By Alyssa Heater
Directed by Sam Esmail and based on the novel of the same name by Rumaan Alam, Leave the World Behind follows the Sandford family on their impromptu vacation to a beautiful rental home on idyllic Long Island. The trip soon goes awry when a cyberattack leaves them without access to their regularly used tech devices, and two strangers – G.H. and Ruth Scott — arrive at their door claiming it’s their home. As the world begins to unravel around them, the two families must put their distrust of each other aside and ultimately rely on each other for survival.
Beau Borders
postPerspective sat down with the sound team behind the film, including supervising sound editor Kevin Buchholz and re-recording mixers John W. Cook II and Beau Borders, to learn about the collaborative effort with director Esmail to build sound as a main character itself.
What was the collaboration process like when building the soundscape for the Leave the World Behind? How early did you get involved?
Kevin Buchholz: January 2022 is when we first started to have conversations. There was something very specific in there from a sound design perspective, and Sam Esmail reached out early so that they could have something to play on-set. There is a signature sound design moment in the movie called “The Noise” that they asked me to design. I worked on that very early so that everybody could react to it on-set as they do in the movie. I started working on the seeds of what the final version of The Noise would be and got it off to Joe White, our production sound mixer, to play on-set. Because of that, the actors got used to hearing and reacting to it, and that was the genesis of what became something very big.
Kevin Buchholz
That did several things for us. One, it helped cue the actors and get conversations going very early with Sam about how he wanted The Noise to sound and what it was supposed to invoke so they could react to it. It also got people used to what it would eventually become. It’s the same in the film as it is in the book: very nondescript but also descriptive in how it makes people feel. As a sound designer, it’s tricky to get that right. Any opportunity to start getting that in our subconscious is a big help for us. I’m thankful that we started early and created the threads of what we were able to build upon.
Another thing that was really special was that Sam could recall the shot list from memory and basically break down everything. He had his assistant, Romilly Belcourt, running a slideshow as we were going through it, but he literally went through shot by shot and gave me an idea of what he wanted it to sound like. I recorded that Zoom and created a bible for all the different members on the team. It was a very long Zoom — like, four hours — but it was amazing to hear Sam describe what the shots were going to look like and then watch the movie. He had a very clear picture. While some of the shots didn’t remain in the cut, everything I saw early on was exactly as he described in that long Zoom session. In addition to that, I was on with [composer] Mac Quayle, who told me how he wanted the score to sound for these particular shots as well as what the background should sound like. It was a really great road map.
John W. Cook
I spent a couple weeks going through that, starting to pull sounds and giving the team direction on the things that should be in the soundtrack per Sam and what the overall feelings were. He had very specific ideas of what he wanted nature and technology to sound like. It wasn’t necessarily technology versus nature, but it did hint at some underlying themes of that.
John W. Cook II: After that, we had a few meetings with Sam to talk about immersive sound and how he wanted to use the speakers in the theater to distribute the sounds that Kevin had started to build and would continue to build throughout the process. Kevin, Beau and I were there to bring our experience to the project, but Sam made it clear he wanted to really push panning technique and utilize Atmos technology in a new and different way to serve the storytelling.
Buchholz: We have guidelines about how certain things should be in certain places in the theater, and Sam very much did not want to adhere to those. He wanted to push the boundaries as far as he could, which was thrilling for us.
Cook: Sam’s vision was to do an inversion of a typical disaster movie — where the disaster aspects of the film were often happening off-screen, focusing the films’ characters, their reactions and growth in the foreground of the story. This placed a certain kind of responsibility or reliance on sound.
Beau Borders: Sam Esmail has a very specific style. I was new to the party. Everybody else comes from the Mr. Robot family, and if there’s something that really stands out about the style of Mr. Robot, it’s the very unconventional camera placement. It becomes very unnerving the way Sam decided to break rules and go outside of what a conventional cinematographer would do. I believe, in a lot of ways, he intended to do that exact thing, but this time with sound.
