Electric Shock: How “A Complete Unknown’s” Oscar-Nominated Sound Team Re-Created Bob Dylan Going Electric
In the first part of our conversation with the Oscar-nominated sound team of James Mangold’s music biography A Complete Unknown, they talked about delivering an intensely music-centric film without using playback and differentiating between the soundscapes of 1961 New York, when Bob Dylan (an immaculate portrayal by Timothée Chalamet) first arrives in the city, and ...
“Deadpool & Wolverine” Sound Designers on the Splatter-and-Slash Acoustics of a Honda Odyssey Brawl
In our last conversation about Shawn Levy’s Deadpool & Wolverine, sound designers Craig Henighan and Ryan Cole discussed the hilarious opening sequence where Ryan Reynolds’ Deadpool uses Wolverine’s adamantium claws and bones to take down some Time Variance Authority goons, all set to NSYNC’s “Bye Bye Bye,” and some sound tricks to make the adamantium ...
“Deadpool & Wolverine” Sound Designers on Turning Frozen Tea Towels Into Broken Bones
Three months after debuting in theaters this summer, Deadpool & Wolverine’s winning streak still wasn’t over. It eventually surpassed Barbie’s domestic gross in its 13th weekend, with director Shawn Levy’s R-rated box office juggernaut ranking as the 12th highest-grossing movie of all time, with a domestic haul of over $636M. It has been a hectic ...
“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 ...
“The Fall Guy” Sound Designer Mark Stoeckinger on Capturing Ryan Gosling’s Wild Ride
A three-time Oscar nominee, Mark Stoeckinger has worked on five of the six features by stuntman-turned-director David Leitch, starting with 2017’s action thriller Atomic Blonde. No stranger to actioners, the veteran sound editor also led the sound team on all four John Wick films (which Leitch also produced). The Fall Guy is a cinematic love letter ...
Can You Hear the Fear? How Sound Shapes the Daring Missions of “Masters of the Air”
Masters of the Air, Apple TV+’s new World War II epic showcasing the heroics and travails of a fleet of young U.S. pilots in Europe, has been lauded for its classical filmmaking and realistic approach to mid-century flight. Focusing on sober, earnest Buck (Austin Butler) and Bucky (Callum Turner), a battle-ready scamp, the show toggles ...
Double Oscar Nominee Richard King Unveils the Aural Secrets of “Oppenheimer” and “Maestro”
Richard King, one of Hollywood’s most successful sound designers, is known for creating increasingly complex aural environments that help achieve a director’s vision, giving the movie its own rhythm and texture. Over the past two decades, he’s won four Academy Awards. And at this year’s Oscars, he’s nominated for two more for his contributions to ...
“The Zone of Interest” Sound Designer Johnnie Burn on Creating the Soundscape From Hell
Writer/director Jonathan Glazer does not shy away from a challenge. He has created indelible sequences that are essentially mindworms, burrowing deep into your consciousness. One of his most beloved films, his 2013 masterpiece Under the Skin, was chock full of them. If you had to choose just one, perhaps it would be the wordless scene that ...
“Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves” Sound Mixer Ronan Hill’s Formula for Fantastic Sounding Fantasy
Ronan Hill has a way with dragons. The Belfast-based production sound mixer is best known for his tenure on HBO’s Game of Thrones, where he and the sound teams tuned the rich, resonating sonic palettes across its eight epic seasons, winning five Emmys along the way. Hill returns to familiar territory with Dungeons & Dragons: ...
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 ...
Bringing Stop-Motion Puppets to Life Through Sound in “Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio”
As the Wood Sprite (Tilda Swinton) grants Geppetto’s (David Bradley) grief-stricken wish to bring forth a son from his wood carving, Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio draws life where there are only puppets and sound where there is only silence. The hearty revamp of Carlo Collodi’s classic is so engrossing, you may not recognize the meta ...
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 ...
“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 “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 ...
“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 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, ...
Sound Designer Scott Hecker on Going Big in “Zack Snyder’s Justice League”
At four hours long, HBO Max’s Zack Snyder’s Justice League, a reworked version of the 2017 film started by director Snyder but finished by Joss Whedon, differs most obviously from its predecessor in length. Those two extra hours, however, do much more than simply pile up the story, even if the overall plot remains mostly ...
Creating the Landscape & Soundscape of Harriet‘s World
Although her appearance on the $20 bill has been predictably delayed by the current administration, Harriet Tubman is still a recurring presence in American culture. An escaped slave herself, she became, as the New Yorker noted a couple of years back, “the most famous conductor” on the Underground Railroad, which itself became the stuff of ...
