In this episode, Neil and Jason talk to the Oscar-winning supervising sound editors and sound designers, Nina Hartstone and John Warhurst, about their work; and specifically, in-depth about the sound design considerations for the feature films Les Miserables, Gravity, Cats, Bohemian Rhapsody and the documentary of David Bowie’s life, Moonage Daydream.
Whilst the David Bowie vinyl album cover of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars boldly stated, “To Be Played At Maximum Volume” (which we caution against) we do suggest that the examples of the subject material in this episode of The Apple & Biscuit Show are “Best Listened To On Headphones”.
About the presenters:
Nina Hartsone – IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0367243/
John Warhurst – IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm1341243/
Neil and Jason –
Details about Neil and Jason’s work as dialogue editors and mixers and how to contact them is here: https://www.theaudiosuite.com
Details of Neil’s 1-to-1 and our Coaching Programmes for ambitious media professionals are available at:
https://www.drneilhillman.com and https://soundproducer.com.au/coaching and https://www.soundformovingpictures.com/
Technical notes:
Written, produced and presented by Jason Nicholas and Dr. Neil Hillman – IMDb
Recorded using the Squadcast remote recording system
Programme edited by Jason Nicholas
All original motion picture soundtrack clips are licensed through SceneClipper Inc.
Transcript:
Announcer Rosie
You’re listening to the Apple and Biscuit Show with Jason Nicholas and Dr. Neil Hillman.
Neil Hillman
Hello and a very warm welcome to this edition of the Apple and Biscuit Show. I’m Dr. Neil Hillman…
Jason Nicholas
And I’m Jason Nicholas.
Neil Hillman
As regular listeners will know, we’re two seasoned sound editors and mixers working in the film and television sound industry and the purpose of our podcast is to share the many ways that sound is used in moving picture productions, to entertain, inform, educate and engage. We curate the guests for our podcast with this wide brief in mind, but it’s also a great way for us to meet up with colleagues we admire and to join with them in conversation, because how they utilise sound in their work interests, intrigues and inspires us as fellow professionals. And in turn we like to think that we are quite different in the way that Jason and I approach sound and sound design, not least of all thanks to our backgrounds. Whilst we’re both long -standing and current practitioners who’ve spent years carrying out location sound recording, dialogue editing and being re -recording mixers, we also have strong academic links to the topic of moving picture sound, Jason with a scholarly interest in human psychology and me with a research background in sound design and its effects on human emotions. And so in this respect, our call to action is that we hope that you’ll feel a real connection to us after listening to the programme.
Jason Nicholas
Hopefully the content of our podcast and the guests who join us will prove enlightening to anyone with an interest in the medium and the part that sound plays in filmmaking regardless of their level of experience. Maybe you’re a student just embarking on your studies, an industry newcomer, or you’re already an experienced professional. Maybe you just love movies. Wherever you join us from, you’re welcome along. And as always, we know that there’ll be plenty that we can learn from our guests.
Neil Hillman
Today on the show, we’re delighted to welcome Nina Hartstone and John Warhurst, supervising sound editors and sound designers who were Oscar winners in 2019 in the Best Achievement in Sound Editing category for their joint work on the epic 2018 musical drama Bohemian Rhapsody, which also earned them the BAFTA that year for best sound. As individuals they each have long and enviable CVs, John specialising in music as exemplified by his work as the supervising sound editor on the 2012 musical Les Miserables, starring Hugh Jackman, Russell Crowe and Anne Hathaway, and Nina as a supervising sound editor specialising in dialogue editing and ADR, and a wonderful example of this was the remarkable 2013 movie Gravity, starring Sandra Bullock and George Clooney. They subsequently collaborated together in 2019 on Cats, where Nina was the supervising sound editor, and John was the supervising music editor, and then in 2022 on the extraordinary biopic feature film of David Bowie’s life and work, Moonage Daydream and so I feel justified in referring to Nina and John as ‘the dream team’. Welcome to you both, are you well and where do we find each of you today?
Nina Hartstone
I’m in the UK in Windsor in my little home studio. I am well apart from a broken leg so just taking me a little age to hobble down the garden to my studio but very happy to be here.
Neil Hillman
Very good and John?
John Warhurst
Hi Neil. I’m actually also in London. I’m in West London. It’s a rainy day here today which is a bit of a shame but I’m back in London. I’ve been doing quite a bit of travelling recently but happy to be back.
Neil Hillman
Well great that you could join us both of you. Now there are literally a hundred questions that Jason and I want to ask you but we’ve done our best to whittle down the huge list we first came up with but to get us underway please could you tell us a potted history of your journeys to being where you are today so that our listeners, some of whom we know are industry newcomers, can be inspired by both of your stories. Nina, would you mind going first?
Nina Hartstone
Yeah, of course. I started in the industry last century, back in the ’90s. I did my degree in visual and performed arts, thinking I was going to go into the art department and was very interested in film and had previously done some work experience on actually the first Batman with Jack Nicholson the Tim Burton film in the art department there and worked as a runner as well. So knew I had a love for film and wanted to work in film. Very fortunate my father worked at Primus Studios and he got me an introduction to Graham Harris who was a supervising sound editor working on some very low budget films like Cyborg Cop and Woman of Desire and to begin with I begged him to just let me come and see what it was all about and learn about how sound was put together in post, so I started going in there making the tea, starting as a trainee, eventually I managed to get a little bit of money for doing it, and within a year or so I managed to sort of ride that wave of the digital audio workstations coming in, because I was one of the younger people on the block, I was the person that people would look to to figure out how the computers worked, I mean I didn’t know how they worked, I just sat there at lunch lunchtimes and evenings with the manual, pressing buttons. What does that do? What does that do? And that served me very well because it made me a popular assistant with the bigger teams in the UK at the time. And so I worked my way up through being an assistant into dialogue and ADR editing and now in recent years supervising sound editor.
Neil Hillman
Fantastic. John, am I right in thinking that you didn’t start your musical career in the film industry.
John Warhurst
Yeah, that’s correct. I mean, I’m originally from the north of England and I, from being a very, sort of very young, I was always into music. I sang in the church choir with my sister, who used to drag me along to go and join in these rehearsals. But that was great, because I got to kind of sing harmonies and things like that. I played trumpet in the orchestra, and eventually when I got to teenage years, I obviously, I took a fancy to the guitar. It seemed like a more fitting instrument for a teenager. But I always, I always loved music. And so I sort of played in bands and I was always trying to record music and this idea of recording music in studios and creating music. And I studied music and I was, to be honest, I wasn’t even aware that they made films in the UK. I always like to say to you because I loved films. You know, I used to go to cinema all the time, it was either music or it was cinema, going to watch films. But I wasn’t aware that they made any films in London or in the UK. I just assumed from the north of England that they were all made in Hollywood. I was a similar kind of time to Nina, maybe a year or two after Nina, but around that sort of time in the 90s, last century as Nina just put it, which made me obviously feel very old now. I hadn’t thought about it like that before, but I studied music, I studied orchestral composition and then from there I did an MA, a master’s in electroacoustic composition and one of the reasons I stayed at the university is because the studios were about to invest in this new thing called Pro Tools, which sounded very interesting at the time. And I sort of went into the studio and this was like the first iteration of Pro Tools that we know today. And I learned all about that sort of side of it and the sort of digital recording and computers. And it was actually, I then moved to London and started working as a pop music engineer as like a recording engineer for producers who were very used to working on tape but had no clue how to use to digital recording. So I did a lot of sort of pop music engineer and then it a friend who said, oh, they’re going to use that in the film industry. And I was like, oh, I hadn’t even considered it until that moment. But they said, you will be very useful in the film industry because there’s this shift happening to digital recording. And it was literally the way that Nina mentioned of sort of digital record that shift from, you know, analogue to digital recording, I was sort of surfing along the top of it and kind of went into the film industry almost by accident. I worked on my first project and I just thought it was just such an incredible thing, such a bigger industry in a way. I just never looked back from there and I started working as an assistant and I worked my way up from there.
