By M. Louis Gordon

Jane Campion is known to cinema as a boundary-breaker, pulling audiences into complex experiences with sexuality and lushly realized human portraits of dominion, love and abuse. Her latest film, The Power of the Dog, turns her lens on the masculine condition, and this diagonal step for the director is garnering some of her highest critical acclaim — including 12 Oscar nominations — since her 1993 feature, The Piano.

Robert Mackenzie

Based on the novel by Thomas Savage, the film is set in 1920s Montana, where the Burbank brothers, Phil (Benedict Cumberbatch) and George (Jesse Plemons), run a cattle ranch left to them by their socialite parents. When George brings home his new wife Rose (Kirsten Dunst), a modest widow and single mother, Phil makes her life on the ranch unbearable with insults and strongman mockery. Until Rose’s son Peter discovers Phil’s biggest secret.

Leading the task of post sound — which has been recognized with one of those many Oscar nominations for this quiet but potent film — was Robert Mackenzie, whose credits include slammers like Hacksaw Ridge, Mortal Kombat (2021) and Netflix’s The King. Though The Power of the Dog would seem a departure in style from Mackenzie’s action-packed fare, it’s more a result of the impeccable thoroughness and attention to detail that he, sound effects editor (and first-time re-recording mixer) Tara Webb and sound designer Dave Whitehead have built a reputation for.

Tara Webb

I got the chance to sit down with Mackenzie and Webb, who worked out of Sydney’s Spectrum Films, to talk about the team’s process.

How did you get involved with the project?
Robert Mackenzie: Tara and I were asked to come onto Top of the Lake [Jane Campion’s limited series]. We were a bit nervous because Jane’s made so many amazing movies – The Piano is one of my favorite films of all time — but she just invited us into her world on that show and then invited us back for The Power of the Dog. She’s the sort of person that’s there every day for the mixing and is endlessly curious about what we do.

How do you start working?
Tara Webb: Sometimes I’ll just start cutting effects straight away, but Dave Whitehead, our sound designer, spent a long time creating this huge library for us of effects, Foley, winds, etc.

The film was shot in New Zealand, and we were trying to create Montana, so he found this website of Montana sounds that had heaps of different birds and nature sounds that we could reference. We found prairie sounds and did some research into interesting birds that we could maybe put in as a drama point of focus. We pulled some grassy winds, some not-grassy winds. We put together a palette that we could pick from to have consistency across the film.

So you’ve built your library of effects. What was the editing workflow like?
Webb: Initially, we just split up the film. “You take the first few reels, and I’ll take the last few reels.” Then there were specific design moments throughout the whole film that Dave took on, so we were kind of working simultaneously. I was cutting certain scenes and then sending them to him. He was doing the same, and he would go out and do recordings as well. He had a lot of props that production sent to him, so he could then spend a couple of days in his studio recording the saddle, the boots, etc.

I was going through the location sound and picking things out. The scenes in the barn, for instance, had some awesome recordings that Richard Flynn (our production sound mixer) had done. I sent that to Dave, and it was a back-and-forth kind of thing. Then I’d jump into Rob’s studio and maybe do a quick little premix and send it to Rob. He would have a listen and then we’d send it off to editorial. It was the first time working with Dave, and he was awesome.

What about the interior locations? Much of the reverb in the house and restaurant sound wonderfully real.
Mackenzie: The sets were really well-built for the starters. Richard was able to take advantage of the acoustics of the sets themselves, the natural echo in the rooms. New Zealand is also inherently a quiet place, which helps. We had a lot of production sound to use as Foley, but a lot of it was wide-miked; something we like to do is combine the Foley with the production sound and almost use the production sound as a reverb itself.

You’ve got the close detail of the Foley, but Foley can sound a bit unnatural. And reverb units, they’ve gotten better with Altiverb, but you can still kind of hear the sound of the speaker; you can still hear that artifice. So we used that combination of all three: dry Foley sound; Richard’s production effects that Tara sunk up, sample-accurate for every footstep and door creak; and then a bit of the Altiverb “indoor” as well.

