Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman, starring Robert De Niro, Al Pacino and Joe Pesci, tells the story of organized crime in post-war America as seen through the eyes of World War II veteran Frank Sheeran (DeNiro), a hustler and hitman who worked alongside some of the most notorious figures of the 20th century. In the film, the actors have been famously de-aged, thanks to VFX house ILM, but it wasn’t just their faces that needed to be younger.

In this video interview, Academy Award-winning re-recording sound mixer and decades-long Scorsese collaborator Tom Fleischman — who will receive the Cinema Audio Society’s Career Achievement Award in January — talks about de-aging actors’ voices as well as the challenges of keeping the film’s sound focused and intimate.

“We really had to try and preserve the quality of their voices in spite of the fact we were trying to make them sound younger. And those edits are sometimes difficult to achieve without it being apparent to the audience. We tried to do various types of pitch changing and we us used different kinds of plugins. I listened to scenes from Serpico for Al Pacino and The King of Comedy for Bob DeNiro and tried to match the voice quality of what we had from The Irishman to those earlier movies.”

Fleischman worked on the film at New York’s Soundtrack.

Enjoy the video: