|
Sound Reality: Clint Eastwood’s
latest, The 15:17 to Paris
By Jennifer Walden
Films based on true stories are always popular, and Oscar-winning director Clint Eastwood has made his share, including Sully and American Sniper, as well as Flags of Our Fathers and Letters From Iwo Jima. While those stories were inspired by real people/events, Eastwood has ramped up the reality a notch with his latest. The 15:17 to Paris — about three men who thwarted a terrorist attack on a train from Amsterdam to Paris — features the actual trio of heroes, Spencer Stone, Anthony Sadler and Alek Skarlatos, as themselves.
Working with non-actors on a feature film could be challenging, so before deciding to cast the heroes in the film, Eastwood did a test run. He called up Warner Bros. Sound’s Oscar-winning supervising sound editor Alan R. Murray, with whom he had collaborated over 40 years. Eastwood mysteriously asked Murray to bring his recording equipment to his office on the Warner’s lot.
The next morning, Eastwood let Murray in on the plan. “Clint wanted to see how these guys would do on camera, so he asked me to walk them around the Warner Bros. lot. They were going to shoot them with a Steadicam, and Clint asked me to record the sound.”
They spent half a day touring the lot with Eastwood and introducing the heroes to people they met. “Walking around Warner Bros. with them, you could see that they were going to be able to pull this off. It was cool to get to talk to them, get to know them and have them re-tell what really happened.”
Capturing Reality
In keeping with his realistic vision for the film, Eastwood chose to shoot the train sequences on an actual Thalys train (the high-speed train on which the attack happened) instead of shooting on a soundstage. According to Murray, production sound mixer Steven Morrow spent five days on a Thalys train recording all the sounds relevant to the terrorist attack — everything from the doors to the train moving. He even captured the sound of an AK-47 jamming up.
Read More >
|
|
 
|
