Oscar-Nominated Sound Designer Frank Kruse Makes Some Noise on “All Quiet on the Western Front”
All Quiet on the Western Front, Erich Maria Remarque’s 1929 novel that lays bare the harsh brutality of war through the eyes of a naive youth fighting in the German trenches during WWI, is considered a literary classic. So Frank Kruse admits some hesitation when director Edward Berger told him he was doing a modern ...
Best of 2022: How The “Babylon” Sound Team Built a Sonic Bacchanal
It’s that time of year—we look back on a few of our favorite interviews from 2022 in our annual year-end list. The opening sequence to Damien Chazelle’s Babylon (in theaters today) hits you like one of the many lines of powder its characters will ingest. It’s eye-opening, choreographed chaos, leaving you with an intensely euphoric ...
Best of 2022: How the “Top Gun: Maverick” Sound Team Ingeniously Captured Raw Emotion Mid-Flight
It’s that time of year—we look back on a few of our favorite interviews from 2022 in our annual year-end list. Mark Weingarten is no stranger to navigating the challenges of a production sound mixer. Over his accomplished career, Weingarten’s mixed on Christopher Nolan’s WWII epic Dunkirk, traveled to another dimension in Interstellar, captured the ...
How The “Babylon” Sound Team Built a Sonic Bacchanal
The opening sequence to Damien Chazelle’s Babylon (in theaters today) hits you like one of the many lines of powder its characters will ingest. It’s eye-opening, choreographed chaos, leaving you with an intensely euphoric feeling – quite fitting for a story that revisits Hollywood’s infancy of the 1920s and ‘30s when La La Land was ...
Best of Summer: How the “Stranger Things” Sound Team Creeps You Out
As we’ve done for the past few summers, we’ve compiled a few of our favorite interviews to highlight in this last week of August. This is by no means a comprehensive list, but a little taste of some of the great conversations we’ve had during these hot summer months. Bring on sweater season. When Millie ...
Best of Summer: How the “Top Gun: Maverick” Sound Team Ingeniously Captured Raw Emotion Mid-Flight
As we’ve done for the past few summers, we’ve compiled a few of our favorite interviews to highlight in this last week of August. This is by no means a comprehensive list, but a little taste of some of the great conversations we’ve had during these hot summer months. Bring on sweater season. Mark Weingarten ...
“Nope” Sound Designer Johnnie Burn Puts the Fear in What We Hear
Before the opening credits even clear the screen, Nope plunges us into an alarming soundscape: the canned laughter of a sitcom. Knowing that this is a Jordan Peele horror film, immediate tension strikes. Something is bound to shatter that wholesome sound, and, of course, this happens in a brutal way. Our ears get the first ...
“Elvis” Sound Guru Wayne Pashley on the Sonic Glue Holding Baz Luhrmann’s Biopic Together
Bursting through in the golden age of television, Elvis Presley had stunning good looks and taboo-shattering dance moves that instantly attracted legions of female fans, but his legacy rests in that sound. His voice was inimitable with the pain and power he had to share to survive. Wayne Pashley, the re-recording mixer, sound designer, and ...
How the “Top Gun: Maverick” Sound Team Ingeniously Captured Raw Emotion Mid-Flight
Mark Weingarten is no stranger to navigating the challenges of a production sound mixer. Over his accomplished career, Weingarten’s mixed on Christopher Nolan’s WWII epic Dunkirk, traveled to another dimension in Interstellar, captured the spirit of Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games, and tracked the drama behind The Social Network and The Curious Case of ...
How the “Stranger Things” Sound Team Creeps You Out
When Millie Bobby Brown’s Eleven experiences a flashback a couple of hours into Stranger Things‘ fourth season, sound effects tell the mutant teenager’s nightmarish origins story in a nutshell: thunder, whooshing, whistles, choral voices, more thunder, pistol shots, birds screeching, rumbling, slithering sounds, squishes and thumps flood her head with 50 seconds worth of precision-orchestrated ...
