By Randi Altman

The Robert Machoian-directed indie film The Killing of Two Lovers, which premiered at Sundance earlier this year and is now streaming, tells the story of a married couple in the midst of a trial separation. During their time apart, they agree to date other people — something the wife does with success, while the husband desperately wants his wife and kids back under one roof. It’s a story of pain and obsession.

Peter Albrechtsen, a veteran sound designer, re-recording mixer and music supervisor, is a frequent collaborator of Machoian’s, having worked with him on The Minors and When She Runs. Albrechtsen has also worked on projects such as Dunkirk and the Oscar-nominated documentary The Cave. For The Killing of Two Lovers, Machoian decided not to have a musical score and instead wanted to use sound effects, which challenged Albrechtsen … in a good way.

Peter Albrechtsen

We reached out to Albrechtsen, who mixed the film along with David Barber, to find out more about creating the soundscape for The Killing of Two Lovers.

You’ve worked with director Robert Machoian before. Can you talk about that relationship? Is there an unspoken language at this point?
My collaboration with Robert is quite extraordinary. He has a lot of faith in me and was really open for any idea or input that I could bring to the movie. I met Robert when I did the sound design for his previous feature film, When She Runs, which he directed together with longtime creative partner Rodrigo Ojeda-Beck. They came to Copenhagen, where I live, and we spent a week on the mix. The film had these long takes, which I thought were incredibly atmospheric, so I added a lot of different sounds to them using background sounds almost as foreground sounds.

Robert and Rodrigo loved it, and they mentioned several times how they wished they had made their shots even longer. So when Robert wrote The Killing of Two Lovers immediately afterward, he wanted to explore this further. “I really believe that you need to work on this film for it to be what I am imagining,” he wrote me when he sent me the script. Quite a statement, but that says everything about how much Robert cares about sound.

He sent me some musique concrète works by Pierre Henry and Hildegard Westerkamp very early for inspiration, and when he started editing — he was the picture editor himself — we started sending sound sketches back and forth. When the proper sound editing had been going on for a few weeks, he came to Copenhagen for a couple of days. The final mix was done at Juniper Post in Los Angeles.

Robert is very good at talking about the film’s sound in an emotional way, and it’s quite rare that we discuss small sync sounds like a door or a car pass. He talks about the feelings of the character and the scenes, and that’s what inspires me to do my sound design. He’s interested in sound being the inner voice of the character. So that’s what we talk about. And sometimes we don’t talk at all, but we can just feel in the mix, being in a room together, what works. It’s a very inspiring collaboration.

When was it decided there would be no score?
From the very beginning, Robert did not want to work a musical score, only with sound design. When he sent me the musique concrète works, the idea was to use sound in a very musical way from the very beginning. Musique concrète was invented in the 1940s and is a type of music that uses recorded sounds instead of normal instruments, and that approach became the foundation of the sound of the film. One of the very first sound sketches I did was the sound collage in the opening of the film that is built from different car sounds and metallic screeches and noises. When Robert heard that first sketch, he decided to use it in several places in the film, and in many ways, that became the film’s soundtrack: We scored the film with sound effects.

How did not having a score affect how you did your job?
It was such a bold decision by Robert to do a relationship drama without any score. Normally in a movie like this, the music would be there to guide your feelings and really be the emotional voice of the film. The main character of the film, David, very rarely talks about his inner feelings, so the emotions of the story are told through the sound.

When there’s no music, you really listen to the sound, and for me, the whole film becomes very real and gritty because there is no music added as filter or guide track for the senses — just like it is in the real world. It meant that I could be incredibly dynamic and bold in the use of sound. Sometimes it’s a very quiet film with a lot of small, subtle, distant background sounds, and at other times, the sound is very intense, loud and visceral. The soundscape is a reflection of David’s inner life.

