By Patrick Birk
We’ve all needed to find ways to escape reality since the pandemic began, and movies have given many of us that much-needed transport. They allow us to get lost in a different time and a different place. Two films that were just what 2020 needed were Patty Jenkins’ Wonder Woman 1984 and Christopher Nolan’s Tenet. These two blockbusters each tell the story of a hero who must fight to save the world, but they have more than that in common: supervising sound editor and sound designer Richard King.
Richard King
This four-time Oscar winner’s collection of credits include Inception, Master And Commander, War of the Worlds, Dunkirk, Interstellar and the Dark Knight films.
Here he shares his general philosophy when it comes to sound design, and how he applied that to create these excellent, yet vastly different, sonic experiences.
How did you manage the large teams on Wonder Woman 1984 and Tenet?
Wonder Woman and Tenet were very different in their preparation. Wonder Woman 1984, which we finished before Tenet, actually comprised two sound crews. I co-supervised the film with Jimmy Boyle, a UK-based sound designer and sound supervisor.
I began the process at Warner Bros. Burbank with several effects editors prepping for a temp mix in anticipation of Patty Jenkins’ screening for the studio. We put a lot into the temp mix editorially, here in Los Angeles with most of my regular crew. Then we segued to WB’s De Lane Lea studios in London, and Jimmy’s crew took over from there, with me and Andrew Bock continuing to work here in LA.
We had slightly overlapping work hours — they’d go home at roughly 11 in the morning or noon our time. So we had some hours in the morning when we could catch up and trade ideas and chat. Jimmy and his team are great to work with, really dedicated and creative.
Wonder Woman 1984
Andrew Bock (assistant sound editor, WW1984 and Tenet), who’s worked with me for ages and is great at organization, devised a system using a shared server and a Google Whiteboard as a synchronous check-out board so it was easy to see if the Avid Pro Tools session for a reel was up on anyone’s system.
The editors were assigned a reel or a project within a reel or scene. Eventually, when they got to a place where they were satisfied, I’d open that session and almost always do a little editorial or mixing work. When I’m supervising solo, I’m sort of the conduit to the stage. In the case of Wonder Woman, Jimmy and I were both conduits, and he was listening to material and tweaking on his end as well. He and I were communicating a lot and rapidly got in sync with each other aesthetically. So it was kind of a synthesis. I had a cutting room at WB De Lane Lea as well.
On Tenet I was back to my usual way of working, with my regular team, again at WB Burbank. Over the years we’ve developed a working methodology whereby everybody gets their hands into everything at one point or another. When somebody has an idea about a scene that someone else is working on, then that person has a go at it, too. It’s a cumulative process, and everyone’s involved creatively. I premix the sound effects and add and recut and subtract things. I then give it back to the editors, and they tweak some more. If we have enough time, we do this trading back and forth and just keep polishing and refining.
Our temp mix process was somewhat different on Tenet, as the pandemic struck halfway through our first temp. For subsequent temps, (re-recording mixer) Gary Rizzo laid down new dialogue and music stems after the editors were done in his home theater up in San Rafael, while I fixed the effects and foley stems at home here in LA. Then Gary made a new sound master, which Chris Nolan heard in his home theater and gave us notes for the following week’s turnover.
Tenet
Both films feature massive battle sequences, but the tone of those sequences is vastly different. How did you develop those sounds?
Patty designed Wonder Woman 1984 to develop in stages. After the dramatic opening on Themyscira, we land in a fun, lighthearted film that becomes quite dark by the third act. Jimmy and I followed our instincts and Patty’s direction.
Tenet and Wonder Woman both had huge scope and scale, with a lot of sound and action, but tonally, they’re very different.
