By Patrick Birk
The Trial of the Chicago 7, written and directed by Aaron Sorkin, recounts the prosecution of a group of anti-Vietnam War protestors known as the Chicago Seven. The film goes beyond the courtroom to explore the circumstances leading up to protesters clashing with police outside the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, featuring visceral scenes of police brutality that resonate today. Nominated for six Oscars, the film features an ensemble cast that includes Sacha Baron Cohen as Abbie Hoffman, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II as Bobby Seale and Eddie Redmayne as Tom Hayden.
Renee Tondelli
Supervising sound editor Renee Tondelli (Bombshell, Deepwater Horizon, Mary Poppins Returns) and re-recording mixers Julian Slater (Jumanji, Baby Driver, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World) and Michael Babcock (Doctor Sleep, Smallfoot, Inception) explain how they created Chicago 7’s gripping soundscapes. They worked out of Warner Bros. in Burbank.
The courtroom dialogue has a rich, resonant quality to it, along with the reverbs. Were you mixing lavalier and boom mics? Did you use recordings of the space itself?
Tondelli: Our production mixer, Thomas Varga, was amazing. He started out with eight mics, but after the first day, he knew he needed more, so he went out and got 12, maybe 15 mics, that he planted everywhere because there was so much going on in that courtroom. We tried to always use the booms, as the natural sound in the room had such a lovely quality to it. As for the mics we selected, we used a bit of everything, and Julian did a lot to make the voices sound like they do.
Julian Slater
Each actor had their own natural reverb depending on where they were in the room. Sometimes, lawyer William Kunstler (Mark Rylance) would be so angry that his voice would have this containment that would just explode. Richard Schultz (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), the prosecutor for the federal government, was constant; he was always at the same degree no matter what he did, no matter when he was talking. Each person had a temperament that Julian made a palette for. So it was really a case-by-case thing for all of us, especially Julian.
The reverbs in the courtroom scene start with the room. Aaron chose to use an old church because he wanted it to be big, cavernous and powerful. The room itself had wonderful reflections that we were able to use. But then Julian took it into another level, and we identified spaces and environments for each character that were indicative of who they were in the movie.
Michael Babcock
Slater: In the case of Judge Hoffman (Frank Langella), who is this beast of a bully, he had his own particular reverb — that no one else had — that would boom around the room. And we added a range of low frequencies and harmonics to support a greater range of authority in his voice that no one else had. So whenever he spoke, there was a different vibe and almost a bigger gravitas to what he was saying. We also did that to Ramsey Clark (Michael Keaton). He’s in the movie for so little, but he makes such a big impact. Renee was very deliberate about wanting to make his performance have a different resonance.
Within that courtroom, we were trying to smooth things out as much as possible and make all those different mic angles flow between takes so there was a rhythm and a cadence to the performance. But equally, we were giving little microcosms of environments to each character so that they’re not all treated with the same EQ and verb. You could call them microclimates.
For the reverbs, it was a matter of harnessing and using the natural reverbs on set and mixing between those and plugins such as Altiverb, FabFilter Pro-R and the TC Electronic VSS3. So some characters would be going through just one, while other characters would have a mixture of all three.
There’s an awful lot of work that happened with regards to making each line of dialogue the best it could be. We were very deliberate in our approach, so things were rich and had a good resonance about them, but without overcooking it … without things sounding overprocessed. It’s a sort of “Goldilocks and the Three Bears” approach.
Does that Goldilocks approach translate to backgrounds and Foley within the courtroom?
Tondelli: Even in the actual reactions of the crowd, everything was identifiable and deliberate. When you work with Aaron Sorkin, your sound effects can be like words because if there’s a moment that’s silent, there’s a reason for it. And that moment allows you to have something wonderful in there. It can be small and simple, and it can be complex to be simple.
We’d often talk about the granularity of some of the simple moments, which were really complex. Like when the judge has Bobby Seale taken away. That worked because we kept cutting back to these silent moments when you would hear one pen click, and then it would cut back and be just brutal violence behind closed doors. Then there’s a cut back to someone moving in their chair and a murmuring. All of those elements were always juxtaposed, and it was really a wonderful challenge to create each moment with something that was profoundly adding to the story.
Slater: Then, of course, it was also a reflection of what’s happening in current times — there’s an allegory there between Bobby Seale being restrained and beaten up outside the court and the Black Lives Matter movement. We were cognizant of wanting to be not only very studious to what Aaron had written, but also to convey those events and help the audience — through the use of sound — understand and feel the kind of things that were happening in those days. And, also, how that reflected in what was going on today.
