By Patrick Birk

To be Oscar-nominated for one project is a high honor, but Skywalker Sound’s Ren Klyce was nominated for two this year. Klyce served as supervising sound editor and re-recording mixer on the Pete Docter/Kemp Powers-directed Soul, Pixar’s charming tale of an aging jazz musician, Joe (Jamie Foxx), whose brush with death on the way to the gig of a lifetime forces a major change in his perspective on life.

L-R: Ren Klyce and David Parker working on Soul.

Klyce took on those same titles on David Fincher’s Mank, a love letter to ‘30s and ‘40s cinema that centers on Herman Mankiewicz, the sharp-witted, alcoholic screenwriter who wrote Citizen Kane.

Klyce is no stranger to Oscar nominations, having earned them for Star Wars: Episode VIII — The Last Jedi, The Social Network, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, Fight Club and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. We spoke to him to find out more.

Soul’s mix felt very three-dimensional to me. How did you decide where to place elements within real-world settings, and how did you develop the sound of The Great Beyond and The Great Before?
In the real world of New York, there’s a lot of detail in terms of panning not just the dialogue, but sound effects as well. It’s probably a culmination of how things are panned within and around the dialogue. The dialogue does move across the screen, and that’s sort of an interesting starting point when you’re working with a filmmaker because some don’t want to do that at all.

That said, with Pete Docter and the Pixar team, I think they were really interested in exploring panning, because with animation there are so many voices that panning sometimes helps clarify which character is speaking. We tend to try to keep everything in the center, but there are moments like the gag where 22 is first introduced. The counselor says, “And next up is soul number 22.” 22 says, “I’m not coming out!” He goes down the stairs, and you hear this whole off-camera thing as he’s chasing her around. That’s a good scene for spatiality and panning and whatnot. Not only are their voices moving across the screen, but all the characters are kind of looking down, hearing them underneath the stage over there or over there.

Then, in The Great Before, Joe and the young souls are mono and tiny, but then the counselors — those wire-like entities — were kind of left-center-right-ish. So even though they were in the middle, if you really listen, you’ll hear that we diverged their dialogue into the left and the right and then on top of that added little delay flutters into the surround, which we achieved with a Lexicon 480 emulation from Relab. The intention was to make them feel otherworldly and maybe a little bit more important and powerful. We added bass to their dialogue, which would sonically rack focus between them and Joe, who’s just mono and dry and center. You feel a change there.

Music plays a crucial role in Soul. How did you go about treating the diegetic instruments, from the school band in the beginning to Joe quietly playing piano in his apartment?
Giving the instruments a realistic feel was a big deal for Pete. And we had done that opening several times because it consists of several pieces of music. It starts off, of course, with the Disney logo, then Joe is heard off camera saying, ”Okay everybody…” Then the baton taps the music stand, and he counts into “Things Ain’t What They Used to Be” by Duke Ellington.

The hope was that it would just sound bad, but we had an actual high school band come out to the studio for a recording, and they were too good. Then Pete directed them: “Hey, can you try to not be so good?” Then they would overdo it. So there was a mixture between that and some studio musicians who were trying to play off-key. Dave Boucher recorded that.

We actually recorded that a bunch of times, and it still didn’t sound “high school” enough. Then Pete decided he wanted a really bad clarinet in the mix. So Pete’s son, Nick Docter, who is on our sound crew, offered his clarinet. He said he could play it really horribly. With that, we got the recorder out, tracked Nick playing some bad clarinet and cherry-picked all his worst bits. We then blended these “clams” with the band recording to add a more amateur sound.

Another big detail throughout the film was to capture the fingers on and off the keys of instruments. There’s that moment at the end of the film when Joe’s playing the piece of music we call “Epiphany,” which Trent Reznor wrote. Joe plays an A and then lets go, and the key goes flying. There wasn’t enough of it — we really got into the quietness, like the hammer action of the piano. There’s an old upright in the green room at Skywalker that’s just this out-of-tune mess. We used that thing all throughout the film, specifically to hear the keys and fingers on keys. We would mute the strings and then record the piano with the notes coming up. Similarly, when Terry goes into Joe’s apartment looking for Joe, he plays his bass and then goes over to the piano and plays the lone note; it’s that same piano.

How did you create the ambience for The Great Before and The Great Beyond?
That was tough. I came on pretty early, and Pete really wanted to push the emotional impact of the sound design there. He also wanted the music to feel a certain way — somewhat scary and foreboding, but also inviting, which sort of works against the other one. Which one is it? Are you pushing me away? Are you pulling me in? So he wanted it to be in this in-between place. We tried a bunch of different sounds and textures. I ended up occupying the sound effects design in sort of the lower-frequency ranges with a sense of rumbling and wind whistling every time we saw that big white light. Then Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross added their music.

