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Sound Design: Wylie Stateman on
The Queen’s Gambit
By Patrick Birk
Wylie Stateman is a renowned figure in Hollywood’s audio post industry, with a career spanning over four decades and a slew of projects with heavy hitters, including John Hughes, Quentin Tarantino and Cameron Crowe. Last year, Stateman reunited with director Scott Frank for the Netflix Original Series The Queen’s Gambit. Their past collaborations include A Walk Among the Tombstones and Godless.
The Queen’s Gambit tells the story of Beth Harmon (Anya Taylor-Joy), an orphan who discovers her prodigious talent for chess at the age of nine. She goes on to compete against grandmasters around the world. Stateman worked side by side with picture editor Michelle Tesoro, composer Carlos Rafael Rivera and music editor Tom Kramer to create a shining example of teamwork at its best. The Queen’s Gambit delivers an emotional impact greater than the sum of any of its constituent parts, and Stateman was kind enough to explain how his sound design factored in.
Space seems to have played a big role in the design, from the isolation of the orphanage basement to the reverberant marble chamber where Beth faces off against Russian Grandmaster Borgov.
In the beginning, the basement plays a very significant role, and it's got to be a scary place. You know, it's the young girl going down into a basement and there's a strange man — the janitor, Mr. Shaibel — who lives down there. He's doing this strange thing, playing chess, and she's never seen the game before. So she's being introduced to a lot of interesting and potentially dangerous sorts of things.
How were those basement scenes handled?
The first person on was the composer, Carlos Rafael Rivera. Carlos started writing sketches to the script, so when they started shooting, picture editor Michelle Tesoro started assembling picture and using some of Carlos's sketches. But from the very beginning, we were trying to orchestrate how we would enter and exit a scene. Do we have weird sound design as they enter the basement? Or do we start with music and then once the sound design comes in, does music lead or does it lag?
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