Jason Nicholas
So when you’re working as a team, let’s get into the nitty -gritty here, can you tell us how you divide your areas of responsibility? And actually, what are your responsibilities as supervising sound editors for the newcomers here.
Nina Hartstone
I work as a supervising sound editor, and John also, you work as supervising sound and music as well. In terms of sort of overseeing the sound, obviously we’re a huge team in sound, actually on a big budget film, because there’s so many different aspects to it. You know, we have our dialogue, we have, which also then encompasses ADR and crowd or loop group recordings. We have our sound effects and sound design and we have our Foley and all of that gets put together obviously with the music and so there’s different people who have different specialties in each of those areas working together as part of the sound team and as a supervising sound editor we kind of come on we will get engaged on the film early on hopefully in pre -production so that you can have those initial conversations with the director, read the script, have a liaison with the production sound mixer and do some workflow tests with editorial, but also then try and maximize the opportunities that you have on set as well. But we come onto the project with the team full -time when you get into post, which is usually a few weeks after the shoot is finished and once the director’s getting their first cut together so that we can start really helping with the sound for the very first screening that they will do. Yeah, we’ll work together as a team and the supervising sound editor will sort of oversee that team and how everyone works together on the roles that they play and the schedule which is worked out with the post -production supervisor and leading us through to the final mix and delivery of the film.
John Warhust
I think also as well, obviously when you brought on as a supervising sound editor or or supervising music editor, or any of those roles, you’re brought on as much for your sort of taste as of your previous work. And so working with directors will often like to see how you would approach things and things like that. So when myself and Nina, we collaborate in that Nina will often sort of take all the dialogue side, the crowd side and things like that, and I’ll sort of take the music side, and then we kind of meet in the middle on the sort of sound effects and the foley and although there’ll be many editors Obviously ultimately we’re responsible for the kind of the taste of that track if you like for the overall sound of it And so it’s about Steering that track to make sure that when we get to the final mix or to any of the temp mixers as well That the track is aligned with the director’s kind of vision of the film. And that’s a very, a very sort of key part, really, that, you know, all of these, that when the, when the director sat in that mix room, and you press play, that they’re immediately happy with what they’re hearing. So one of the ways that Nina and I work very well together is that we kind of, I mean, I find it quite hard on my own sometimes, because it’s always nice to turn around and say, someone’s, you know, what do you think, you know, and then, and, and get a different take or a different perspective. So we, we always, we always work on a nothing is sacred kind of a way. The only time we always say it becomes sacred, we don’t say it anymore is when we get to the final mix, because then it gets more tricky to kind of do, but up until that moment, you know, because obviously you’re trying to close things down. And like Nina said,yeah, it’s leading up. Ideally, it’s in pre -production because the key thing about that is that you can kind of connect with the production sound mixer, especially on music films, that is essential. That’s really, you know, to have already so much stuff is set up in production that you need for post -production. You can’t come into it in post -production and especially on a musical film view, you would be in a very bad state to do that. But yeah, and then obviously all the other more technical aspects, there’s kind of the budgets and the budgeting and the crewing and there’s all that other side always amuses me when you get some, “Hey, I’ve got to, I’ve got to go to a wedding that weekend. It’s all right if I take some time.” You know, that kind of sort of what they call it, they, not manpower, but the human resource. Yeah, the human resource, which, you know, at first I was like, “Oh, I hadn’t really considered about any of that sort of stuff.” But obviously it’s very important as well, because you need a happy team. You do need a happy team. So it’s about working with people, I think, as well.
Nina Hartstone
I think it’s very, very important to keep the buoyancy and the mood of the team because sometimes the hours are horrendous and sometimes you need to keep redoing things again and again and you need them all to be with you in sort of trying to create something as good as possible. Yeah. Happy people give you the best work, don’t they?
Neil Hillman
I was about to say when I first started, there was an old timer, a freelancer who’d worked in film for a long time, and he said to the director, and I overheard, he said “You do understand that the success of this film relies on the happiness of the crew don’t you?”
Nina Hartstone
Yeah, if the crew aren’t happy there you don’t get as good a job that’s the truth of it you know. If we’re all kind of pulling in the same direction for the same cause together. I think that that’s one thing I’ve learned actually once I started supervising was how important that that aspect is to keep everybody together on side as a team and moving forwards. But also and then yeah, the creative vision the vision that it aligns with the director is the other key thing.
Jason Nicholas
All right. Well, let’s dive into some film questions here. Early in Bohemian Rhapsody, the then unknown band was playing some of their first gigs together in a local pub, and for a 1970s English pub, the sound system was apparently incredible. How do you make decisions around what would be realistic in a documentary sense versus what the audience expects and how it should sound? I suppose there’s some magical realism in there as well, because I remember seeing some performers decades ago who were unknown at the time in some not great venues. However, when I think how they sounded, it’s somehow perfectly mixed and mastered in my head because I’ve heard those same songs many times since. As sound designers, what decisions are you making musically and sonically in these cases?
John Warhurst
The scene that you’re referring to, I think, is when they’re in the pub and Freddie comes down and it’s the bar and he sees them for the first time and they’re a trio called Smile. Not many people. I don’t know. Well, many, maybe many people have noticed, but I hope that they would never notice that when our actor, Brian, is playing the guitar, there’s actually three guitars there you are hearing. I did try that the absolute realistic version, which is when the guitar solo starts, all guitars drop out because it’s not actually possible to have any more guitars playing as a single guitarist. I did try that version and but I instinctively knew that there’s no way that Brian May and Roger Taylor would ever think that that was a good sounding option. So we worked quite tightly with their engineers and so a lot of these decisions were also in collaboration. We had to think about you know their music and how their music is represented as well as the realistic sort of elements of it. Now one of the things that we discuss with Nina a lot and we talk about a lot because for me it has to be utterly realistic. I really, if I’m in a cinema and I disconnect with what I’m seeing in a way, I have to have this anchor to a sort of a realistic sound. So it’s very, very important for me that, because it literally bumps me out of the movie if I don’t believe what I’m seeing. You’ve lost me, I’m out. So the other things that we do in those kind of situations is we do a thing called ‘world-izing’, where we will re -record the sound back into a room through a PA and use that as our sort of reverb for the sound and also use it as the front of house as well. So you do get that feeling, the sense that you are stood in a pub -sized room, hearing that music through a PA, which actually helps a long way. And then you just hope that nobody notices that there’s actually three guitars playing, not just one, because it feels like you’re in the room. So you try and compensate some of the things that aren’t real, but still try and drill down on the things that are as real as you can make them feel. Especially in the cinema because if you think about the size of a cinema it should be quite easy to achieve that sound in a cinema -sized room because it’s a similar kind of room so you want the sound to sound like you’re in that room so it is achievable through the use of world-izing.
