By Patrick Birk

Wylie Stateman is a renowned figure in Hollywood’s audio post industry, with a career spanning over four decades and a slew of projects with heavy hitters, including John Hughes, Quentin Tarantino and Cameron Crowe. Last year, Stateman reunited with director Scott Frank for the Netflix Original Series The Queen’s Gambit. Their past collaborations include A Walk Among the Tombstones and Godless.

Wylie Stateman

The Queen’s Gambit tells the story of Beth Harmon (Anya Taylor-Joy), an orphan who discovers her prodigious talent for chess at the age of nine. She goes on to compete against grandmasters around the world. Stateman worked side by side with picture editor Michelle Tesoro, composer Carlos Rafael Rivera and music editor Tom Kramer to create a shining example of teamwork at its best. The Queen’s Gambit delivers an emotional impact greater than the sum of any of its constituent parts, and Stateman was kind enough to explain how his sound design factored in.

As a sound designer, what were your first impressions about working on a series about chess?
I’ve worked with the director, Scott Frank, a number of times before. When he reached out and told me he wanted to make an original series, and that it was a great sound opportunity, I was really excited. We spoke in very broad terms at that point. Then he said, “It’s about a young orphan girl who becomes a grandmaster chess player.” I joked, “Couldn’t we do this about a World War I fighting ace or something? In period costumes?”

So, yes, it was hard to understand how he was going to create an emotional thread that was going to rely on sound from the very beginning. But once there was a better understanding. I knew that The Queen’s Gambit was a really lovely, craft-driven piece, where original score music, source music, sound design, sound editing and mixing would really get a chance to show themselves in a very subtle way.

Space seems to have played a big role in the design, from the isolation of the orphanage basement to the reverberant marble chamber where Beth faces off against Russian Grandmaster Borgov.
In the beginning, the basement plays a very significant role, and it’s got to be a scary place. You know, it’s the young girl going down into a basement, and there’s a strange man — the janitor, Mr. Shaibel — who lives down there. He’s doing this strange thing, playing chess, and she’s never seen the game before. So she’s being introduced to a lot of interesting and potentially dangerous sorts of things.

How were those basement scenes handled?
The first person on was the composer, Carlos Rafael Rivera. Carlos started writing sketches to the script, so when they started shooting, picture editor Michelle Tesoro started assembling picture and using some of Carlos’ sketches. But from the very beginning, we were trying to orchestrate how we would enter and exit a scene. Do we have weird sound design as they enter the basement? Or do we start with music and then, once the sound design comes in, does music lead or does it lag?

These are the kinds of things that are really good to work out early, and that’s the beauty of the way we work; we do a parallel working process whereby sound is developed in a final mix template and session alongside the picture cut. And sound really does include music. Our music editor, Tom Kramer, functioned as an editor, a mixer and a producer. I function in many ways as a designer and a producer — what I call a “sound DP.”

Our DP, Steven Meizler, produced beautiful images — the DP defines the frame. The sound designer and the sound mixers determine the space. So there’s a lot of use of acoustical space and acoustical scale that make this project really interesting. And when the director says, “I’m going to make a movie about chess,” you hardly think of acoustical scale or space. But that’s really what we played with on this project. There’s a lot to be had there in terms of telling a story and delivering emotional impact.

One of the major uses of space that I noticed was the transition to the USSR. Everything felt cavernous immediately. Was this meant to reflect where Beth was at mentally?
Yes. The whole series is building toward Beth facing off with her nemesis, Borgov, and it had to be built into a frenetic crescendo. The photography is quite interesting, and a lot of the acoustical space came from the production. Production mixer Roland Winke used a Decca tree with three omni microphones hung way up in that massive Russian auditorium.

We had beautiful crowd tracks and ambiance for that space, and it not only guided the reverb and delays that we used in the final mix, but it was great source material for making that scene, as you say, big and cavernous. Also, sometimes it comes down to just the tiniest touch of Foley — the hitting of the clocks or the laying down of a chess piece. That’s where we get the scale. You have this big acoustical space, and then you have the scale that’s created by having really beautiful and intricate Foley. I promise you that the Foley and the production are indistinguishable throughout this series.

The Foley editor, Rachel Chancey (who works out of her own studio in Brooklyn called Props and Pits Foley) did a beautiful job being selective about what she handed us from the Foley tracks. The beauty of it is that instead of having Foley by the mile or by the pound, we really made sure that every little add felt like production.

What’s your process for integrating that Foley so seamlessly?
Well, that’s why I say the mixer is in charge of the acoustical space. Microphones are terrible at describing proximity beyond a certain point. With vocals, when a singer leans into the microphone, they know how to use that proximity effect to their advantage. With Foley, not so much. If you record Foley too close, you can never push it away. If you record it too clean it feels alien to the production track. So we tried to Goldilocks it and get it just right — not too hot, not too cold, just right, That is, not having the recording be too clean or too unclear or recorded too close or too far.

We had great production effects and production, wild tracks and recordings from Roland, and those combined with the Foley create this dynamic range that’s indistinguishable between something that’s capable of being close up and in your face and something that feels like it’s in a giant, cavernous, five-story auditorium.

