The “Shōgun” Sound Team on Recreating 17th-Century Japan One Katana Clash at a Time
Praised for its authenticity, beauty, and sensitive storytelling, FX’s Shōgun has just been renewed for two more seasons. Created by Justin Marks and Rachel Kondo, the show follows the plot of James Clavell’s 1975 novel, set in Japan in 1600. English pilot John Blackthorne (Cosmo Jarvis) and his ship’s crew run aground in a Japanese fishing village, and after a brief imprisonment, Blackthorne is taken on by Lord Yoshii Toranaga (Hiroyuki Sanada, also one of the series’ producers) to share his knowledge on European warfare and the Portuguese merchants and priests insinuating themselves into Japanese society...
“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 to the unsung heroes of the filmmaking business, an uproarious action comedy with a winsome love story that’s a throwback to old-fashioned movies and has one simple goal – to deliver a nonstop thrill ride...
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 between dogfights in the air and quiet moments on the ground, on airfields in the English countryside and in medical wards where some of the crew suffer from as-yet undiagnosed PTSD...
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 Bradley Cooper’s Leonard Bernstein biopic Maestro and Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, an R-rated historical drama about the first atomic bomb,...
“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 artificial intelligence, a classic sci-fi set-up that felt alarmingly less fictive given the rapid expansion of AI in our real world...
“Maestro” Oscar-Nominated Re-Recording Mixers on Building Emotion With & Without Music
In Bradley Cooper’s Maestro, the music is flipped. Tracking the arc of Leonard Bernstein’s career in tandem with his loving but complicated marriage to Chilean actress Felicia Monteleagre (Carey Mulligan), the film’s music is Bernstein’s music, playing as it did over the course of the composer’s life, whether that’s performed on stage or worked out in the studio at the family’s Fairfield country house. When we revisit emotionally charged, private moments from Bernstein’s life, at a frightfully strained family Thanksgiving,...
“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 with her. A massive ship alights above Veldt’s rolling fields, dropping Atticus Noble (Ed Skrein) and a band of soldiers onto the moon to commandeer the farmers’ grain stores and disturb their bucolic way of life forever...
“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 takes place on a Scottish beach after Scarlett Johansson’s nameless protagonist (she’s an alien who seduces men throughout Scotland, to their eternal chagrin) lets a mother and father drown in the heaving sea while their baby,...
“Maestro” Sound Mixer Steven Morrow on Recreating Mahler’s “Resurrection” at the Ely Cathedral
Bradley Cooper knew Maestro was going to be the next film he directed before the proverbial ink dried on A Star Is Born (2018), his feature debut, which he starred in alongside Lady Gaga about a troubled musician’s relationship with alcohol. The adaptation, deservingly so, went on to be nominated for eight Academy Awards and won Best Original Song for “Shallow.” This time, the multi-hyphenated actor trades in a guitar for a baton to embody Leonard Bernstein,...
Searching for That Ferocious “Ferrari” Sound With Supervising Sound Editor Tony Lamberti
How eager was Tony Lamberti to work on Michael Mann’s latest feature? Let’s just say the director had Lamberti, a Formula 1 enthusiast, at Ferrari.
The Oscar-nominated (Inglourious Basterds), Emmy-winning (John Adams) audio engineer got his first peek at the feature about Enzo Ferrari and his iconic racing legacy back in 2015. Overseeing a mix update on Mann’s crime thriller Blackhat,...
“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: Honor Among Thieves, from directors John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein, a film that refreshingly spins the popular fantasy role-playing game with a cast of enjoyable characters led by Chris Pine as Edgin,...
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 retelling. That disappeared after Kruse read the script. Though the challenge would be daunting, he wanted to be the film’s sound designer and supervising sound editor...
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 feeling – quite fitting for a story that revisits Hollywood’s infancy of the 1920s and ‘30s when La La Land was a sandbox of drugs,...
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 spirit of Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games, and tracked the drama behind The Social Network and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button...
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 a sandbox of drugs, sex, and all night partying.
It’s here we meet Manny Torres (Diego Calva), a low-level “yes man” with aspirations to make it in the biz,...
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 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,...
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 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,...
“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 warning sign moment after terrifying moment in Nope as we hear what we can’t yet,...
“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 supervising sound editor of Baz Luhrmann’s epic biopic Elvis bravely took up the mantle of resurrecting one of the most famous voices ever recorded...
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 Benjamin Button. In director Joseph Kosinski’s world-beating Top Gun: Maverick,...