[Keep Yourself Alive song excerpt plays…]
Nina Hartstone
So you don’t have to play it flat, you know, you can actually dive into the instruments more closely when you’re closer to the stage, you can make it sound more like it’s at the back of the room, towards the back of the room. And I think those kind of things, it’s not one static sort of audio performance that you’re listening to in scenes like that. You’re always using the way you’re portraying the music and the audio to tell the story.
John Warhurst
That’s a very, very good point, because what Nina said just there was the complete overall concept of the soundtrack of Bohemian Rhapsody. The discussions of the concerts and things like that, the bigger concerts and things, what’s the difference between watching this movie and just going on YouTube and watching the real thing? And so the most important thing to us as filmmakers was that when people see it in the cinema, we wanted people to feel like, it almost feels like your face is strapped to the front of the camera and you’re flying around the stadium and so therefore you hear things as you see them. So when you go close to the guitar, the guitar just lifts gently. That’s one of the things that [Re-recording Mixer] Paul Massey did so expertly, the sort of blending of these. So they’re imperceptibly raised up with the camera. So when you move closer to things, if all of a sudden the symbol is huge and in the corner of the screen when that cymbal gets hit you hit it and it’s panned correctly to that to the screen so we want to always for people to feel like that this was an immersive experience of things that they’ve seen before.
Neil Hillman
Look I really do want to acknowledge as one professional to another my utter admiration of the sublime craftsmanship involved in the soundtracks we’re discussing; obviously Bohemian Rhapsody, and later we’ll talk about Les Misérables and Moon Age Daydream in a little bit more detail. But I like to quietly think that I’m pretty good at what I do and if I was a jeweller, I’d perhaps like to compare my editing and mixing to that of a skilled and precise watchmaker. But the quality and detail in these soundtracks is sublime. To me these are the audio equivalent of priceless Fabergé eggs. Honestly as the credits roll, I want to stand on my seat in the scenery and be like, “Hey, do any of you have any idea what went into creating that soundtrack?” Now, one of the pleasures of Queen music for me as a teenager was listening on headphones to the multiple harmonies and guitar parts and their panning and spreading and suddenly switching from left to right, which was all very 70s and 80s hi -fi. And this sense of studio production was an integral part of Queen’s recorded sound. And the movie soundtrack manages to brilliantly retain this very Queen feel throughout. Could you share with us some of the lengths that you went to in Bohemian Rhapsody to achieve that level of authenticity?
John Warhusrt
Well it did help enormously that we had, obviously Brian May and Roger Taylor were producers on the movie and one of the things that happened in pre -production, which was very exciting for me, was that they said that they would support the film and help us as much as possible in terms of their archive. So that meant the week after that was decided I was driving down to Roger Taylor’s house to his studio to sit with his engineer and go through all the multi -track to see what recordings that we could use and how they could be utilized into the film. Before that, there was talk about trying to re -record it, especially for the film, but then we realized, well, we don’t need to do that if things are recorded as well as we know that Queen will have recorded them, then we don’t really need to re -record to do what I call a karaoke version of it. We could actually use the real thing, which, as you pointed out, gives a level of authenticity to the sound as well. The wonderful thing about that meant that when we came to mix it with Paul Massey as I mentioned, then he could also see that panning and work out that panning and also although it might not necessarily work for the screen we would still make it work for the screen but you could keep that essence of it, that authenticity from the original track through into the actual soundtrack for the film and I think the support of the band really was one of the big decisions, the big moments in the making of that film, when we realized that they really wanted to make the best film that we could possibly make and help us achieve that, that just took the whole game to another level.
Jason Nicholas
So speaking of using original recordings for a documentary like Moonage Daydream, you’re dealing with archival footage and sound, and we have all kinds of tools for cleaning up and remastering old material, where are your thresholds for how much you restore things versus giving in what would be considered an accurate representation of how it sounded? I mean, you seem to have a great deal of artistic license putting the Bowie film together. Were there times when you used a more modern recording of a given song over the archival footage? And did you need to recreate concert audience response with loop groups? I’m thinking that in these original recordings,they didn’t have audience mics out there.
Nina Hartstone
Well, I mean, one of the great things about “Moonage” is the fact that we had so much reference material that we were able to get access to through Brett Morgan’s dealings with the estate. We were able to have all sorts of recordings from the concerts and also, for me, trying to the ambiances of backstage and recording studio. I had hours of footage when other documentary filmmakers had followed David around on some of his tours and those sorts of things and I was able to listen through long, long runs of recordings backstage of him with his makeup people, his costume people, interviews with fans out front of the stadiums, any audience mics that were there during any of the recordings so that I could hear the sorts of things that people were shouting out during different parts of the concerts that he was doing across the time that he was performing, which has obviously changed, his audience changed over the decades as well. And using that to actually build up an authentic background and then embellish it with loop group recordings, which are very much in the vein of what was originally there, but just giving us extra recordings to support was really useful and it was just just a fabulous opportunity to get that kind of peek behind the curtain and listen to the day-to -day chat in the recording studio. I mean, it’s just incredible opportunity for me.
John Warhurst
Also, as well, with the concerts and certainly this was something we used on Bohemian Rhapsody, as well as on Moonage Daydream, that one of the most important things of soundtracks for cinema is obviously when it comes to mixing, as we know, to have the elements separate means you can do so much more with them. And although a lot of these live recordings come with a certain amount of crowd on them, that they will have crowd through all the microphones that will be part of the actual live recording. It’s not actually that useful for a cinema because you can’t mix those recordings. So one of the things that we knew on Bohemian Rhapsody, say when it came to doing the big stadium concerts and things like that, was that we would need to completely recreate all of that new and so that it would be separated from the music. I’ve had experiences before where realizing that if you push the crowd mics up it just ruins the music mix. The only good thing about here in the crowd in the crowd mics is it gives us a roadmap, a plan of what the actual crowd was doing. It means that we can rebuild and replicate that crowd. So that meant doing huge amounts of loop group recording from sort of 500 people loop groups down to 40 people down to individuals and doing these different layers so that it meant as s you move around the stadium that these layers, the different layers could be lifted up and down. So you have the sort of the 500 loop group, which creates the base layer. And then you have the sort of the medium groups so that if the if you imagine the cameras going through the stadium, and then it comes down into the crowd, you’re going to hear that the 40 people is going to lift up around you as you come into it. and then you’re going to start to hear the individuals, the screams and things like that as well. So you’ve got these three different layers which are completely separate to the music mix now, which means that we can create these concert scenes in a sort of an immersive, never seen before type of environment. And then the third layer of that, of course, is the world-izing I mentioned before, where we play at concert levels into an arena and then record from the back of the arena what that sounds like and we use that for the back of the cinema. So that when you get the shots from the back of the arena you can lift this up and it will give you the sound or the sensation of actually being at the back of the arena because you are hearing a recording of what it is like, what it sounds like, to be at the back of an arena.
