By Patrick Birk

One of the first films to be released during the pandemic was Apple TV+’s WWII-set film Greyhound, directed by Aaron Schneider and starring Tom Hanks as Commander Ernest Krause. Hanks also wrote the screenplay, which is based on the book “The Good Shepherd” by C.S. Forester. The plot focuses on an Allied Naval convoy carrying supplies across the Atlantic to Liverpool during the Battle of the Atlantic in 1942. The convoy must cross the “Black Pit,” a section of the Mid-Atlantic where no air cover is available. Tension is palpable throughout the film, as the USS Keeling and her fellow ships must contend with the constant risk of attacks from German U-boats.

David Wyman on set

Production sound mixer David Wyman played a crucial role in capturing the tension that makes this film feel so authentic. Wyman was nominated for a Best Sound Oscar along with Michael Minkler, Beau Borders and Warren Shaw.

Wyman’s past credits include The Big Short, The Hate U Give and Showtime’s Your Honor. He was kind enough to explain the methods he employed for recording dialogue laden with such intensity. While we here at postPerspective typically cover the audio post process, we made an exception for this film.

What elements of the WWII ships did you record to achieve a “period” feel? Why was it so important to have functional communications equipment on the ship?
I think that’s what sets this film apart from anything I’d done previously. The director’s edict was very much that everything had to be completely true to the period.

Aaron Schneider on set

Sourcing the correct pieces was very important. I know from talking to the production designer (David Crank) and the set decorator (Leonard Spears) that they searched far and wide to get these set pieces, the current props and everything else. They did an amazing job, and letting me modify them was another big leap of faith for those departments.

Fundamentally, the job we ended up doing was to service the actors in their performance, and the only true way to do that was to give the actors a real-time, live representation of what they would’ve heard if they were at war at sea in a destroyer.

Almost all of the actors, bar none, had been to a boot camp for a week with Capt. Dale Dye, who is a film industry military consultation. He put these guys through their paces because there was so much naval jargon in the script itself. They needed to hear and perform all of those tasks as they would have done in 1941 or 1942. As a net result, we had to come up with this hybrid system so that all of the actors could talk to the people that would be in their command chain. That meant reworking all of the headphones that everybody wore, putting headphone drivers in, reworking speakers and amplifiers in these toolboxes so we could actually broadcast the dialogue that was coming from other sets, or from off-screen actors onto the set.

Does that mean that the Nazi taunting the captain was live?
It was live, and it was director Aaron Schneider who did the taunting. A byproduct of what we did was that the director could route his signal from his push-to-talk microphone into any of the sources we needed it to go. So if Tom Hanks would have to be on the phone, and Aaron wanted to give Tom screen direction privately, I could route that to the phone. Or if he wanted to pretend to be the German U-boats, we routed him to the same speaker they would have heard it through back in the period. The final German voice is probably ADR by a voice actor, but the reactions were genuine from a live source on set.

I think it’s absolutely fair to say, in reflection, that the communication channels we created gave the actors a wholly immersive experience, so the scenes flowed exactly as they should. There were overlaps in the dialogue, which we recorded and allowed to happen, because that’s how the sailors would’ve been in intense moments of trying to convey information to the captain — about what direction the torpedo comes from or whether they hear U-boat propellers. All of that information has to be relayed very quickly.

The guys who played the talkers — the sailors with the big helmets on and the sort of telephone mouthpiece hanging around their necks — became very good at listening and speaking simultaneously. Admittedly, they knew the lines, but it can be very off-putting to have a voice in your ear and deliver dialogue at the same time. They became very proficient at it. I think that really helped to cement the intensity that we were able to communicate to the audience.

Did you tour the ship in Baton Rouge? Did you look at schematics?
I spent the first day literally being a visitor and trying to understand the geography of the ship. The veterans who work there are so knowledgeable because they served either on that vessel or something similar. Once I understood the geography, I could then ask pertinent questions like, “If the captain speaks over here, how does a person two decks down find out what he said?” That’s when I started to create a mental picture of how the communications of the ship actually worked.

Then I scaled that down, knowing that we wouldn’t be shooting on a complete replica of a ship, but just certain portions of it where our story was told — like the pilothouse or the CIC, which is the command-and-control center where they do all the radar plotting and all of the U-boat calls from — and then obviously we had our exterior deck and our sonar room.

Aaron Schneider

Was the ship in Baton Rouge strictly used for research, or did you shoot on it, as well?
Yes, there were a couple of interiors that we shot in Baton Rouge. In fact, one of the opening scenes, where the two sailors are brought up in front of Tom Hanks for fighting, was actually the mess room on the ship itself.

Then we had to do a bunch of exteriors on the ship and all of the gun work and the depth charge releases. A lot of the long tracking shots of Hanks walking around the perimeter were done there, too, so that we could actually have the height that was required.