On Tenet we did a lot of experiments to figure out how to make the inverted sequences sound different without simply reversing the sound. We quickly realized that simply playing all the sounds for the inverted sequences in reverse wasn’t going to work. It actually sounded a little silly and comical. We eventually ended up, for instance, recording all the Foley forward but just adding the odd sweetener here and there to explain a movement that wouldn’t be possible in normal life. We constructed all the inverted sequences with primarily forward-playing sounds. We had worked out a philosophy to try as much as possible to be true to the physics of the situation in the portions of the film that are inverted. So we kind of thought through how different sounds might logically transfer from an inverted character’s perception to a forward-moving character’s perception. Of course, it was all a guess, but it made for some interesting conversations. We developed strict rules with Chris and implemented them throughout to try to take a logical, consistent approach to those sequences.
So it’s really about getting into the spirit of the film. I try to do that with every movie and try to avoid adhering to any kind of style or familiar approach. I start each film as if it’s the first project I’ve done, so it’s a revelatory experience. I mean, you obviously want to take some of that experience with you, like learning from past mistakes. But I just try get a strong sense of what the director is looking for in every movie — what kind of vibe they want — and then kind of feel my way into it. That’s what all sound editors and designers do. The worst thing you can do is copy yourself; it’s much more fun to launch yourself into a movie and rethink everything.
Patty asked us to come up with a lot of new sounds, but one sound that she liked the foundation of was the Lasso of Truth from the first film — only she wanted to elaborate on it. So we stuck with the same general feeling that the Lasso of Truth had in the first Wonder Woman but gave it a bit more articulation because visually it looks a bit different as well. At times its sonic movement had an electrical quality, like high-voltage buzz, to give it some power. Basically, it’s a reflection of what she’s feeling, so it changes a bit from sequence to sequence depending upon what’s happening.
As for the Golden Eagle Armor, Patty wanted that to be massive — that metal is meant to be as hard as a manhole cover; it’s practically impregnable. So we ended up going bigger and bigger with the metal hits that we used for its movements, such as when Diana takes it off or puts it on, and when the Cheetah is banging against it. We started out with a little ring to it. That ring became less and less, and then it became more like full-on solid metal without a whole lot of resonance. Patty wanted a lot of size and dynamics, especially in that sequence. It looks super-impressive and needed to sound as impressive as it looks. The character Barbara, as Cheetah, is pretty bad-ass herself, and she can wreck this impregnable armor.
That sequence definitely contains some supersized sounds, but even during moments like that, which are clearly impossible in our real world, you want to make it feel as if it’s really happening. To me, that makes it much more impressive.
Wonder Woman 1984
Imagine something like that happening in the world that we’re accustomed to — it’s much more aggressive than seeing something fantastic on a screen and hearing a big generic movie sound effect that doesn’t relate to the space they’re in. It’s a fine line, and you can only make it sound so real, but you don’t want to give the audience a moment to think that it seems somehow overblown or false. You want them to feel like, “Oh shit, that really happened.” This is a subtle distinction, but I think it’s a recognizable distinction.
What are some of your favorite tools for getting EQ and reverb right, or for creating new effects?
We use the usual wide array of plugs. Altiverb is such a great tool. We use that a lot for convincing reverb. Phoenix verb as well. The way a sound activates a space is as important as the sound itself in conveying reality. It imparts so much information about where you are, how far you are away from the sound, what direction it is coming from, and what the space you’re in is made of.
I recently discovered Radium, Soundminer’s built-in sampler. They’ve focused on ease of use, so I’ve been using that quite a bit.
I encountered an interesting situation when I was working at home on Tenet. Two of my three dogs really don’t like loud noises like fireworks and thunder. The third one’s oblivious — he doesn’t care. I was downstairs working in my studio, playing machine guns at full movie volume, and I noticed that they just slept through it. I couldn’t figure out why they didn’t react to my guns. I found that reinforcing lower frequencies in the guns got a little more of a reaction, though still not like the real thing. It’s probably body resonance that’s missing.
Since our bodies are like a vessel mostly filled with water, mostly fluid, it resonates. The sensation we call sound is a mixture of aural perception and bodily perception. We perceive those ultra-low frequencies and have a reaction to them.