Nina Hartstone
One of the challenges we do get is our crowds and loop groups are asked to sing along to the songs because you know if anyone’s been to a concert but it’s a sort of contract between the audience and the performer you know everybody that that’s what makes the sounds it’s not just the performance on stage the sound that you experience is being with that whole group of people all singing along so we do recreate the singing along which we do inspired by Freddie kind of line by line play a line of the song and then they sing it back. One of the complications there also is that you want these, the singing along to sound spontaneous. And very often the performers will be ad -libbing on stage, but you can’t have your audience, if you want to feel authentic, you can’t have the audience knowing the ad-lib. So, they need to sing it as if they are singing along to the record or the single that they know, but then catch up to the ad-lib as the ad-lib comes in. So creating that sort of spontaneity and truthfulness to what it would have been like on the day, always adds another layer of complication. We end up with a couple of sets of lyric sheets to try and figure out how we get that perfect meld of an authentic response as it would have been on the day in the concert.
John Warhurst
Yeah, the Freddie inspiration came from a moment where there’s a crowd of 500, we needed to record a crowd of 500. It’s like, how can you record a crowd of 500 without getting the music that you want them to record to in that recording? We can’t possibly start to give out 500 sets of headphones. And we talked about maybe putting plants into the audience who could lead people and things like that. But I’ve seen that go wrong as well before where it just turns into a bit of a mess. And the decision was to sort of barcode the song what we call barcode the song so you literally chop you edit the song into line by line by line you play one line out the pa and then you ask them to sing back the line that they just heard coming out of the pa and so there then you end up with these kind of concertina recordings of line by line by line by line all the way down each song and then when you get back to the edit room you just edit them all back together into the feel natural and in time with the song. And then that then also, yeah, as Nina was saying, makes up another layer of the crowd. We have these multi-layered crowds over the years of doing these different projects. There’s the singing crowd, and then there’s the effects crowd, and then there’s the real crowd. So you’ve got all these different, the effects crowd is the white noise cheering, which It’s not actually, you can only get away with using this for so long and then it becomes actually quite horrible to listen to in the cinema if it’s loud and it’s constant. It actually pans around from being pleasurable to painful, which is obviously not what you want to do in a cinema. You always want people to be thoroughly enjoying it. So the way to illustrate the crowd without pulling people with white noise is to use singing crowd and clapping crowd because that still illustrates the size of the crowd, but it’s a very musical crowd and it makes it feel more joyous and elevated when it goes along with the music. I guess, yeah, crowds, crowds are often, when they are joyous and elevated, they are often singing along and clapping.
[“Bohemian Rhapsody song excerpt plays]
Jason Nicholas
So talking about using music in films here, the nature of the medium usually calls for a specific kind of applied music when it’s used as score to supplement the narrative. In that instance, the film composer has to take into account that the music will generally need to sit under and around the dialogue and effects, and it will start and stop and be intercut between scenes, and it will just be a presence to support the storytelling as an integrated element in the soundtrack. But the music that was originally composed to be a freestanding piece such as Queen pop songs, it often fills the whole sonic spectrum, and it doesn’t have to compete with or leave room for anything else. What are the challenges of using music like this in a narrative film?
John Warhurst
A lot of these songs, they are written into the script. You can’t put the song, the size of say a queen song or a boy song into that that’s not something that can be done as an afterthought. It’s something that’s done with the picture editor, with the script. These are kind of often scripted moments. And what can often happen is you need to reduce, reduce the song and rework the song, which is where stems can come into it. EQing the separate stems to allow things to pop through where they need to pop through, but I mean I think as you say it’s very much down to particular films we worked on that this is established early on and then the editor which you know Moonage Daydream Brett was the editor and John Ottman on Bohemian Rhapsody they’re working out they’re editing it in a way that everything can take a turn you know they’re editing it so that you can hear the music where you need to hear the music and parts of the music and then they’re making sure that if you do go to a dialogue piece it’s going through a bit of instrumental or you know so that these elements of our soundtrack can weave together beautifully but in these musical films it’s very much led by the music and the dialogue and then the effects or sound design sort of fills in around them you know that they are absolutely the leaders in those sorts of is not like an action film where the rhythm and the excitement and everything is brought by the sound design. And it’s essential to get the stems as well. The stems are the only way you can make these soundtracks possible is by having the stem. If we were to have a sort of a mastered stereo mix, I’m always trying to avoid the kind of released mastered stereo, especially if it’s been mastered because you literally have nowhere to go with it in terms of the, I mean, we’ve all seen those mastered stereo mixers. It’s what we call the audio sausage, which is literally like a brick wall limited. You’ve got nowhere to go with tracks like that. You need to get back as close back to the originally recorded elements as possible. And the absolute golden ticket, as I always say, is the mixed stems and the raw multi -track and then we can really dig in and create when these songs are often originally mixed they’re mixed for kind of radio play they’re mixed for home listening on a hi -fi they’re not mixed for adobe atmos cinema which has a much greater dynamic range so if you can get this golden ticket of getting the mixed stems so you know how it was all mixed to create the single, but also the original recordings, especially for the voice, the original recordings, the original multi -tracks, you really can do a much deeper, a much more immersive, believable soundtrack. And that often involves getting these estates on board as quickly as possible, way down the line in pre -production, and explaining these elements to. And obviously there’s a lot of worry. There’s a lot of, they worry about how you’re going to use them, how things are going to be represented. They’re very happy with the way that the song is mixed that the world already knows. And so there’s a lot of worry about that. So there’s a lot of trust needs to be gained and experimentation, things like it does get easier that we now have other films that we can point them to and say, well, have a listen to that film. And this is the end results so it does make it easy but yeah there’s a trust needs to be gained with the estate to be able to get into if you can get those original recordings, you really you can really do something so much greater in for the cinema mix.
Neil Hillman
I must admit I was impressed with the extended version of Rick Wakeman’s piano playing in Moon Age Daydream from the Hunky Dory album and I wondered if that had come from stems or whether you’d managed to get Rick involved to play some extended filligree work for you?
John Warhurst
Yeah, no, that was all from stems. Again, it wasn’t just for the music. He [director Brett Morgan] had been given access to literally millions of assets in the David Bowie archive. This is from, you know, visual media to recorded interviews, as Nina was saying earlier, to the record, to the multi -track recordings, all of these things, which again meant that you can really get much deeper involved. Sometimes if the estate are nervous about releasing multi -tracks, then someone they trust will do a mix on them for us, but we’ll ask them to mix without the compression or much less of the harsher, not harsher, but the those EQs that you use that were so familiar the sound of that you hear on the radio. So it’s a question of just taking a few steps backwards to get back to the original material so that you can do this reverse maneuver and then drive out into a different way to create a different sounding mix for the cinema because that’s the key thing. Like I say, if you’re dealing with master recordings, you really can’t do that much.