He really pushed us to go beyond what we would normally do as far as where sounds are placed, creating hard edges and taking sounds away, just like pulling the rug out from underneath you when you least expect it. It creates this tone where the audience really second-guesses what they’re seeing, hearing and feeling. It gives a lot of mistrust in what the characters are doing and saying. That’s the tone that really makes the film effective all the way through to the end. You really want to feel unsettled, and you wouldn’t think that something simple — like hearing birds and then not hearing birds — would do that, but it really does create a vacuum at a certain point in the film when you get used to this soundscape that’s very lush and very all around you, and then it goes away. You might not consciously even know that’s what happened, but subconsciously, because of what Sam had us do with sound, you end up with an unsettled anxiety, and that’s just the best character in the movie.
Tell us about the technology used to craft the immersive sound for the movie.
Borders: We mixed the film in Dolby Atmos between Kevin’s studio and John’s studio at Universal, and then we did our final mix in New York at Warner Bros. We work in this immersive Atmos format, which is very much a three-dimensional sound format. And Sam, being very technical-minded, quickly tried to figure out what the limitations were and then how we could go 150% past those limitations. Sam invented terms, such as “swizzle shot,” to describe how to move the camera. Or “I want you to spread the sound,” which was his way of communicating how he wanted sound to travel from speaker to speaker.
Typically, my hands are on the sound effects, and I’m used to moving sounds around the room, whether it’s a helicopter, an airplane, a bird, a tornado, whatever. We had to utilize the exact same tools to move music around the room because, to us, it had to become invisible. Whether it was a piece of music or a piece of sound effect, it didn’t matter. It was all about what gives off the emotion that we’re trying to achieve in this moment. And so musical instruments move around the room using the same kind of technique that I would use to move a helicopter around the room. And that became a lot of fun because we as the creative collaborators wouldn’t really think, “Oh, I am in charge of the music, so I want to hear every musical note,” or “I’m in charge of the dialogue, so I want to hear every piece of dialogue.” It was more about what the movie needed at any given moment. And the movie might need a sound hard-panned in a speaker or a music cue might to cut off right in the middle of an action shot. It’s not what you would normally do, but as long as you are left with an anxious feeling, then mission accomplished.
Cook: There was a great deal of review that happened over the four months we were on this movie. Sam’s taste or desire for a particular moment would evolve. For example, he might like a panning move of timpani across ceiling speakers in an early session, but then after watching the movie through in context, he would adjust in a later session. We were always moving toward a vision of Sam’s, and getting there was a really creative process of communication and experimentation.
Buchholz: Beau and I learned early on that we had to be very judicious and particular with our use of reverbs, delay and so on and so forth because Sam really wanted to perceive the locations of the sounds. He really wanted things to move, sometimes very conventionally, sometimes very unconventionally, and that created an off-kilter uneasiness that sonically puts you with the characters. If the disaster itself is opaque, but we’re with these people that are off-kilter, then the sound’s got to reflect the way they’re feeling. If we achieve that on a subconscious level, we’re successful.
Beyond Sam, are there others involved in the collaboration process? Do you work closely with the picture editor?
Buchholz: We worked very closely with the picture editor, Lisa Lassek. She and I were going back and forth early on. I had a bunch of recordings that were done on Long Island and all along the Eastern Seaboard. We wanted to make sure we had the birds correct and the waves at varying distances… all these things. I sent her huge libraries of sounds, and she cut with those, which was so wonderful because much like the journey of The Noise, the same thing happens in the Avid. We worked early on with Lisa, her assistant Blake, and their whole team. We also worked closely with associate producer Gregg Tilson.
Mac started writing the score before they shot a frame. They were building with what Mac envisioned from reading the book and his conversations with Sam. To convey how he wanted orchestration, Sam gave Mac a rough direction with an avant-garde, European composer that was very explosive and bizarre. That’s about all Mac had to go on. Then our music editor, Ben Zales, was integral in making sure that the music was edited to picture.
It can be daunting to be asked to design the huge elements first, but if you’re tackling that first, and you have music that you can play off, it actually makes the whole process so much easier, and we’re just finishing as we go. The house is already built, we’re just picking the color, the trim, the fixtures. I think Sam had a complete understanding of what the movie should be, but it required all components. He had to hear and see everything and have the whole thing together before he could make a decision whether or not it was going to live in the movie.
