When Sound Inhabits Emotional State, From ‘Last Night in Soho’ to ‘Tick, Tick … Boom!’

Last Night in Soho

Focus Features

For Edgar Wright’s psychological thriller — in which Ellie (Thomasin McKenzie) is transported to Soho in the swinging ’60s, where she follows a singer, Sandie (Anya Taylor-Joy) — the director’s go-to supervising sound editor/designer and rerecording mixer, Julian Slater, aimed to create sounds that might come from 1965. “We desperately wanted the movie to sound like something distinctly and sonically relevant to that time period,” he explains. “We spent a lot of time shunning modern-day plug-ins and effects units. There’s a lot of stuff happening with regard to using pieces of dialogue and sound effects and doing treatments that were done from records — a bit less so movies — of that era.”

Another key priority was to convey Ellie’s emotional state. Slater explains that the first 24 minutes of the movie were mixed in mono to reflect Ellie’s boredom with her life. “When we go into Soho for the first time, we open it up into expansive, immersive sound [mixed in Atmos],” he says. “It’s the ’60s that she really fantasizes about, and so that’s the thing that’s going to awaken her senses.”

He adds that the first time she is transported to the 1960s, “everything is very dreamlike and very warm, but the more times she goes back and things get darker and darker, the sound design does the same thing. Voices start becoming de-tuned and the whole ambience starts to shift into a much darker tone.

“As her journey goes deeper, the two worlds start inhabiting each other,” continues Slater. “You’ll have old-style police sirens in modern-day Soho, for example. And outside her apartment, at the beginning of the movie, you hear people drunkenly, but playfully, fighting with each other or having a kind of couple’s argument. As she goes further into this [dark] story … the arguments become slightly [more] violent outside.”

A Quiet Place Part II 

Paramount

In the sequel to John Krasinski’s 2018 Paramount thriller — which follows a family trying to survive in a world inhabited by deadly predators that are blind but can hear the slightest sound — the director reteamed with supervising sound editors Erik Aadahl and Ethan Van der Ryn, who were Oscar-nominated in sound editing for their work on the original A Quiet Place. “One of our mantras on A Quiet Place Part II was, ‘The smallest sounds are big sounds,’ ” says Aadahl. “Whether it’s a close-up of a foot gently compressing sand and then next a foot stepping on a leaf that’s uncomfortably crunching, those tiny sounds are huge sounds. They are so critical.”

Of creating the creatures, two-time Oscar winner Van der Ryn explains that the sound team gave them “sonic modes” — a search mode, which included recording “a stun gun against grapes, pitched down,” as well as a navigation mode and an attack mode.

In the movie, actress Millicent Simmonds, who’s deaf, plays the deaf character Regan. Aadahl explains that the film’s sound, from her perspective with cochlear implants, is “almost an internal sound — the sound of your body and rumble of the heart and blood.” He says that feedback from Simmonds helped to shape this sound, as well as additional research when he and Van der Ryn visited an anechoic chamber, which is a space isolated from outside sounds.

Tick, Tick … Boom!

Netflix

In a musical such as Lin-Manuel Miranda’s directorial debut, a key goal for a sound team is to create songs — and go back and forth between songs and dialogue — in a way that doesn’t draw attention to itself. “You want to make it not be apparent to the audience. And as much as you can do that, that’s where the emotional experience is for the audience. It’s seamless,” explains supervising sound editor Paul Hsu. “Hopefully, they don’t even feel the difference.”

The team artfully combined live on-set recordings with prerecorded versions of the film’s songs. “There are songs that we actually [recorded] live that they go back and use — parts of it from live, parts of it from playback — and go in and out of it, and that’s Paul’s magic,” says production sound mixer Tod A. Maitland (who is cited twice on this year’s shortlist, having also worked on West Side Story).

He adds that other songs in the film are fully live, including “Why,” which Andrew Garfield as Jonathan Larson performed on the stage at the open-air Delacorte Theater in New York’s Central Park. “When Andrew got to that scene, he had run through the park, he went through all of this emotional upheaval as he approaches the Delacorte Theater, and when he gets to the theater, he pulls the drape off the piano and he starts to play [in the rain]. At that point, his emotion was so much further than where it was when he did the vocal prerecords three months earlier, so that we decided to do the thing 100 percent live so that we could capture where he was at that moment, because his emotional energy was tremendously different from the prerecord. That’s not uncommon.”

This story first appeared in a January stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.