[‘We Will Rock You’ song excerpt plays]
If we consider the three music-centric films we’ve already mentioned, Les Misérables, Bohemian Rhapsody and Moonage Daydream, whilst music is at the heart of all three, they couldn’t be more different, could they? Les Misérables was already a phenomenally successful and traditional West End stage musical that was being made for the big screen, but with a libretto rather than a script. Bohemian Rhapsody was conspicuously more operatic, in as much as it sympathetically depicted the triumph but ultimate tragedy of Freddie Mercury’s life, and it could have been written by Verdi with its themes of social pressures, love and death. And then there’s Moonage Daydream, an exhaustive, relentless, assaulting and at times confrontational, visual feast documenting David Bowie’s progress as a rounded artist. We get to see him as a singer, an actor and a surprisingly talented painter presented in three distinct acts: London and LA, that’s the Ziggy Stardust, the Spiders from Mars and Mick Ronson’s unique guitar playing years; then there’s Berlin, the thin white duke, producer Brian Eno and the distinctive guitar of Carlos Alomar; and then what seemed to me to be the most secure of his personas, maybe as close to himself as we ever get to see, Bowie in South East Asia and painting. His voice is noticeably deeper and authoritative in the third act as well. What do you remember about the conversations, and how different they were with the three directors of these movies? How did each of these directors’ visions influence what you did as sound editors and sound designers?
John Warhurst
That’s a big question. That’s a big question to answer! I’ve tried to think of a one sentence to answer the whole thing. But so obviously, as you say, they are very, very different style films, completely different style musical films with Les Misérables. Obviously, this was, as you say, it was kind of scripted. It was like a libretto. It was an existing musical, a very, very famous musical. And the key thing with Les Misérables was the fact that all the, that everything was sung, but it was essentially the dialogue. It was, they were singing the dialogue. And it was important, and it’s incredibly important to Tom Hooper, the director of Les Misérables, it was incredibly important that when people sang those lyrics, or when they sang that dialogue, that they were allowed the freedom of being able to also act, rather than, as I would say, when you have music playback – you press play on a computer and this computer will drive you all the way through that scene and you cannot stop, you cannot get off that train. It’s literally going to give you no opportunity to be able to do much. So that was where the idea about performing, the music live for Les Misérables came with a live on set pianist and so that the pianist wouldn’t push the actor, the pianist would wait for the actor to act. And so that there was no difference if they had spoken those lines, it was trying to achieve a similar result to if they were speaking those lines, just the fact that they’re putting sort of pitch into the dialogue, if you like, pitch and some rhythm, then it doesn’t, they still have the freedom to be able to kind of act. So that was the main part of Les Misérables was always about that being sung dialogue and that’s how it was recorded. It was recorded exactly like dialogue on set by a fantastic production sound mixer called Simon Hayes and it was recorded with two lav mics. I remember having the conversation with Simon, he was worried that if they sang, they blew and they went over the top because he wanted to minimize the amount of compression. I think there’s a lot of a lot of things out there. Simon’s written a lot about all of this, but I think he was trying to reduce the amount of compression or limiting that he put onto the mics. So, he would place one mic closer and one mic further away so that if they went, if they suddenly were whispering and then started and then burst into huge song and it actually overloaded the one mic, he would have the up option of that second mic that’s a little bit further away. And then also of course with a boom mic. So, it was all recorded like dialogue. And then when we came to put that film together in post-production, it was literally like one huge dialogue edit really was the film. Bohemian Rhapsody was very different because obviously that was a scripted film. That was a film that had been written around sort of Freddie and the band’s life and but using their music to tell their story. And so a lot of those things were sort of written into the script. But as we said before, when John Oten came to edit the film together, that there is a license as to how you how the actual realization of the edit comes together, how it can be moved around to to tell the most dynamic story using the Queen, the music of Queen. Ironically, John Ottmann was also employed as the composer on “Bohemian Rhapsody,” and he tried to write a score for it. But every time we went to like this other music that wasn’t Queen music, it felt so out of line. And Graham King, the producer, every time we screened it for Graham with these other bits of music in, he would just be like, “What is that? Take it out, take it out.” So, we realized over a number of months that we needed to stay, we could only stay with the music of Queen. It was the music of Queen that had to tell their story, not sort of like composed melodies. And I mean, we tried the obvious things of using the Queen melodies to, you know, re-orchestrated Queen, but they also sounded a bit strange as well. They didn’t really sound that great. That was the whole part of that was the fact that it was a scripted story. Now, Moonage Daydream, Nina, I’ve been doing a lot of talking, you explain about Moonage Daydream, about how that was put together.
Nina Hartstone
Well, I mean, Moon Age is again a totally different beast. I guess I was going to say the thing that’s very different about Bohemian Rhapsody compared to Les Mis is that, you know, there were certain, obviously certain sequences where we were very tied to the music or the original performance and the timing of that and the way that’s performed for example live age you know that was performed to match as exactly as possible the performance that was on the day but that does mean that you know for our process in the end music at that moment is God you know we’re so used to picture being the be all and end all that everybody kind of shifts and moves around but on those sorts of films the music that we have there is what it is and everything has to move around that so we had a lot of liaison with the John Ockman editor to make sure that every shot was as close as it could be sync wise for Rami’s vocal and for the instruments and everything so we end up moving picture and sound around to make sure that we’re as much matching the music as well as possible. And then Moonage is, I mean that’s a completely different beast again in a way. It’s a whole, it was an incredibly creative experience to work with Brett Morgan who has had such an amazing vision of telling the story of Bowie, not just of his music, of his whole creative personality, of his emotion, his state of mind, his philosophies and realizations throughout his life. And using both the music and sound design, as well as obviously it’s different to a documentary in many ways because the whole thing, it’s not our talking heads, it’s not interviews, the whole thing is told in Bowie’s voice. So in that sense, it was a very creative piece for us. I mean, working through the archive recordings of Bowie. Again, with those sorts of things, you don’t want to clean anything up too hard. You get to a point where you want it to feel authentic. You need to work with the parameters of what the original recording is to try and push through some clarity where you can. But we never want to kind of, you know, there’s some really impressive tools out there that can do absolute monster cleaning on things and suck everything out except for the voice and boost the voice with all sorts of frequencies, but it all sounds like a robot to me. And the reality of David’s expression in what he’s saying, his thoughtfulness, the pauses, the breath, everything in his performance there, we would definitely want to maintain. And in terms of the music and the sound design, they were so overlapping where music becomes sound design and sound design is sort of and that the whole thing needed to kind of all work together and be melded together bouncing back and forth with Brett to try and create this whole that didn’t have to relate to what you were seeing in the image.