Webb: Leah Katz, the dialog supervisor, would send through cleaned-up sync effects so I could have that as I was working, and I sent that to Dave as well. We had that great palette of sounds, so when Foley started, they could focus on the areas that hadn’t been hit yet or things that Jane perhaps hadn’t yet liked the sound of.

I’d always try to use production whenever we had Phil’s feet because it just had a great natural resonance to it. Dave recorded these amazing spur tings, which sounded fantastic, so we used them as a device as well.

Mackenzie: Initially we were making a big thing out of Phil’s boots, and then it was too much, so we’d pull back. As [director] Wan Kar-wai said to me once, “Rob, you’re kissing the audience with the same kiss every time.” So we try to adjust the balance of those elements to create some variation.

What did you use to mix the background elements outside — on the ranch, in the hills, etc.?
Mackenzie: I think there were multiple instances of Slapper on Tara’s session.

Webb: Reverb [plugins] can be amazing, but getting that natural kind of recording, there’s nothing like it.

There was one scene where Phil’s walking through the water. I was going through the location sound and there was a dog barking off somewhere, so I thought it might be cool to drop that in somewhere. I often go through the location sound and find things like that. I love those little snippets and stuff and try to drop them in when I can.

Mackenzie: That’s the type of thing Tara’s especially good at. She’ll find that one leaf that’s moving in the background and highlight it.

Another thing Dave Whitehead did was some worldizing in New Zealand. He got some of the loop group and re-recorded that through speakers next to a mountain. That helped a lot on the scenes with the cowboys — distant whistles or callouts through that opening cattle drive and in other areas.

You mentioned earlier that Jane was there every day for the mix.
Mackenzie: The way Tara and I work is to give editorial the sound as they’re cutting. We’ll do mix-downs of dialogue backgrounds and sound effects as stems and hand that over to editorial. Then if they add to it — they might delete our stems and then add more sound — we’ll get that back as an AAF and resupply the stems for the next cut.

Jane’s present at the final mix but also through the whole process, so we are getting feedback on all the material we’re supplying her throughout the picture edit. Jane was very particular about the way she wanted things to sound and how it would help the storytelling. Any sort of tonal drones or dramatic artifice that we might have put in early on — all of that was stripped back, and the drama came from those close-up details and background textures that were naturalistic.

Webb: By the time we get to the final mix, we’re usually in a really good place. Rob and Jane can then focus on the story and the drama rather than any kind of technical things. They didn’t have to spend time choosing between sync effects and Foley because that’s already done.

Mackenzie: When we sit down on the first day of the final mix, it’s playing the way Jane has heard it —the temp mixes have been in the cut, and she’s used to it. We mixed Reel 1, and then Jane said, “Oh no, it’s all a bit too much and overwhelming,” so we would break it down and then build it up again. We had three weeks for the final mix, which is pretty standard for us. But having Jane listening and giving feedback on the temp mixes up until that point gave us the luxury of time to be creative.

Could you break down one of my favorite scenes? Rose is practicing the piano in the drawing room, and Phil starts mocking her by noodling the same tune on his banjo from upstairs. The scene starts with Rose closing all the doors to the room to get some privacy.
Mackenzie: Oh yeah, it took a long time to get that wind through the crack in the door. That little “whoosh” as she’s closing it. Jane talked a lot about the wind. She had a whole concept for the wind, to hear the close wind around the house. And the idea of the house is almost that it’s a mausoleum. It’s sparsely furnished. It’s Phil’s domain.

Webb: Yeah. There’s no warmth in the house.

Mackenzie: You are hearing the wind come through the door, and then when the door’s closed it’s like a vacuum. Like Rose is sealed in the house and she’s sealed her fate. We know that Phil’s in the house and that he’s gone up the stairs. Rose doesn’t know that.

Webb: She thinks she’s in a little cocoon there. That wind was Dave Whitehead, our sound designer. We also did a lot of wood creeks and stuff as well, floorboards and that kind of thing, which we would sparsely place in between for moments.