Tenet
We also did a lot of old-fashioned analog worldizing on Tenet, because we had made these weird sounds, but they didn’t sound real and organic enough. So we recorded them in very specific environments that would impart the kind of room reverb or sense of distance we wanted. For example, sound effects editors Randy Torres and Joseph Fraioli set up several oscillators and modular synthesizers and played back various low-end warbles and punches over speakers and subwoofers on a large sound stage at Warner Bros.
The sounds were massive, especially reverbed out in this vast empty space. We recorded with a lot of different mics — a pair of SASS-P MK II mics, Neumann 191s, Schoeps mics, DPAs. Each mic was placed according to its strengths.
How much did quarantine affect the post production of either film?
Wonder Woman was mostly finished before quarantine. There were some mixing tweaks done in March, but I finished my work on the film in November of 2019 and then moved right on to Tenet. We began our first temp mix at Warner Bros. Stage 9 in Burbank at the beginning of March. We had blocked out eight days, but by day two, it became evident things were about to go pear-shaped. We managed to get the temp mix done in four days, hours before the lockdown.
Warner’s engineering department, led by Kevin Collier, did a fantastic job of getting everybody the equipment they needed to work from home. It was a crazy time, but we figured out the logistics of how to do it. So we all spent five weeks at home — cutting. And we did a couple of temp mix updates from home. I brought enough gear home to set up a 5.1 studio in the movie room at my house. Gary Rizzo has a home theater, so he simply brought in his Wacom tablet and Pro Tools, and he was ready to go.
We didn’t deviate from the schedule by a day, and we finished Tenet in mid-June in time for its original release date. It really didn’t affect the course of the film creatively at all. When we began mixing, we were the only people on the lot besides security. The day that we wrapped the mix in June, the commissary at Warner Bros. opened for take-out for the first time since lockdown. It was very strange being alone on this giant movie lot where normally, on any given day, there are 10,000 to 15,000 people working. It was a ghost town. But in a way, I think it focused all of us, because I don’t think any of us had much going on outside work.
Did the equipment Warner Bros. provided during quarantine include mobile ADR or loop group rigs?
Warners does have mobile ADR rigs that they can send out, but we had done all the loop group before quarantine. We did all the Foley before, too, so we’d gotten those big jobs out of the way — not out of foresight, but simply because I wanted to get it done before the temp mix.
Tenet
Chris generally does very little looping for his films. I think there were half a dozen looped lines in Tenet at the most, and I don’t think there would’ve been many more even if COVID wasn’t an issue. Chris recorded those lines himself in his own home theater.
Face coverings such as masks and helmets were prevalent in Tenet. Were you just working with production audio for scenes that featured those costumes?
The production sound mixer, Willie Burton, did a really good job of dealing with the masks. He experimented fitting DPAs and other tiny mics inside the masks. He also did experiments to figure out the best positioning to capture the voice in addition to the boom. It worked out great. Gary Rizzo did a fantastic job of sharpening the dialogue so it didn’t sound too muffled. He made it sound appropriate to what we were seeing and made it more intelligible. Chris Nolan loves putting his characters in masks — Dunkirk, Bane in The Dark Knight Rises — so Gary’s gotten very good with actors in masks! There was also a lot of hunting for syllables and words, a lot of really forensic dialogue editing by Dave Bach and Russ Farmarco.
Did you approach the mix of Tenet differently at all, given how limited theatrical releases have been this past year?
No, Tenet was going to go out into the theaters. There was no question about that. Toward the end of the mix, no one really knew what was going to happen. The entire film was shot on IMAX film and 65mm film, so there was no way it was going to get released strictly online. That’s very important to Chris. His movies really need to be experienced on a big screen, and we all work with that in mind. Ultimately, it did get its theatrical release, briefly. When this is all over, I hope it gets a real rollout in IMAX.