John Warhurst
That was one of the key things with it was that we were always trying to tell the story of Bowie’s spirit at that moment and that did not necessarily come across by the images or via some sound that perfectly matched the images it came across in a feeling with the sound of the music, the feeling that that created in the audience viewer. When we started off spotting that film with Brett, we thought that we were going to have a spotting session with him and his producer arranged for us to have a spotting session with him. We started this spotting session and after about two or three hours, he said, “That’s probably enough for today.” We hadn’t actually got five minutes into the film because we’d spoken about every single frame. He’d been editing this film for four years by the time that we met him and started working with him. So he’d obviously had a long time to think about every single aspect and an image and how sound that would fit with it and all of these different things. And we went on to do I think we did about 10 spotting sessions. It was going on for it was out of sort of 20 or 30 hours it took to actually sit down with him and spot the film thoroughly until he felt as though he’d given us all the information that he wanted to give us to be able to put the track together. One of the things that came away was that moment of him saying to was, well, the thing is, though, if we decide that we want to put a car horn, and even if there isn’t a car horn, a car on screen or whatever, it doesn’t matter. We’ve decided to do that. And because we’ve decided to do it, it makes it right.
Nina Hartstone
And so it’s like, okay, this is much more interesting now, because now everything is free. We don’t have to, on nearly every film that we’ve ever worked on, I’ve ever worked on, You’re such a slave to the image, you have to always be looking at them, but this idea of creating a track that could also have nothing to do with the image as well. And then from those conversations came about the fact that we have, obviously we have the Bowie music, which kind of scores the film throughout. But there was no score and the idea to use sound design to evoke these feelings, to evoke the feelings of when he was down, when he wasn’t well, or evoked these feelings of the craziness in his life and things like that. And to actually try and illustrate that using sound, sound that was free of the image, free of the screen, was very, very liberating. I think we all enjoyed being able to have that freedom, to be able to just make sound for sound’s sake, which was a wonderful thing to be able to do.
Neil Hillman
It’s the most extraordinarily sustained sound montage that I’ve ever experienced. It was extraordinary, extraordinary.
John Warhurst
Yeah, it was certainly a pleasure putting it together, it really was. And working with Brett, he kind of directs you, your dream of working, he gives you everything and frees you completely and encourages you to push all the boundaries and to take it as far as possible and to not be made of making mistakes, which is one thing that I always often speak a lot with the sort of team about, you know, this idea about making, we have to make, I read this thing about that the more mistakes you make, the more successful you can become, and therefore you will get a better end product by making the one that makes the most mistakes that ends up creating the best thing in a way. So this idea, this philosophy, which could be executed on Moonage Daydream. It’s not always the way, it’s not always the way on a lot of films. Not only you need to just turn up and they’ve got it, so it matches the images right first time, but yeah, on that one, it was a very unique experience.
[‘Moonage Daydream’ excerpt plays]
Neil Hillman
As dialogue editors, we were interested to ask you a few questions about ‘Gravity’, Nina; where so much of the dialogue takes place in spacesuits and over coms, how did you decide how much futz to add to the voices to make it sound real and risk tiring the audience, as opposed to keeping the dialogue clear? And how much did you need to replace the supplied production dialogue? I’m guessing that it was a very noisy environment to record dialogue in on set, because of the physical movements involved for the actors. And if you are ADR-ing so much of the dialogue, what were some of the tricks that were used between you, sound designer Glenn Fremantle, and the re-recording mixer Skip Leavesay, to bed in Sandra Bullock’s replaced dialogue so convincingly?
Nina Hartstone
Well, the first thing I’d say about that is that all good ADR comes first and foremost from the actor’s performance, and, you know, so absolutely hats off to Sandra Bullock and George Clooney for their performances that they gave us to work with on that. You’re quite right. We weren’t able to use much of the production sound because they were shot in these contraptions that were sort of like, that would gyrate them to make them look like they were moving in space. And each time they moved, you could hear the servos going. And the thing about a film like ‘Gravity’ for dialogue is, you know, you’re in space. There is nowhere to hide. There is nothing to fill it with. We can’t put some crowd in the background. We can’t put too many airs or wind in trees or anything to bed the audio in, so it had to be very clean. And it had to be separate so that you could hear Sandra’s dialogue from inside her helmet separate to any of the other astronauts in their helmets; and so very much, you’re telling Sandra Bullock’s character’s story throughout that film because you are with her the entire time from the very beginning to the end and one of the big challenges for me was to have her breathing, you hear every breath that she does and make sure that the breathing throughout the whole sort of quiet moments and traumas that she goes through in the story feel continuous. I could never sort of dip away to update the rhythm or anything. Everything had to flow perfectly from one piece to another. And in terms of how we went about recording it, it was important to us to make sure we tried to capture that feeling of being inside the helmet. So we recorded the ADR traditionally with a boom mic, but also with a lavalier mic or radio mic which was up on the forehead to pick up a nice close sound, but we also used one of the radio mics that goes over the ear on a boom pole that gives the microphone very close to their mouth and that was purely there so we recorded everything three-track to give us the sort of plosive sounds the blows of air onto the microphone for certain moments to make it again sound authentic that’s what we’re all used to hearing and really listen to people speaking from space, is that very close, tight sound. And then working with Skip in the mix, we found the sound for what Sandra’s helmet would be, so that we could kind of, again, with all those things, I think whenever you try and treat something, if you do it as it probably would sound inside a helmet, it’s always too much, you know. When I worked on Everest, it was the same with the, with the oxygen mask that they had to go up the mountain. If you made the sound of their voices as if it is actually behind those masks you couldn’t understand the word they’re saying and similarly with the helmet it is it can be too much so you have to have a slight artistic license of maybe processing it a little bit less than it would sound in reality however that definitely that extra mic that we could go to allowed us to sort of feed in and give it some authenticity of being in space. But the main thing for them was to try and make them feel like they were in space, like every movement was slow. We had weights in our ADR sessions for the performances. And then we spent a very long time, both Sandra and George were very good at doing long runs. And so I spent a long time just stitching it all together and weaving it and working alongside visual effects to make sure that we got the exact right misting at the same time as the breathing and the whole process was you know at the end of it you like to think it looks very simple and it looks like that’s exactly how it was performed from the beginning to it’s one of those things it’s the better hopefully I’ve done my job the more invisible it is but It did take quite a long time to put the whole thing together.
[‘Gravity’ film excerpt plays]
John Warhurst
In Cats, which you both worked on with Tom Hooper, who was the director of Les Misérables, how was the dialogue that segues from the kind of singsong talking into the musical pieces handled, just logistically? Were the actors singing on set and then just went into the dialogue? Or how do you make these kinds of transitions?
John Warhurst
Yeah, so on that film, we had to, again, it was a similar kind of concept to Les Misérables in that some of it was live, some of it was playback and some of it was obviously spoken. What we did was we devised this sort of system where the live keyboard player could trigger the playback with a foot pedal. And so the actor could be speaking, then they could sort of move to a live part where they might get some musical accompaniment, say some chords and things like that. And then at a certain moment, especially on that film, because there was so much choreography that obviously there’s only one way to shoot choreography and that’s with playback music. It has to be identical every single time because there’s so many moving parts to the choreography. And then it would be actually the pianist that would trigger the playback with a foot pedal, which would then take us to a next section until the playback ended. And then so if you imagine the protools session, it would play that playback section and then there would be someone operating the music playback who would then stop the computer and then reset it to the next mark, which meant that the pianist could then go back to being live again and the actor had the freedom to be able to perform as they wanted until the moment when you came back to the choreograph moment that you could jump back to play back. So that was how that was achieved by this sort of these different elements of you know between spoken dialogue into live song dialogue that had to be free and acted into the kind of bit of large sections which have to be identical every single time are most of the actors in.