So we wove both of those things to the foreground, then the music would swell, the rumble would hit, and then the music would swell again. Originally, Pete thought that when the souls go up into the big light and zap, that’s basically death. So what should we do there for comic relief? Of course, your instinct is to do something that’s big and deep, maybe intense, like a backward thunderclap that turns into some kind of a bang or something. We tried all of those types of things, but Pete thought they were too scary and would push children away. So instead of doing that, we would have these big crescendos, and at the very end, it would be like a bug zapper. So it’s like there’s all this expectation, and then all of a sudden, we’re nothing but flies.

You were also supervising sound editor and re-recording mixer on Mank. It was really interesting how aesthetically informed the design was by films of the ‘30s and ‘40s.
David Fincher was very interested in the technical limitations of what movies sounded like during that period — how they were recorded on set with ribbon microphones, the music that was being mixed in old films and why it sounded all distorted. He was very much interested in the fact that the movies were monaural back then. He was interested in the limit: What makes a movie sound old?

So not only did we have to make the sound effects sound vintage by collecting old telephones and typewriters, hiring people with old-fashioned cars and recording all of those sounds, but we had to make the whole movie sound like it was old. Then we added noise, distortion and crackle to the sound of the movie as well. That’s how we made the movie sound old and lo-fi.

Then, at the very end of the post process, David said he wanted the audience at home to feel like they’re inside an old-fashioned movie theater with a lot of echo. So we actually played the whole movie in a large theater-like acoustical space and recorded the reverb of the acoustical space. Then we very carefully added that reverb back into the film, into the surrounds, so that you felt like you were in an old-fashioned, giant movie hall.

Fincher always refers to the term “dodge and burn,” which comes from the days of developing analog film. If you were making a print from 35mm film — of a woman’s face, for example — and you wanted her to be lighter, then you’d cup your hands around everything else and let the light only go to her face. You’d kind of move your hands around, protecting the paper below so that the exposure of the print would get brighter. We dodged and burned that echo sound from the movie theater. When you watch the film, you’ll hear that we didn’t just leave it at one level. We established it at the beginning of the movie, and then we kind of pulled it away.

What was your process for making the film sound “lo-fi”?
David wanted to have the experience of hearing the movie sound old-timey. So we did a frequency analysis of Citizen Kane and realized that there was nothing below 110Hz. But it tapers off at this Q factor, and then there are all these mid-range peaks that are spiky, and then it drops off precipitously at 8,000Hz and tapers off. We built this curve using a FabFilter Pro-Q 3. Then supervising sound editor Jeremy Molod figured out how to get that FabFilter bolted onto David’s Adobe Premiere, which was awesome, but the problem was clamping down on everything too much. In the end, we figured it out.

It was a long process because we actually mixed the entire film at full bandwidth. The other two mixers, David Parker and Nathan Nance, would be mixing something, and I’d run off to the other room to do what I call an “aging demonstration” for Fincher, who was in LA. Then we would send him a mix, an example of what it’s going to sound like. He would say, “Keep distorting it. Oh, now it’s too distorted. Now again, more crackly. Now it’s good.”

We kept going around and around in circles as we were mixing before he arrived. It took about 26 tries to arrive at what we call the patina effect. We treated the music differently, with its own EQ curve and distortion approach that was different from the dialogue, and sometimes we treated each character’s dialogue differently. And, of course, the sound effects, ambiances and the Foley all had their own treatment. We would often try to use things like Audio Ease Speakerphone on Mank, but in some cases we ended up running the dialogue through an actual old-fashioned 1930s telephone. So it took a while … more time than we thought it would. Luckily, we were given three extra weeks to figure it out.

How did you work with Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ score? Was the “patina” added by you?
They did it themselves, initially. Alan Meyerson mixed the score, and then Rich Breen mixed all the jazz stuff. Trent and Atticus were really excited by how Rich recorded the brass, drums and what we call the “big band” pieces of their score. Because of COVID, the music was all done with each musician at home recording on a microphone sent by Alan, so that was a totally different approach. Atticus patina’d himself, initially. Then we kept going with it. A good example is when Lily Collins’ character finds out her husband is lost at sea. The radio is playing a song (which Trent and Atticus wrote, by the way), and it sounds really tinny. Then Fincher asked us to “make it even more crappy.” He relied on me to then distort even further.

There’s another really great source cue that Trent and Atticus wrote. It’s when Mank meets Marion after he wakes up at San Simeon. He doesn’t know where he is, and she’s screaming as part of a scene she’s acting in. Mank sees LB Mayer, and they’re like, “What are you doing here?” There’s a Victrola in the background playing a warbly record, and they wrote that piece. That was another one where Atticus had sort of futzed it, then I just kept going and ruined it even more. Then David wanted it to have some added wow and flutter.

Then our music editor, Sally Boldt, ran it through Serato, and we did this weird little thing to kind of make you feel seasick. So there was a lot of attention to detail trying to get those little moments to feel old-fashioned also.

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.