Periodically, the sound design becomes overtly rhythmic. For example, the chess clock ticks in time with a waltz, or the sound bridge has a dying engine fading into a ticking clock. How did you develop moments like those?
I believe that rhythms are one of the greatest tools that we have, and the handoff between sound design and music — when it’s done with fluid intentions — can be really beautiful. Also, it creates continuity, and it kind of pulls the audience through the experience. Conversely, if you make it bombastic, it can create discontinuity and punctuation.

When we go from a ticking clock into rhythmic percussion, and music into the rhythmic ticking of a destroyed car cooling off on the highway bridge, those are all pieces of continuity design. Those handoffs are really valuable for pulling the audience through these story moments and making them want to see what happens next.

There’s a saying in front of my studio that says, “When the eye leads the ear, the ear becomes impatient. When the ear leads the eye, the eye becomes impatient.” So, we need to use that impatience. Sound and picture married together are a wonderful way to force the audience to focus their attention and to move inside of the story. So scene transitions that are seamlessly going from music to sound design, or from sound design to music, are a wonderful way to do that. All of that needs to be worked out in advance. You know, everybody wants to lead, but it’s often very valuable to slide from sound design to music or from music into sound design.

Yet, you need to pick those start points based on the cut of the picture. Because of the parallel process we used on The Queen’s Gambit, we had the opportunity to work with the picture editor, Michele Tesoro, very early on in her editing process, which allowed us to work with Carlos Rivera’s music, and to work with Tom Kramer, the music editor. Everyone was cutting, mixing and establishing the rhythms early in the process. We don’t wait for the final mix to get everybody together in a room and see who wins; we create these dynamics, in terms of sound, very early and deliberately.

How was this parallel process affected by the pandemic?
We used Evercast to bring us all together. Carlos was in Miami; the producer, Bill Horberg, was up in Woodstock, New York; Scott and Michelle were at Goldcrest in Manhattan; and I was working out of my studio in Topanga Canyon. I have an Atmos home studio here, which was designed by Dolby, and it’s really nice.

The series touches a lot on Beth’s substance dependency. How did you approach the sound of her mental state during these sequences?
What we found was that Beth had this superpower: She was able to see the chess board in her mind, to internalize the dynamics of chess in a way that allowed her to make multiple moves in advance of her opponent. She was a chess prodigy because she was able to do this in her head. So we used our superpower of music, sound design and acoustical space — meaning when you’re in somebody’s head, it’s kind of reverberant, it’s swimming around. We were able to take her superpower and represent it with a sonic vocabulary that allowed the audience to enjoy that experience and be a part of her developing these powers.

It takes us through the whole series. Throughout the chess play, it’s not just pieces moving on a board; it’s the pieces moving in her head. To complement that with sound and music was really interesting. Some of the speed chess was done like a kung fu movie, with swooshes and bangs. The Benny Watts game is set to a jazz piece called “Classical Gas,” and we have panels moving visually. There’s all this wonderful stuff going up on the screen, but we also have the great jazz rhythm of “Classical Gas.”

Her romance with Harry Beltik is set to “Fever,” and wow, what a fun song that is for her to come into her own as a sexual being. But she’s also, again, always exploring what’s inside of her head, and what’s motivating her. Doing that acoustically and within scale using sound is what we did on this project.

The licensed tracks were excellent across the board. How did they come to be in the show?
That was Randy Poster out of New York. He provided “Classical Gas,” “Along Comes Mary,” “Venus” and “Fever.” These are really cool songs to cut picture and sound effects to, and to mix to. If you notice the way we use these songs, they don’t just come in at one level, stay at that level and then go away. They’re constantly moving around level-wise and within the space, switching from non-diegetic to diegetic placement. We did it in a way that is really compelling to the story and sexy to the characters, and it becomes a wonderful companion to the audience’s enjoyment of this piece.

Given that the series takes place in the 1950s and ‘60s, were there any period-specific Foleys or elements of sound design that you found especially interesting?
I am a big fan of creating a time period, not by being sonically accurate necessarily to the period, but by being sonically reminiscent of what that period might’ve been like.

So when we arrive in Mexico and we’re driving from the airport, we have a motorboat for the car engine, which is going “bum bum bum bum.” It’s just a wonderful, low-frequency thing that’s not in the dialogue, but it tells you that that car is not of this era. For me, it would have probably, during that period, run on leaded gasoline, and it would smell different. It would burn oil, and it would motorboat a little bit, so we used a motorboat.

Being photorealistic with sound is never my personal intention. It’s to create the mood and to create the memory. You know, there’s muscle memory to sound, and it’s fun to sort of explore what that is . We try to pay attention to those things, but the payoff isn’t in reality, the payoff is in more of the abstract and the storytelling elements that sound can bring, and the music is wonderful.

My God, nothing timestamps a scene like a great piece of source that’s memorable, that sparks that muscle memory that we have associated with music and sound.

I think The Queen’s Gambit is a very crafty project, and every department showed up with game. I think the makeup, hair and wardrobe, the production design, the sets, the production crew itself, the DP… Everybody brought game to the table, and that’s what you see when you watch it.

Patrick Birk is a musician, sound engineer and post pro at Silver Sound, a boutique sound house based in New York City. He releases original material under the moniker Carmine Vates. Check out his recently released single, Virginia.