Wylie Stateman on Once Upon a Time…
in Hollywood‘s Oscar nod for sound
By Beth Marchant

To director Quentin Tarantino, sound and music are primal forces in the creation of his films. Often using his personal music collection to jumpstart his initial writing process and later to set a film’s tone in the opening credits, Tarantino always gives his images a deep, multi-sensory pool to swim in. According to his music supervisor Mary Ramos, his bold use of music is as much a character as each film’s set of quirky protagonists.

Less showy than those memorable and often nostalgic set-piece songs, the sound design that holds them together is just as critically important to Tarantino’s aesthetic. In Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood it even replaces the traditional composed score. That’s one of many reasons why the film’s supervising sound editor Wylie Stateman, a long-time Tarantino collaborator, relished his latest Oscar-nominated project with the director (he previously received nominations for Django Unchained and Inglourious Basterds and has a lifetime total of nine Oscar nominations).

We talked to Stateman about how he interpreted Tarantino’s sound vision for his latest film — starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt — revealing just how closely the soundtrack is connected to every camera move and cut.

How does Tarantino’s style as a director influence the way you approach the sound design?
I believe that sound is a very important department within the process of making any film. And so, when I met Quentin many years ago, I was meeting him under the guise that he wanted help, and he wanted somebody who could focus their time, experience and attention on this very specific department called sound.

I’ve been very fortunate, especially on Quentin’s films, to also have a great production sound mixer and great re-recording mixers. We have both sides of the process in really tremendously skilled hands and tremendously experienced hands. Mark Ulano, our production sound mixer, won an Oscar for Titanic. He knows how to deal with dialogue. He knows how to deal with a complex set, a set where there are a lot of moving parts.

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