The ship interiors were quite small. Did you have to stash many mics?
Yes, we did. Having done the work to set the communications up, I either had one or two boom operators on every shot. Now, if we were shooting predominantly in the pilothouse, then I’d have a boom operator there, but it was such a tight, confined space. I think the set was maybe 8 feet by 10 or 11 feet wide, and the lid of the ceiling was only 7 ½ feet, so it was really restrictive. Then you put two handheld cameras in there, plus all the actors, and there’s not a lot of room for anybody else. So I used the Neumann KM 185s — those small-profile, hypercardioid microphones — for booms inside. I would love to have used Schoeps with a GVC to get an even smaller profile, but they just couldn’t handle the humidity from the amount of special effects on set on a daily basis.

Any area that we had to cover that the boom couldn’t get to, we either planted microphones out of sight or used, obviously, a lot of wires. We had wires in the helmets of our characters when they were in battle dress, and if they weren’t in battle dress, they would have a lav mic in their clothing. But one of the other things that I did, as part of the communication system, was use desktop omni microphones painted the same color as the set. I sent them away to the paint shop. I sent about 500 feet of XLR cable away to be painted, as well, so we could run all these cables and hide these microphones literally in plain view. This way, when somebody went to use one of those pieces of communication gear, I didn’t have to rely on the microphone within the machinery. I could just pick it all up on an omni mic, which gave me a much better spread and a much cleaner signal to pipe to another set or to a set of headphones.

I also added an extra two omni mics that I placed above the two doorways that led inside and outside of the pilothouse. There were so many shots where people were literally running from one side through the pilothouse to the other side, talking or leaning in the doorway to give an order. With the camera positions and the size of the set, there was just no possibility to get a boom mic to ensure that we had that dialogue clean. So those were just tracked all the time.

Tom Hanks and Aaron Schneider

What tabletop and stash microphones were you using?
I used some Audio-Technica and Shure conference table mics. I needed something very rugged and very utilitarian that I knew I could rely on. Those mics get kicked around conference rooms all the time, so I knew I was in good shape as far as making sure that stuff didn’t break, which is really key when you do these scenes where you may only get one or two takes.

With so many moving pieces, what was the typical track count for you on set?
We had anywhere from 12 to 16 tracks. I think we could break it down and say there were probably five or six main tracks. I mixed everything every day. That daily’s mix was a live mix of all the microphones that needed to be heard. Obviously, we had a bunch of ISO tracks. I also took a feed from the submixer that was controlling all the communication channels because I had a second utility reading a script and opening and closing microphones as necessary so that we didn’t get any unwanted signals. There’s no point in having something come through to the speaker when you don’t want it to come through. We recorded that source back into the main recorder, so anything that went over those individual comms channels could also have been pulled out by the post guys to use.

What did your team and cart look like?
I had one utility, Marc Uddo, who was designated to do wiring and to keep all the equipment ready for whomever had to go on set. I also had a second utility, Jason Vowel, who was on his own mixer. My main cart was stacked with a Cooper 208 recorder and a submixer piggybacked onto a Sound Devices 788. The other mixer was used to take all the feeds that were coming off of that massive gimbal and route them where they needed to go. I actually used two 788s.

So I had a total of 16 inputs available to me. The other mixer was an Audio Developments, which was an eight-channel stereo mixer, so some of the channels we allowed to come in on stereo — so it was one play to two tracks.

That sounds like a lot to manage.
I’ve always been good at mixing large numbers of sources, and I think that comes from a recording studio background from when I was younger. Looking at a 96-channel mixer doesn’t scare me because I know it’s just 96 repeats of the same thing.

But I think it’s fair to say that the art of sound mixing lies in being able to deliver the editors a comprehensive mono track that gives them a really good representation of what was happening on set during any scene. Sure, we will have ISOs that can kind of save us if we miss a cue, but the art of it is to get those cues right, and I cut my teeth mixing to stereo.

I have mixed in recording studios to a 24-track. I also mixed from eight channels to stereo NAGRAs and stereo DAT machines very early in my career. I think it takes muscle memory and concentration because you’re following the script, you’re waiting for cues, you’re waiting for actors to say their lines. You’re paying exceptionally close attention to the monitors because you also need to know who’s on camera —is this guy about to step in, or is he going to pause? It becomes a dance, really, it does, between the script, what you’re seeing on camera and what you’re seeing on the faders in front of you.

What was the most challenging scene in the entire picture?
The most challenging scene was the scene where we shot two sets simultaneously. We sent one camera down to the CIC, which was 50 to 75 feet away from the gimballed set, and we shot the pilothouse and the CIC at the same time. Tom Hanks and Stephen Graham talked to each other over what we affectionately called the “bitch box.”

So the speaker and the mic had to be open and relay to each other; they had a conversation on the phone, which was also live. That was the most difficult thing to do because I was mixing the two sets simultaneously and having to make sure that the actors could hear and speak to each other in real time so the performances would be correct.

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.