Jason Nicholas
So in a stage musical you’re projecting to an audience and it’s obviously very different what we can do on film I’m thinking of some of the you know the big musicals from the 50s and 60s. They’re still set like you know a stage musical will be set and the actors are often projecting out to people that aren’t there. Is it different now in kind of a modern musical when we can do much more intimate, lower level?
John Warhurst
Well, that’s, we always say, and that’s the difference between the sort of disciplines between stage acting or kind of, you know, film acting, because, you know, in a film, even the slight raise of an eyebrow can mean so much in that moment, in that dialogue scene, whereas if you were to do that on stage, nobody would see your eyebrow moving. So, and it’s the same thing with these musical films as well, that they do need to be delivered in a different way. They need to be acted, especially when you’re dealing with, if the lyrics have a sort of a dramatic context and a storytelling context, often, if you want it to feel natural, then they do need to be acted and acted in a way that we’re used to seeing acting done in cinema and that’s a lot of that was done in Les Miserables and in Cats where you know that the actors were given the freedom to act in a way they would normally in a film.
Nina Hartstone
I mean ultimately that you know you’re tied to sort of if you’re thinking of a cinema screen and you’ve got a close shot of someone you actually don’t want them yelling at you know especially if it’s a which might feel appropriate on stage, when you’re trying to speak to the back of the auditorium, but if you’re watching it in the cinema and you’re very close to someone’s face, then it needs to feel more appropriate for that for sure.
[Les Misérables’ film excerpt plays]
Jason Nicholas
Can I jump in? John, I have a very nerdy synth question here. So I’m going to apologize to the general audience. Les Mis has been running as a stage production for decades, and the sound of it is very set specifically in the audience mind. And though the actors may change and that’s fine, the orchestration and the music cues are quite specific. And I believe, and correct me if I’m wrong here, that the synth that was originally used and was the Yamaha DX7 and then the later, the DX7 was, I think, sampled into a curse file. Were you able to evolve the spot effects and synth sounds for the film or was that a walled-off area that had to stay the same?
John Warhurst
It wasn’t a walled -off area. And again, it’s going back to what we were just saying about the acting. There was talk about utilizing some of those things into the sound, but then ultimately, I think it was decided that it needed to be kind of created new or treated in a way that felt more cinematic. And as you hear in the film in Les Misérables, you hear the wonderful Anne Dudley arrangements that really gave a different colour and a different sound. And it was much more orchestral. Obviously, we went to Air Studios and Abbey Road studios and recorded with the orchestra to kind of create that blend. The orchestra was recorded after the film was made. So the film was made using a piano only. And then in post-production, all the orchestrations, all the orchestra was recorded afterwards and then tightly fitted to the vocal so to make it all sit together. It was a huge amount of editing with that film. I remember because the problem is, is that it’s all well and good putting these, what I call, I think it’s known as the ‘Pinter pause’, isn’t it? When you leave this long pause and you don’t say anything and they say that there’s more drama in the silence than in the words you could have said. When you have actors that put things like that into the middle of a musical composition, obviously it means that you have these kind of pauses that you need to work around and try and make the orchestra, make the orchestrations fit too. That was quite a difficult thing musically to overcome some of those acted out parts where they had put longer pauses in than you’d musically expect, but we still need to incorporate them and make them feel very, very natural to the orchestrations. But there was talk about using some of those sounds from the stage show, but ultimately, I think Tom Hooper decided that he obviously wanted to create the film to feel cinematic, to feel its own thing, if you like, its own written for the for the medium of cinema and that those things don’t always translate as well, you know, because if you’re going from large-scale orchestrations to DX7 sounds and then, you know, it can be sort of take you out the moment almost and kind of attract too much attention to itself that that happened, which is, as Nina was saying, when we’ve done our jobs very well, the more invisible everything is. Because you get pulled into the emotion of what you’re seeing and if something sticks out and pulls and jolts you out of that We always have the joke when we’re mixing films It’s if it jolts you out makes you realize you sat in a dark room with some flickering lights and some sound and a load of strangers, then that’s not a good thing. The magic trick has gone.
Neil Hillman
Well thinking about those discussions can I ask you and how the relationship works between the supervising sound editor, the re-recording mixer and the director, when you’re on the mixing stage, and you’re involved with the final mix.
Nina Hartstone
I mean once you get to that stage it really is the sort of heart of the collaboration. It’s where it all comes together on traditional films. It’s where you finally get the recorded music, the score that’s been recorded. You very often have only had demos up to that point. So it’s where you finally get all those elements together. And the supervising sound editor has usually been on the film, obviously an awful lot longer than the re -recording mixer. The re -recording mixer may have come on for some temp mixes and know a little bit about the film, but in a supervising sound editor’s role, you’ve sort of, you’ve taken all the information from on set and from the production sound mixer and you’ve worked on the tracks you know them intimately you know everything that you have there and what you don’t have there you’ve been through all the sound rushes you’ve been through all the libraries and you’ve been through all the try-outs that you’ve done with the director to get the director’s vision so when you do get to the mix stage it’s always about sort of finding your rhythm in there a little bit like when you’re in ADR you’ve got your re-recording mixer who’s doing the work in the sense that in that room, it’s a very difficult role I always think, because you’re trying to perform at your best but you’re doing it on a show to people behind you, and so in an ideal situation obviously the supervising sound editor and the re-recording mixer have an existing relationship and work together well and know how they work together and are a unified kind of force of knowing how to quickly keep bouncing back and forth to get things better and better with the director leading the room in terms of their notes and how they would like things to sound. And sometimes it can certainly be, you know, you can receive notes from a director and sometimes they almost need translating into what that actually means for what you would do to the sound to action that note in. So, you know, it’s a fantastic part of the process. I know it’s nerve-wracking for many directors ’cause they’re getting near to the end of creating everything that they’ve done up to that point. They’re creating some finals, their final delivery of their movie that can’t change after that. And so it can be quite a nerve-wracking space for directors at times. It can also be an incredibly collaborative space where everyone can kind of pitch in and I mean from my part I love that moment where I can actually wheel back a little bit from all the things that I’ve been worried about, all my tiny little moments that I always hear but if I’m in a room with everybody else and no one else is hearing it that’s when I get to sort of let go and see the big picture and listen to what the final track is going to sound like, how it’s all going to work with the music and actually start. You know, when we review reels, I love trying to get away from the desk, go in front of the desk and just watch it as a film so that I can really then judge how we’re working with the emotion and the storytelling and make sure that we’re doing the absolute best for that with our sound of music.
Neil Hillman
Brilliant. Now, could we give you some quick-fire questions that have come in from our listeners, in one or as few words as possible. Let’s have a go. A lavalier or a boom mic for ADR?
Nina Hartstone
Record both. Use the lav for exteriors and for interiors. Match what was used on set.
John Warhurst
Yeah, I would say the same. I did think that I was like, well, how can you choose between one or the other when you need both? But yeah. And also now with some really great software, you can combine the mics and mix them together, which is much more effective than you used to be able to do. So again, they’re really both so essential for that.