I do not feel there is that big of a difference between sound design and music, generally. I work a lot with rhythms and tonalities in my sound design. I often score a scene with sounds the same way you would write a pop song: First comes the intro, where you play ambiences loud and set the scene, then comes the vocal/dialogue, and you bring down the instruments/ambiences, then in every pause in the vocal, you add a little fill to underscore the feeling. This would be a drum fill or guitar note in a song, whereas I use, for instance, a bird call or a train pass, and then the chorus comes, the scene peaks, and you make sure that the sounds build toward that moment. Then you add an additional sound or perhaps take away some sounds to make the moment stronger. I think that the more musically you approach sound, the more impact it has on the audience. So even though The Killing of Two Lovers doesn’t have any film music, it hopefully feels very musical.

You were also re-recording mixer on this. Were you mixing the dialogue or the effects?
I mixed the film together with David Barber at Juniper Post in LA, and he was handling dialogue and Foley, while I mixed ambiences, sound effects and all the abstract sound design elements. David did such an amazing job on the dialogue. This was the first time we worked together, and at our very first meeting, I urged him to experiment. One of the first things he did was to play around with panning in one scene where it really helped enhance the distance between the characters. Immediately, we all loved it and that became the method for all the dialogue mixing in the film — pretty much all the dialogue is panning with the person in the frame.

That may sound like a very technical endeavor, but it was an amazing way of underlining the physical and psychological gap between the people in the film. This took a lot of work, though, as several scenes were recorded with just one or two mics. David did magical things with iZotope RX to isolate dialogue elements. Like in the scene where the father and the kids are in the field with the fireworks. The kids didn’t have a separate mic, so David took the recording of the father and removed the kids’ voices, panned that to the left side together, and then removed the father’s voice and kept the kids’ voices in the right side. It’s something you couldn’t technically do just 10 years ago. It’s pretty much sonic magic what David Barber did, and it really made the wide images come alive in a beautiful way.

What were some of the soundscapes you created for this one?
There are a lot of different layers of sound in this film. Some very subliminal, some very upfront. Some are very quiet, and some are very loud. I’ve already talked about the abstract sound collages, but there are also a lot of background sounds that play a big role in describing the unique location in Utah where the film was shot. Everything takes place in this tiny town, and we really used sound to enhance the environment.

Robert went out to the town where they shot to record some ambiences on just a small recorder, and I used those sounds as inspiration and foundation for my work with the layered ambiences. Robert’s recordings were filled with the sound of cows; I’ve never made a movie with this many cow moos! It helps to enhance the humor that’s also an important part of the film. There are generally many abstract sounds playing in the distance as well. I love it when you can’t really hear clearly, but those textured, tactile sounds make your ear curious. There are also lots of different elements added to the sound of David’s truck.

I used animal roars when he turns on the engine and a lot of weirdly processed rattles and whines pitched so that they fit together or create weird dissonance when he’s driving — really turning the car into a living, breathing predator. It’s a beast. The car is really an additional character in the film, and the sound gives it a distinct and unpredictable personality.

How did you use sound to build suspense?
The suspense in the film is sometimes created by the intense, loud soundscapes but also, quite often, by the absence of sound. There are also a lot of abstract, unnerving, subtle elements in the ambiences throughout the film. Clayne Crawford, who played the lead role of David, was really good at doing ADR for breathing and efforts. Those can sometimes be really tricky to do for actors, but Clayne nailed it. By using his breathing all the way through the film, it creates this feeling of being very close to the main character. This results in a lot of suspense because it feels like we’re really close to a character who, from the very beginning of the film, is doing highly unpredictable things.

What was the process like with Robert? How often was he checking in. Were you working under COVID protocols on this one?
The film was made before COVID, but most of it was still done long-distance. Robert lives in Utah and I live in Copenhagen, and during the sound editing process, we were sending video bounces back and forth, usually a couple times a week and sometimes more often. As I mentioned before, Robert came over during the sound edit for a couple of days so we could experiment together.

I do a lot of international work with directors and people remotely. You can make a lot of great things that way, but being in a room together is still incredibly important, especially when you’re doing something that’s experimental or abstract like we did on this film. Still, the whole setup was very international: Dialogue editor Ryan Cota was in Sacramento; my Foley artist, Heikki Kossi, works from his studio in Finland; and the final mix was done in Los Angeles. Even my Danish sound effects editor and recordist, Mikkel Nielsen, is located almost 50 miles from me in Denmark. I love how you can easily work with anyone you want nowadays, no matter where they’re located. The teamwork on this movie was incredible, even thousands of miles apart.

