You started doing music-based films with Oliver Stone’s The Doors.
Yes, that was the first foray into it all.
And was any of that done live?
Yeah, absolutely. Val Kilmer [who played Jim Morrison], a lot of his vocals in that are live, believe it or not. He was unbelievable. I was on that film for six weeks before production. I was there throughout all the prerecords. Having never done a music-based film before, that was the beginning of a major learning curve of trying to figure out how to do this. But Val would sing live and [to replicate] Jim's voice is so difficult, it tears up the vocal cords. With Val, we could only get six takes or so before his voice was shot. We would always do the close ups first and do those live. Afterwards, we'd switch to the wider shots and use the prerecorded tracks.
When he was singing live, he was singing to prerecorded music in an earpiece?
To capture live vocals, that's the general way of doing it for films. If we have a band, all of the band will have hidden earpieces in, which are called earwigs. Deaden the drums and all of the instruments, and then I have a clean environment to capture the vocal. Once Val’s voice was worn out, we would blast the backing music through the PA speakers.
I heard that after that experience you got hooked on doing music-based films.
Absolutely. It was a great challenge. Doing location recording for films – some films are challenging, some aren't as challenging, and some are just nuts-and-bolts dialogue recording. But musicals add a whole new dimension to it, and a whole lot of problems to figure out. I'll test lavalier mics with actors before we start shooting. I'll take six different brands of lavaliers and attach them to a grip stand, all in a row and at the height where the lavalier would be placed on the singers’ body – which is a bit below about dead center on the sternum. I'll also have my Sennheiser MKH 416 [shotgun mic] overhead. I'll give the actors headphones and have them sing and talk. I'll use whichever lavalier matches to the 416 the best. Every actor is different. Lavaliers have a particular sound to each, much more so than larger diaphragm microphones. I'll go through, and A-B each lavalier against the 416, and see which one replicates that person’s voice the best. That allows me to do transitions – if I'm boom mic’ing them and I have to switch to a lavalier in the mix for the same scene, I'm able to make that transition to the other mic and it doesn't sound different. It sounds nearly the same.
With the Dylan film, A Complete Unknown, Timothée Chalamet – who played Dylan – sang 100 percent live?
That's correct. The first time ever that any actor has ever gone 100 percent live for the whole film. We didn’t use any earpieces whatsoever with him. Nothing even for tempo. Normally we'd at least give the singer a little earpiece – one of the little hidden earwigs – for tempo purposes to keep the music exactly in time for the editors later because, from one take to another, it can vary. But Timothée was dead on. With beats per minute, he was almost exact. Maybe off by one BPM from start to finish, if at all.
I heard you also recorded the buskers and the music coming from the apartments for the film. When Dylan’s character is walking down the street, there's a guy playing some percussion on the sidewalk and stereos blaring out of windows and such. You were recording that as it happened, rather than recreating it later?
Yep, and anything that was prerecorded, we played it back on the street in real-time to give the actors that energy. Having that music there was a boost for the actors. They appreciated it immensely, because it made the environment so much more real. On most films, we're always trying to keep this pristine, quiet environment so that we can capture dialogue. Here, we went all out – to the point where I'd even play back sounds that were happening on a television in a scene. Other sound effects, like ambulances and fire trucks going by, we used to help create that chaotic feeling, particularly during the Cuban Missile Crisis scenes.
A funny difference between film sound and record making, is that in film you’re often putting noise back in, whereas with records most of the time those same sounds would be suppressed or erased. Word is that you always have dancers do a take without singing to record all the steps and squeaks.
You did your homework! The actors and the dancers need to hear the music pounding if we're doing a bigger number, so we need to play it over a speaker. If we gave them a tiny earpiece and they're trying to create the energy of a big dance number with the emotion and energy of it, it just doesn't work. As soon as we get the scene visually, for ambient sound I'll give all of the dancers and actors wireless headphones and I'll have them reenact the entire dance. Everything they did, except without vocals. And they'll do the entire dance while I have three booms following them around capturing all of the incidental sounds. That allows me to capture everything that they're doing, whether it's footsteps, stomps, claps – whatever it is that's happening in the scene. Now we'll have an organic Foley track. It’s better than anything I could ever try to replicate in post-production.
Because it’s real and it actually occurred.