We were both cognizant of the fact that not only was this an Aaron Sorkin script, which comes with its own gravitas, but also that we were portraying real events that happened many years ago. I’m from England, so I didn’t know about it, and I think there’s a whole younger generation of Americans who also didn’t know about this story.
Many of the chants that were used in the protests over the last year appeared in the film. Did today’s protests inform your design?
Tondelli: The whole world is watching. It was the exact same chant as 50 years ago, which is
Slater: Before we started, Renee had these films of riots back in the day that we were asked to watch to get a vibe of what was happening. Then on the flip side, we were coming to work each day, seeing what was happening on the news with the Black Lives Matter protests, and we had that as a reference to pull on. So I don’t want to trivialize the demonstrations that were going on by saying, “It was a great reference for us,” but it certainly reinforced our approach of what we were doing to try making those scenes as visceral as possible.
Tondelli: We started out with this exigency of getting the film out before the election; we wanted to tell the story of the heavy hand of the federal government coming down. Then, when we finished our first pass of it, the protests began — the exact same thing was happening today: The federal government was going to try the protesters in Portland as seditionists, which was basically the Rap Brown Act they came up with in Chicago 7. It was so completely parallel that it was chilling. We had no idea the relevance that we were stepping into. We really were hoping at first to be a film that was going to be relevant for people to see before the election. But I think it’s even more relevant today than it was in September.
How did the lockdowns affect post on this film?
Tondelli: All of the post process was done during lockdown. Nobody had a plan yet, and I knew we needed to have this film done by late summer and record all the group and principal actors. The problem was in the beginning of this COVID experience, we couldn’t have actors together on a stage, so everybody was recorded in their homes. I thought, everybody’s got a phone, so we had everyone get the Shure MV88, which plugged into a phone. Then I spent about two weeks with everyone finding the best place to record in their home and having them send me recording samples until we got it right.
Generally, you do group in passes — medium and large groups, then specific voices one at a time — but when you’re doing all the big stuff and the little stuff individually, it becomes a very different sound. It’s more articulate; you can get this granular essence to it. It’s more complicated. It took a lot more work to make it work, initially, because I could go through and say, “This voice doesn’t work. This word is not working” and then build the track. In the end, it has an articulation to it that you would never get if you recorded them all together.
What was your process for blending the individual voices?
Tondelli: You want to hear them percolating, but you don’t want to really hear them. You don’t want to hear a word that’s going to take away from the main character because there’s always somebody that’s got a conversation going on in our movie, right? It’s Aaron Sorkin.
So we did a lot of work in blending all these together. It gave us a lot more freedom, although it was a bit more work. I had sessions with hundreds of tracks, and then I would start to play it like a composition. I would play it and think, “Oh, there’s a bad note,” and I would take out that voice.
I would play with these tracks until I felt like I had a compositional track that would lay and support the scene. Aaron Sorkin also wants to hear everything. There can be main actors speaking intimately with each other and a group of people screaming on camera … he wants them all to be heard. An example is the “Take the Hill” scene with Daphne (Caitlin FitzGerald) and Jerry (Jeremy Strong).
Tondelli: Between Julian and Michael Babcock, who was our uber sound effects mixer, they had to constantly work this composition between all the elements, being evocative and still keeping the storyline engaged with the audience.
Michael, how did you mix the crowds in scenes like that? Or during the scene that takes place the night before in the park?
Babcock: In that particular scene, Aaron wanted to feel the vastness of the space along with the movement as you move through the park. He wanted to feel like there was just this mass of humanity. There were different groups of people having different interactions — fires, singing, drumming — all filling up the sonic real estate around you in the mix. The dialogue between Tom Hayden (Redmayne) and Leonard Weinglass (Ben Shenkman) had to be the sonic focus, and rightly so. To get all that detail through, I used compressors to “flatten” the sounds in order to play them at a healthy level without peaks getting in the way or being distracting to the words.
The sounds of the police weaponry and fighting were very punchy. How did you achieve that?
Babcock: Those scenes were sonically dense, to say the least. First, having the exact right sound for weaponry was important. I used a little compression trick in which the compressor is set to a relatively aggressive setting, but the attack of it is delayed a little. So, when you push the sound very upfront, or louder, you get a very transient attack before the compressor clamps, downplaying the rest of the detail of the sound. Add a little subwoofer, one-to-two-frame bump, and you’ve got something that punches through everything for the right effect.
Slater: There was a very fine line between those guns sounding too Hollywood — too over the top — and being a distraction.
Tondelli: We definitely went down that road a lot, by the way. We spent a lot of time getting the baton hits to sound just right.
Babcock: It was very much about picking sounds that were organic and unprocessed and creatively using EQ, compression and presence played at the right level to make them just feel right.
Pat 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.