“Morbius” Scoring Mixer Jason LaRocca on Sinking His Teeth Into Marvel’s Vampire Antihero
After suffering throughout his childhood from a rare blood disorder, Michael Morbius (Jared Leto) heads into the Costa Rican jungle and cuts his hand open, thereby trapping a swarm of vampire bats. The bats are the final key to the brilliant doctor’s cure, which, as we can guess by the fact that these particular bats ...
Oscar-Nominated Re-Recording Sound Mixer Paul Massey on “No Time To Die”
“When I started out, I had no objective whatsoever to become a re-recording mixer,” says Paul Massey, who may well be the most accomplished accidental Oscar winner in history. Growing up in London, Massey played trumpet in wedding bands, worked at a recording studio and then, he says, “I made a slow, totally unintentional transition ...
“Dune” Oscar-Nominated Sound Team on Sandworms, Ornithopters & More
The experience of seeing writer/director Denis Villeneuve’s Oscar-nominated epic Dune was, for this viewer, as much an auditory experience as it was a visual one. The sounds of the alien world depicted in part one of Villeneuve’s two-part adaptation of Frank Herbert’s 1965 novel are mesmerizing, from the whispering sands shifting across the desert planet of Arrakis ...
How “The Killing of Two Lovers” Sound Team Created an Agonizingly Tense Soundscape
The Killing of Two Lovers, written, directed, and edited by Robert Machoian, is a tale of a marriage coming undone that’s as taut and tense as a guitar string. The film opens in the moment before we believe it will earn its title. Two lovers are asleep on a bed, Niki (Sepideh Moafi) and Derek ...
How “The French Dispatch” Sound Team Immerses You in Wes Anderson’s World
When it comes to a Wes Anderson film what unequivocally stands out is the whimsical aesthetics. A potpourri of artistic detail perfectly placed as if each shot was its own painting. The French Dispatch, which chronicles the final issue of an American magazine published in a fictional French city, is no different. But what immerses ...
How “The Guilty” Sound Designers Cranked the Tension in Antoine Fuqua & Jake Gyllenhaal’s Thriller
In The Guilty, Jake Gyllenhaal plays a cop demoted to answering 911 calls while he awaits trial for an unspecified crime he committed eight months prior. He never leaves the call center, yet finds himself snared in an ongoing abduction when the call comes in over the transom. Joe is already in a bad state, ...
Best of Summer: How the “A Quiet Place Part II” Sound Team Turns the Viewer Into Prey
This interview is part of our “Best of Summer” series. It was originally published on June 1. Don’t make a sound. The utterly frightening creatures of A Quiet Place are back in a terrifying sequel thirsty to tear your body apart. In this new chapter, the story picks up right where it left off with ...
Sound Editor Trevor Gates on Keeping “Fear Street” Real, Upbeat, & Horrifying
Based on master of teen horror genre fiction R.L. Stine’s novels, Netflix released writer-director Leigh Janiak’s Fear Street trilogy over the past three successive Fridays. Opening with a neon-lit shopping mall murder spree, Part One – 1994 introduces the seemingly cursed teenaged residents of Shadyside and their luckier next-door neighbors in Sunnyvale. In Part Two ...
“In The Heights” Supervising Sound Editor On Capturing a Musical City’s Magic
In The Heights is, in all ways, an epic collaboration. Director Jon M. Chu‘s adaptation of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Tony Award-winning musical, written by original playwright Quiara Alegria Hudes, summoned musicians, choreographers, and a vast team of filmmakers to pull off. It’s never easy to adapt something that was already massively successful in its original form, nor ...
“Cruella” Sound Editor Mark Stoeckinger on Getting 1970s England Right
Whether it’s her bohemian attic lair, Liberty’s department store, or her job at an insufferable couture designer’s immaculate atelier, young Cruella, née Estella (Emma Stone) divides her time between very particular environments in 1970s England. She and her pals, Jasper (Joel Fry) and Horace (Paul Walter Hauser), are roommates, professional delinquents, and dog-lovers. A terrier ...
