baker Landers (a first-time nominee) had a delicate balancing act to bring out the nuances of both of those sides of the film, ably aided on the mixing side by nominees Scott Millan (a three-time winner, last for Ray) and David Parker (winner for The English Patient) and production mixer and two-time nominee Kirk Francis.

Baker Landers explained that in Bourne, foley recording and editing was critical, because of the chase elements and the well-choreographed fight sequences. “The style of the foley [says] that the Jason Bourne character is very solid and fast and deliberate,” Landers says. “He's not real high-techy; not flashy. He's down and dirty; he gets it done, and he's precise; he's a machine. … Jason Bourne's feet [foley] shows some of his attitude, his confidence. There's nothing messy or sloppy.

“The art of really capturing a character [through foley] is amazing, and when it's good you don't even notice it. But when it's bad it's distracting.” The effort paid off; The Bourne Ultimatum took home both sound Oscars.

To enhance the ambience for Ratatouille, Supervising Sound Editor Michael Silvers made recordings in real restaurants in France and interspersed the French jargon he captured, along with the sounds of pots and pans, in the kitchen scenes. Photo: © Disney Enterprises, Inc. and Pixar Animation Studios. All Rights Reserved.

And finally, there's the charming animated hit Ratatouille, about a rat who wants to be a great French chef. For sound editing, Sound Designer Randy Thom and Supervising Sound Editor Michael Silvers were nominated (both won for The Incredibles in 2004); for sound mixing, it was Thom, Sound Re-recording Mixer Michael Semanick (who last won for King Kong), and Original Dialogue Mixer Doc Kane (a four-time nominee).

My first question to Thom, on a break from mixing Horton Hears a Who! at Skywalker Sound, is “So, did you get to go to Paris for field recording?”

“I didn't,” he says with a laugh, “but Michael Silvers did some real recording in French restaurants there. So we have a sprinkling of French kitchen jargon in there, and then he got some nice recordings of pots and pans and things — and, of course, he got to eat some wonderful food.”

Thom says the most challenging scene in the film was the whitewater sequence where Remy the rat is washed around the sewage system. “Partly because Brad [Bird, director] decided not to put music in it, just to make it feel a little bit more real,” he says. “Whitewater is always a challenge because if you go out and record actual water, it just sounds like pink noise; it sounds like you're standing next to Niagara Falls, So you have to find ways to make the water change as much as possible moment to moment and be articulate and really sound watery, as opposed to just noisy.

“As a sound designer, you dream of having sequences with no dialogue or music, but then when they actually come to you, you get nervous,” he says.