“The Bear” Emmy-Nominated Sound Team on Capturing the Chaos of the Kitchen
The first thing you might notice in Season 2 of Christopher Storer’s hit drama The Bear is how well you can hear chef-owner Carmen (Jeremy Allen White) and his team of kitchen underdogs as they set to work reopening their Chicago restaurant. Restaurant kitchens, especially those still under construction, as the Bear’s is for most of the season, are not quiet places. But no matter how prevalent the sledgehammers and steel cookware may be on screen, yelled or barely muttered, the interpersonal dynamics between the show’s lovable characters always comes through.
“Fifty-six percent of people watch [streaming] with subtitles on by default, and I take that personally,” Steve Giammaria, the show’s supervising sound editor, joked. He and his Emmy-nominated team, dialogue editor Evan Benjamin and production mixer Scott Smith, prioritized the series’ emotional side with clear dialogue viewers don’t have to strain to understand. “We try, when I’m mixing, to be dialogue-forward because there are a lot of words in The Bear, and they’re happening very quickly and very energetically,” Giammaria said.
Yet Giammaria and his team do so without leaning much on ADR, which neither showrunner Storer nor the sound team are fans of. Instead, to get across every word of a kitchen battle between Carmen and Richie (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) or a subdued heart-to-heart chef Sydney (Ayo Edebiri) has with her father, dialogue editor Benjamin relies on old-fashioned alts from other takes. “If you hear a giant bang on the end of a line, and you can just fix that one word, the whole scene seems to make more sense. You do that 10, 15, 20 times a show, and all of a sudden, the thing feels much more legible,” Benjamin said.
But the soundscape of The Bear also eschews wall-to-wall dialogue. The series’ acute attention to food detail, the sounds of which Giammaria credits to the lead Foley artist, Leslie Bloome at Alchemy Post Sound, sets the stage for the sonic tenor of the season’s different restaurants. Whether in Copenhagen or Chicago, the show’s sound team focused on creating distinct intensities for the various kitchens where Carmen’s staff go off for additional training. Marcus travels to Denmark to work under Luca (Will Poulter), a quiet, nearly Zen-like experience, compared to Carmen’s chaos. Richie spends a week against his will at an established high-end Chicago restaurant, Ever, which is run with a military-level precision Richie is totally unused to but comes to embrace. “It’s a very measured intensity,” at Ever, Giammaria said, “so having those two worlds collide sonically is fun.”
“Forks,” the episode during which Richie does his Ever stage, is one of the most emotional of the season. It’s also one of the quietest. Feeling adrift in the Bear’s back-of-house lineup and taking it out on Natalie (Abby Elliott), Richie has an epiphany about his life and his place in the kitchen while peeling mushrooms with Ever’s head chef, Terry (Olivia Coleman). Terry tells him about her background; the pristine kitchen is otherwise silent. Benjamin intentionally removed any body noises and almost all another sound around the pair, rendering the moment as still as possible. “It’s remarkable what you can do to the emotion of a scene if you do something as simple as getting rid of all that kind of stuff,” he said.
At the other end of the emotional spectrum, the season travels back in time about five years to Christmas dinner at the dysfunctional Berzatto household. Carmen’s brother Michael is still alive and chucking forks at his mother’s boyfriend, Lee, in retaliation for Lee’s condescension. Donna (Jamie Lee Curtis), their mother, is preparing a Feast of the Seven Fishes and having a meltdown. She eventually drives her car into the house, a climactic moment made less dramatic by the sheer amount of fighting and griping that precedes it. Marked by anger, shame, and tension, “I think that dinner scene is probably the hardest thing I’ve ever tried to edit,” Benjamin said.
“You’re trying to get each one of those arguments, and sometimes those arguments are colliding with each other in a way where they’ve layered multiple takes on top of each other. So you have to pull out one voice from a tangle of voices. It’s very hard to do.” The process started with Smith, who “recorded things on the sly” on set in order to get as much material as possible, including background effects and dialogue cadged from rehearsals. “The dynamics of that scene, as it ended up on the screen, were more or less the dynamics when it was shot,” Smith said. He and Benjamin established the episode’s unusual sonic landscape, while Giammaria worked with producer David Woods to settle on how Michael’s final, climactic fork throw should sound. “We went a little understated. When the table flip happens, all hell breaks loose. We [thought], let’s dial this moment back because it’s the last straw before the dam explodes,” Giammaria said.
Back in the present day, at the restaurant-in-progress, aligning what’s happening between the characters with what would realistically be underway at any given time of day is a priority, though “emotion always wins,” Giammaria said. If Richie and Natalie are arguing during busy prep time, the sound team might play the background noise a little more quietly to avoid overshadowing the dialogue—but the makeup of those sounds is still carefully considered. “We get as granular as, hey, there are too many forks and not enough dishes,” the supervising sound editor said, with different objects influencing the show’s tenor on a case-by-case basis. “Things that are a little more vertical tend to cause chaos, as opposed to just a running sink, a boiling pot,” he added.
The Bear feels tangible, not just for its close attention to the food, but because what we see on screen is what we’re actually getting. “In season two, they’re really knocking those walls down. There really are sledgehammers flying. Those pilot lights are turning on. There’s something there, and we’ll just enhance it. We’re building on this foundation that Scott makes and Evan keeps in there, and then we’ll pepper it up with effects,” Giammaria explained. But even more important to the final sound is that on The Bear, its significance is accounted for from the very beginning. “You can’t just wedge in good sound after the fact,” he added. It’s given the scaffolding it needs early on, “which is evident in the final product—they actually leave room for some sound design and, and the ebb and flow of chaos.” When Carmen and his team finally open their doors to friends and family, the door between the kitchen and dining room acts as an almost magical sonic buffer between the two worlds, which makes the relatively soigné nature of the dining room all the more appreciable to viewers who understand what it took to get there.
Featured image: THE BEAR — “Omelette” — Season 2, Episode 9 (Airs Thursday, June 22nd) Pictured: (l-r) Lionel Boyce as Marcus, Jeremy Allen White as Carmen “Carmy” Berzatto. CR: Chuck Hodes/FX.