What’s an example of a note you got from Robert? How did you address it?
Every director has his or her own way of giving notes. Robert rarely gives super-specific notes, but something that he’s focused on is rhythm, and his notes are often about timing — when should an abstract sound element start or when should it end? The sound collages were very rhythmic, and sometimes he wanted specific parts of the collage to hit specific places in the scenes. But this is also because Robert doesn’t necessarily want the subjective sound to cut out when we leave a scene. Sometimes he wants it to linger into the next one or perhaps cut out way before we leave a scene. There are a lot of very dynamic shifts in sound inside the scenes in the film, and a lot of those come from Robert. Sometimes in movies, sound can really be a slave to the image — every little sound has to have a visual reference, and all sounds have to stop when you leave a scene visually. But Robert is often quite the opposite: He really wants to explore what sound can do beyond the image.

Does your process change while working on big-budget films like Dunkirk versus more indie films like this one?
I love doing a lot of different projects, different styles, different genres. That’s also why I do both fiction films and documentaries. I even do sound installations in museums sometimes. Variety is incredibly important to me.

For Dunkirk, all I did was record sound effects of a special boat, which didn’t exist in the US anymore. I’ve known Dunkirk sound designer Richard King for quite a few years now, and he reached out to me because he was looking for sounds of a boat that only existed in Scandinavia. So this was a small job for me, but, of course, I’m very proud to be a tiny part of that phenomenal soundtrack. Richard King’s work is a big inspiration for me. But what I do feel is that, generally, there’s not that big of a difference between doing a big-budget film and a small indie feature. Of course, you have more time and more money when you do a big-budget film, but basically, it’s about telling stories with sound.

I think it’s a very fundamental thing to be part of the projects early, no matter what film it is. I love being part of projects already from the script stage, like I did on The Killing of Two Lovers, and the same goes for documentaries. Early involvement means I have a lot of time to do research, record a lot of unique sound effects and start creative discussions very early with the director, the picture editor and the composer. Great sound design is not something you do at the end of the process. Great sound design is something that’s integrated in the storytelling from the beginning.

Peter Albrechtsen

For a recent Danish fiction film, The Good Traitor, we did some sound collages for the film before it was even shot, and these sounds were written into the script, so the images were made to fit with the sound instead of the other way around. It was a really inspiring process, not just for me and the director, but for everyone — the photographer, the picture editor, the composer and the actors, of course. I think filmmakers should consider much more how to organize the creative process on a film. Every movie is different, and to me it’s kind of weird that the processes are usually so similarly organized.

Can you talk about the tools you use?
I mentioned this product earlier, but we really couldn’t have made the dialogue mix of The Killing of Two Lovers without iZotope RX. It’s amazing what that software can do. For the effect side of things, I used the Cargo Cult delay plugin Slapper quite a lot. Before Slapper I always found it hard to find the right delay for exterior sounds because those are usually very complicated, complex and unpredictable, but with Slapper there are so many possibilities for playing around with the settings. It totally changed the way I work with ambiences. This works for realistic sounds, but I often also add the weirdest sounds to Slapper, and because the delays work in such naturalistic ways, you can add any kind of crazy sound — an animal scream, a weird noise — to the plugin. I used that a lot for creating tension in subliminal ways in several scenes.

During the sound collages, I often sent ambiences, Foley and dialogue through Slapper to create the dizzying feeling of being inside our main character’s head. I had a lot of these delays and echoes as separate audio files so I could do lots of different pannings for them. The film is in 5.1 and not Dolby Atmos, but we really used the full surround system for panning abstract effects and elements in the ambiences. I love using spatial dynamics in mixing. Often when we talk about dynamics in sound, we talk about quiet and loud sounds, but you can also use panning for dynamics, and there are several places in the film where the sound is in mono and then goes full 5.1 or the other way around. It provides really interesting dynamics. We had a lot of fun with all available tools on The Killing of Two Lovers. Working on that film was a truly extraordinary experience.

Randi Altman is the founder and editor-in-chief of postPerspective. She has been covering production and post production for more than 20 years.