Was there a particularly challenging scene or sequence within the film, and if so, how did you approach and overcome that obstacle?
Borders: The film is broken up into vignettes — feeling at home, feeling danger, feeling mistrust, feeling excitement. All these different moods are represented in the movie. To me, each one was incredibly difficult. The trick with sound is that, if we do our jobs aesthetically and correctly, you shouldn’t really notice the sound. We always appreciate it if you do, but ultimately, we just want you to go on the journey of the movie.
Take a scene like when Julia Roberts’ character is walking through this Airbnb and admiring the craftsmanship. You might think that was really easy for the sound crew, but there is so much that goes into it: the placement of the birds, the off-screen kids splashing in the pool and just how smooth and high-tech things sound. The house itself had to have a life to it, yet the more active a house sounds, the cheaper it sounds, in a way. Why would a house be so noisy if it’s this multimillion-dollar mansion? It should be silent.
So even the moments that you would think are simple sonically just weren’t. We had to pour over many options and tastes and go on the journey with Sam to figure it out. Then there are scenes with cars and boats crashing, all bigger sonic set pieces. Those were just as difficult as you would expect them to be. In the case of car crashes, Sam’s note to me was that he didn’t want them to sound “too Hollywood.” I had to dial back on what I would do in a conventional action film and create the sound of danger while leaning on realism. And that was a challenge in itself.
Was there something unique or special about this film that made it a particularly memorable experience for you guys?
Cook: We moved this movie from two different rooms at Universal to four different rooms at Warner Bros. New York to two different rooms in Warner Bros. Los Angeles. There were a couple of rooms in New York where we worked closely with Dolby to make small adjustments for our needs. They were great. It gave us interesting insight hearing our mix in these different rooms, each with its own characteristics.
Borders: Warner Bros. was really incredible too. Because of scheduling, we had to move into the CNN building. We worked in a room that was technically a television room, but it was big enough to accommodate theatrical. Carol Mintz and Nina Leitenberg and the rest of the WB NYC family jumped through hoops to turn that into a theatrical room — swapping out equipment, rearranging speakers, etc. If they wouldn’t have been able to do that, then our only other option was to leave New York, but we really wanted to finish the film in New York with our filmmaker. So, they were great.
As painful as it was to move from room to room to room, I think it ultimately helped our process. Leave the World Behind first had a theatrical release then went on to Netflix for streaming. We can’t control how it’s heard at home. Maybe you have a soundbar, maybe you have a full home theater system, maybe you’re watching it on your phone with earbuds. When we make a feature film soundtrack, we do assume that you’re at least in a theater. Once it goes to streaming, we can’t assume that anymore. We really obsessed over how it would work on small speakers, on soundbars, on iPads because sound is such a huge character in this film. So, moving from studio to studio to studio actually disciplined us to make the film work in as many different environments as we could.
Does having both a theatrical release and a streaming release impact your workflow at all?
We put a lot of time and energy into our home theater version. We know that it’s likely going to be heard at a lower level with inferior speakers and we take that into account. In the case of this film, Sam listened to absolutely every format and had different notes and sensibilities based on each.
Buchholz: To Beau’s point, I will always take someone like Sam, who cares about how all of these versions are going to sound. If you have a showrunner or someone driving a project who cares about what you’re doing, you’ll go to the ends of the earth. It’s all worthwhile knowing that it comes from somebody who wants it to be the best it possibly can. In this case, we watched the movie nine times in a week, literally 18 hours of playbacks, and Sam gave notes on every single version. Give me that any day of the week. I’ll do all the record keeping in the world. It is refreshing to know that your efforts are going to be shown in the best light regardless of the format.
Absolutely. Is there anything else you’d like to add?
Borders: While this one is in theaters, I’d just like to ask people to please go try to hear and see it in the biggest theater you can. And if you’re going to watch it at home, then damn thy neighbors and crank the audio because sound is a really special character, and we’re really proud of it!