Rose is playing, then we start hearing Phil’s banjo far off from upstairs.
Mackenzie: We did the banjo overdubbing almost like an ADR session. Jane directed the whole thing, and it took a day or two just to overdub the banjo for the film. Dave had to write parts based on the shapes that Benedict was playing, so we were mixing and matching between Benedict’s performance — because he learned to play the banjo — and Dave’s overdubbing.

Jane was really into Dolby Atmos, so I used the banjo as an object and put that in the back right corner, up in the roof. Then I slowly panned it forward as the camera zooms in on Rose and made the size of the object larger, eventually filling the room to get right into Rose’s headspace on the close-up.

Phil then pushes the door open, making sure Rose can hear him.
Mackenzie: We went back and forth a lot on how loud that footstep was going to be as he opens the door.

Webb: We initially cut it a lot louder. We did quite a few test screenings. When we were initially looking at just that scene, it sounded great to have his foot really stomp down. But when we watched the overall film, we ended up pulling back on most of those details. We left it with a naturalistic style.

Let’s talk about how frontal everything sounds. It’s such a sparse mix and you can make each thing feel grounded. Was there an approach or any tools you used to achieve that in the final mix?
Mackenzie: I went through a stage of using soft Neve compression on the entire final mix, but on this film, it was all in the box. We mixed on an Avid S6 at Spectrum Films here in Sydney, and it’s a great-sounding room. Compression is my favorite tool, and I use it on everything, but hopefully you don’t notice. We could talk forever about compression ratios and attack and release times. I used to love that, you know, the compression on the Neve Digital Film Console. When I first heard the EQ engaged on one of those, it was like my mind exploded. For this film, we tried to be subtle. We used Neve emulation plugins on the dialogue and music buses and tracks and things like that. Just to get that sound in there without you knowing.

What’s the biggest lesson you’ve each learned from this project?
Webb: Oh gosh, I learn something new on every project I do. This was my first time doing mixing on a big feature film, so I learned a lot.

For this film we went further than I thought we would go with how much we stripped out. And there were times when I was worried that we’d stripped out too much. I was thinking, “Is that going to translate. We’re pulling out so much. Is that going to feel too empty for the audience?” It was quite surprising by the end when we watched through. It felt right for the film. I think we found a good balance.

Mackenzie: That was a huge learning curve for me… trusting what you’re hearing. And Tara is really good at that. She’s really good at saying, “That doesn’t need to be loud. I like it like that.” “Don’t worry about that, the audience will hear that.” Not being too concerned about how it’s going to translate over people’s phones or TVs. It solidified my belief that you need to mix it so it sounds good dramatically and the rest will take care of itself.

When No Country for Old Men came out, I read an article where Skip Lievsay was talking about the night scene in the hotel. Josh Brolin’s character sits on the bed, shotgun pointed at the door, and from outside comes a very faint sound of a light bulb being unscrewed. I’m probably getting the story wrong, but they were in the mix, and Skip was saying to the Coen brothers, “You can’t have that sound so low. It’s not going to translate across different cinemas that might have loud air conditioning or people that are rustling their chip packets. People might not hear it.” And  one of them said, “Well, then the scene’s not going to work. It has to be like that for the scene to work. So let’s mix it low.”

That was in the back of my mind when we were mixing this movie. You need to trust in what you’re doing and that the audience is listening. And when I saw The Power of the Dog with an audience for the first time, that’s exactly what happened. Everyone got very quiet and leaned into the subtle moments. If we had forced those and made them any louder, any fuller, we’d deprive the audience of that experience.

M. Louis Gordon is a sound editor, designer and location sound mixer at Silver Sound NYC. He currently produces podcasts for the nonprofit, Shalom Hartman Institute of North America. His credits include Sundance 2016’s Equity, The CW’s Tough Mudder: The Challenge Within miniseries and Tribeca 2021’s limited series In the Cards. You can follow him on Instagram @mlouisgordon.