Plus, it saves the production thousands and thousands of dollars it would take going back and trying to recreate those sounds. Doing this live usually only takes an additional five or ten minutes, but it saves the producers so much money and it adds a truly natural ambient sound. They can take a prerecorded track of vocals and music, add this ambient track in, and have a live scene.
I've always noticed in so many films and TV shows, that during nightclub scenes there are a group of extras dancing as the lead actors are speaking, but there's clearly no music being played in the background, and there isn't any life or synchronicity to the movements.
Well, that's the whole thing about sound. Sound should never take the viewer out of a story. If they're noticing sound, it's generally because something's not working right. And maybe once in a while, it's because the sound is amazing. In general, they shouldn't notice the sound much. It should be seamless to the environment.
I read that Timothée Chalamet first told you that he was going to sing and play live only five minutes before you shot the first scene that was in front of a concert audience.
Correct! [laughter] It was very interesting, because in all of our pre-production, the director, James Mangold, didn't want to go live because he felt it was going to slow down production. There were 40 music pieces that Timothée did, and another 15 or so from other artists, like Edward Norton [who played Pete Seeger] and Monica Barbaro [who played Joan Baez]. Jim Mangold felt that if we went live it was going to be the death of him, time- and schedule-wise. When we're using prerecorded tracks, we already have that all done so we don't have to worry about the quality of the singing or playing.
Right.
But with Timothée, we’d prepared nonetheless… I’m always prepared to go live with anything, just in case. I was fortunately ready when he did that first concert scene, which was at Carnegie Hall. He came over, five minutes before, and said, "I'm going live.” The thing was that he knew he was going to do that the whole time. He’d been preparing for it for five years – learning to play and sing. But James Mangold didn't know he was going to do that! Nobody else knew either.
He never told anybody, probably because he figured that if he did they were going to try to put the kibosh on the whole idea.
They were, because Jim didn’t want to go in that direction. We had so many conversations about this before production, and he didn’t want to go that way at all.
For the Newport Folk Festival scene, I heard that you shot for 22 minutes straight with more than 30 tracks, and you were recording everything – the chatter, the dialogue going on in the wings, and the audience.
That's correct, yeah. I think we did four complete 22 minute live takes, straight through. Then they moved in for coverage, close ups, and picking up random shots later. It’s all that end of the film scene, depicting the 1965 Newport Folk Festival when Dylan went electric. Everything starting from when the railroad gang performs, and then all the way through to when Dylan exits the stage. That included all of the interaction, with the audience screaming “Judas” at him, and all that. I had so many microphones out. Obviously, all of the actors were wired with lavaliers, and all of the practical microphones were operating – guitar mics, drum mics, and everything. And then there were other various microphones on the stage, and microphones in the audience, capturing the audience from different perspectives. Even a microphone on the PA speaker alone. Again, that provides the ability to add and subtract as much as we want – to give that flexibility – to go in and out from more of an audience perspective to a stage perspective. That all changes with each shot’s framing and distance.
An additional benefit of doing it all live is you don’t have to worry about lip syncing, which never seems to look quite right. The movie band performed live, with the playback of the prerecorded tracks playing very low?
Yeah, so the band played. Timothée was always live, whether it was electric guitar or acoustic guitar, he was always live on vocals and guitar. And the rest of the electric band was following the playback. They all had earpieces. I played the music out to the audience, and I kept the speakers deliberately out in front of the actors. But when we have an on-camera performance mic, where the actor's actually singing into it, I recorded that directly. It gives a lot of flexibility. I can have a little bit of bleed through from the instruments coming through that mic, because the singer’s voice is going to overpower the rest, and then we added in the prerecorded accompanying music on top of that. I was able to capture the singing clean throughout all of that, even though I was playing the music out to the audience.
So, when he's singing into the featured mic, you're splitting the signal and taking one side directly onto a track for yourself.
Yes, 100 percent. I'm recording it, and then I'm also sending it back out to the speakers with the prerecorded music.
And since he held his guitar up high, you had to instead put a DPA 6060 lavalier in his hair, sort of Broadway-style?