Jason Nicholas
Do you salvage production dialogue or go straight to ADR?
Nina Hartstone
Always salvage all production dialogue to the state that it can be, the best state that it can be presented in, and then ADR, the things where I think, actually, it’s itself as well as it can be. If they absolutely want to use that, we will use it. However, we need to have ADR to make sure that the audience can understand the dialogue.
John Warhurst
Yeah, I would say the same thing. Because also as well with ADR, sometimes you don’t use it wholesale, it can just be a word. And so it can be, if there’s anything you’re worried about, it can be good to grab those bits while you have the actor, which is obviously a great expense to be able to get the actors in the studio. If there’s any bits you’re worried about, you can shoot the ADR. And then so many times I’ve seen this with on the last film we’re doing on the Whitney film, where we’re literally putting in bits and pieces of ADR to make the production more intelligible.
Neil Hillman
Is AI a threat to our jobs or an exciting prospect for the future of movie sound?
Nina Hartstone
I’d say exciting prospects. I think it’s very exciting. I am amazed by the more and more you can do ultimately creating sound for movies is trying to translate your imagination of something onto those images and the more tools that you have to be able to translate that imagination.
John Warhurst
I think it’s another tool that we can use in our toolbox everything that we do we sort of reverse engineer from an idea in our heads of how we want something to sound and then we go to our toolbox to try and create that sound and AI will give us additional tools to do that and more effective tools in some cases.
Jason Nicholas
The film that most inspired you before you were professional.
Nina Hartstone
I’m not picking one. I’m going for ‘Dead Ringers’, ‘Blue Velvet’, ‘Ghostbusters’.
John Warhurst
If I had to pick one, it would probably be a kind of a classic rom-com or something like that. I remember ‘Apocalypse Now’ was; I remember going to see that in the cinema multiple times. So probably something like that.
Neil Hillman
The film you remember being responsible for you actually falling in love with movies?
Nina Hartstone
‘Star Wars’. I was going to go and save the galaxy with Luke Skywalker.
John Warhurst
Damn it. I would have to say, I think, I was just trying to think of my earliest memories and it’s probably watching movies at home, probably on TV. And those kind of old Cecil B. DeMille type films, I used to watch those. And actually interesting, one thing that we did get in the north of England on a weekend was big Bollywood films as well, which big Bollywood musicals, which I used to, I don’t know how I ended up watching them, but I used to watch a lot of those as well.
Jason Nicholas
Your favourite place to watch a movie for pleasure at the cinema or at home?
Nina Hartstone
Cinema.
John Warhurst
I’m going to say, I don’t watch movies at home, just at the cinema. The films were made to be seen in the cinema. If you would see anywhere other than a cinema, you are getting a pale comparison of what the experience you’re meant to be having. Most importantly, they’re made to be heard in the cinema.
Nina Hartstone
Yeah, exactly.
Neil Hillman
Are you in a different place professionally when you’ve won an Academy Award?
John Warhurst
Yes, without doubt. One of the things, the one of the more surprising things about when you win awards like that, I remember on Les Misérables, it wasn’t until other people started saying to me, “Wow” that I realized, “Oh, okay.” It was the people around me that felt that they were, I didn’t realize that people would say, “Oh, wow, to me about it,” but they did. Then that then made me realize, “Oh, actually, it does help.” Yeah, and definitely the Academy Award without doubt, I would say, it definitely helps when moving forwards on films and meetings, if you’ve won an Academy Award, you essentially put forward by your peers and voted for by the academy, then a very, very incredible thing.
Nina Hartstone
Yes, although my caveat is, as a female sound supervisor and there just aren’t enough of us, there are more glass ceilings to break. However, the award, I think, has allowed me to have maybe a bit more of the sheen that some of the guys have.
Jason Nicholas
With all of your experience in musical films, what’s something that hasn’t been done before that you’d like to attempt?
Nina Hartstone
I’ve got this one. I don’t think they should do it. I don’t think anyone should do it. However, if ‘Sound of Music’ or ‘Singing in the Rain’ is ever remade and they do it without me, I will riot.
John Warhurst
I think the film, there’s two films that I’ve always thought would be great to remade. In terms of a stage musical film, I think that ‘Hamilton’ would make a phenomenal large -scale cinematic experience. I know that they made a Hamilton film, but it was all they did was just shoot the stage show, which I think if you’re going to watch that, you’re better off to watch it in the theatre personally. But to see Hamilton made in a large -scale way would be incredible, and they also need to make a Prince movie. I think we need a Prince movie to be made as well.
Neil Hillman
Nina and John, thank you so much for joining us today. What a privilege it’s been to have you lift the veil on some of your projects and tell us about the precision and artistry that you bring to each and every soundtrack that you work on. Are we allowed to ask when we’re going to next hear your work?
Nina Hartstone
Yeah, I’ve got a couple of movies who are actually screening at TIFF. I’ve got a fantastic movie directed by William Bridges that’s got Brett Goldstein and Imogen Putz in it called ‘All of You’, which I think people will enjoy, and also quite an epic film called ‘William Tell’ directed by Nick Ham, which is quite a big, exciting epic that hopefully people will enjoy. I’ve got one other thing that I’m working on, but I cannot tell you about it. Sorry.
John Warhurst
Well, yeah, I’ve just finished the Maria Callas biopic with Angelina Jolie, which just had its premiere in Venice. That will be out in cinemas in November, all about the final weeks of the opera singer Maria Callas, and also working on the Michael Jackson biopic which we’ve finished shooting now and we’re going to go into post-production so that will be out some point next year.
Neil Hillman
Well maybe both of you can come back a little later in the series and tell us about those projects especially the one that we don’t even know about of course your secret is safe with us Nina. Well look it’s said that as sound professionals the better we do our job the less our work gets noticed and then it’s the pictures that take precedence in the audience’s eyes, but I’m prepared to go out on a limb and say that Les Misérables, Bohemian Rhapsody and Moonage Daydream are definitely three examples that totally disprove that theory, because the soundtracks of these movies are simply stunning.
Nina Hartsone
Thank you, Neil. Thanks so much for having us on.
John Warhurst
Yeah, thanks for having us on.
Neil Hillman
Nina and John’s impressive IMDB listings are on today’s show notes page, along with Jason and my contact details as enthusiastic and experienced work for hire dialogue editors, my work as a sound producer, overseeing films from pre -production right through to post -production, as well as the live, online coaching sessions that we run, and that we like to think are relevant and useful for all craft creatives, such as directors and picture editors, and not just sound professionals.
Jason Nicholas
It’s our goal with our podcast to educate listeners from all backgrounds about the under -appreciated wider role sound plays in life as well as the film and television industry, and to also develop a sound language and style of dialogue that filmmakers can use to more easily communicate with each other about sound from moving pictures. If you like what you’ve heard today, please be sure to subscribe to the podcast and leave comments about what would be helpful to you and your work and who you’d like to hear from on the show. And lastly, thanks for listening.
Announcer Rosie
The Apple and Biscuit show is written, produced and presented by Jason Nicholas and Dr. Neil Hillman. It is edited and mixed by Jason Nicholas in our Sydney studio.
