“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 ...
How The “Blitz” Sound Team Shook Steve McQueen’s Harrowing World War II Film
While researching Small Axe, a riveting series about the political awakening of London’s West Indian community, director Steven McQueen found a photograph of a young Black boy standing on a train platform holding a large suitcase. The stark image had the director questioning who the child was and what his story was during the London ...
Eye on the Emmys: “The Bear” Emmy-Winning Sound Team on Capturing the Chaos of the Kitchen
*After the 76th Creative Arts Emmy Winners, announced on September 8, and ahead of the 2024 Prime Time Emmy Awards on September 15, we’re looking back at our interviews with some of this year’s nominees. Costume The Bear’s Re-recording mixer Steve “Major” Giammaria, ADR mixer Patrick Christensen, foley mixer Ryan Collinson, and production mixer Scott ...
“Twisters” Sound Editors on Creating the Ferocious Voice of Six Distinct Tornadoes
Catastrophic weather struck a chord with moviegoers over the weekend when Twisters blew apart box office expectations and raked in a whopping $81 million for its debut. The action spectacle, directed by Lee Isaac Chung (Minari) and filmed in Oklahoma, stars Daisy Edgar-Jones, Glen Powell, and Anthony Ramos as storm chasers determined to study tornadoes ...
“The Creator” Oscar-Nominated Sound Team on Blending Retro-Futurism, Robot Monks, & the Didgeridoo
The Creator‘s Oscar-nominated supervising sound editors, Erik Aadahl and Ethan Van der Ryn, had a dream experience creating the soundscape for director Gareth Edwards‘ vision of a nightmarish future. The timing of the film couldn’t have been better—The Creator is set at a point in human history where there’s an outright war between humanity and ...
“Rebel Moon” Sound Editors on Creating Different Sonic Worlds for Zack Snyder
Part one of director Zach Snyder’s Netflix space epic, Rebel Moon — A Child of Fire, opens on a quaint farming community on a peaceful moon called Veldt. Hard at work in the fields, Kora (Sofia Boutella) is clearly not of this community of self-styled Luddites, and the evil Imperium she’s escaping soon catches up ...
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 ...
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 ...
“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 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 ...
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 ...
How The “A Quiet Place Part II” Sound Team Turns the Viewer Into Prey
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 the Abbott family having destroyed their home in order to stay alive. Well, almost everyone. The tragic ...