Yeah. I noticed when we were doing rehearsals before we started shooting, that he held the guitar way up high. I realized that there was no way I could put a lavalier on him because normally lavaliers are right there on the chest where he was holding the guitar – that would’ve just annihilated the sound from the mic. The only way to make it work was to drop a mic in his hair! [laughter] It's a difficult thing to do on film, because we're in close, we're shooting behind them, and I also have the transmitter wire to contend with. That mic’s capsule is only 3 millimeters wide, but it’s not like on Broadway at all, where the audience are far away and they can get away with that. On film, everything’s right there, front and center. I have to deal with the hair department, with wardrobe, and also with Timothée. It's a process. I have to get the mic placed there, and the actor has got to go in and get it woven through their hair somehow so that we can't see anything.
And you put a Sanken COS-11D inside the body of the acoustic guitar?
Correct. I always had that in there every time he played. That gave us the ability to capture a close sound from the guitar. It wasn't the most natural sound, because it's obviously inside the belly of a guitar. But if I add an ambient mic on top of that, it opens the sound up and gives it a fullness. If I just use the ambient mic, it'd sound too far away for many of the shots, when the camera's further away and the boom has to stay farther out of the shot.
When I saw the film, that early scene where he's singing a “Song to Woody” in the hospital room was critical to the film’s success.
Right. He won over everybody at that moment. I had seen him sing in pre-production, but most everybody else working on the film – the crew and cast – hadn't really seen him play until then, and he made that song his own. He wowed everybody with that, whether it was us on the set or people in the audience watching the film later. That was the first scene of him playing that we shot. I had the lavalier inside the guitar, and I had a boom mic underneath, aiming at the guitar, and another boom mic overhead, aiming at the guitar near his mouth. And there was the lavalier on his forehead, also. As many choices as possible for the post-production mix, which was done by Paul Massey.
These two recent films – A Complete Unknown and Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere, were both released as records with the actors singing. I think that must be among the first times – other than the satirical film Walk Hard and much of the Johnny Cash movie, Walk the Line – where there's an entire album comprised entirely of the lead actor singing the songs themself for a music biopic.
Yeah. It's the first time that I know of. With Jeremy Allen White [who plays Bruce Springsteen], on his prerecorded takes we got a chance to listen to him. We would A/B him against Bruce’s voice on those same songs, and Jeremy was really good. I mean Springsteen’s not an easy voice. Much like Jim Morrison’s, it’s another difficult register to keep your vocal cords going – the way Bruce sings is difficult on your voice. This was another similar situation to Val Kilmer’s in The Doors, where we needed to capture Jeremy live during the first takes. After a certain point, his voice would be shredded.
In the Springsteen film, how much of what the actor is doing is sung live?
Most of what you see of him close on camera is him live. But not necessarily the bigger, live concert scenes. The song, "Born in the U.S.A.,” was done inside of a recording studio – inside the Power Station studio where the original Born in the U.S.A. album was recorded. That was obviously a great environment for me. I love recording studios, because it’s acoustically perfect, I have all the options, and I have all the practical microphones and everything else. I can kind of do whatever we want. Whereas on A Complete Unknown, we recreated a set of the recording studio. We built it because there's no 1960’s Columbia 30th Street Studio left. That place doesn't exist anymore. We built that from scratch; the console and rack gear were all just props. We worked to create sonic treatments for the room, though. It was on a soundstage, but we wanted to make it sound like a recording studio, since we were recording everything live.
The Sennheiser MKH 416 has long been the industry standard boom microphone for film.
It’s still my number one mic. I grew up with it, and it's what you get used to. I'm sure there are other great microphones out there, and I know everybody has their favorites. But for me, I grew up with that sound; I know that sound, and I love that sound. The microphone's a real workhorse, but you have to be a good boom operator to use it because it's very pointed. It's a hypercardioid. You have to be focused right on the top of the head – and it's great. But if you're just slightly off axis, it’s not good. You have to have a skilled boom operator to use that mic. But I just love the sound of it. Then there are other mics for when I have different ambiences – if we're in a tiled bathroom, riding in cars, or whatever – there are other microphones that I use for dealing with the acoustics from those very specific spaces. But, in general – maybe 90 percent of the time – I use the 416s.
I've heard you say, “Microphone placement is 80 percent of the job.”
Yes, that is true.
Do you use a lot of plant/hidden mics around the set?
Yes, though wireless lavaliers on actors and singers are a great tool, they're not a totally natural sound. I have to try to make them sound natural. If I can do something additional with a plant mic, or if there are other sounds going on that I want to capture, I always keep around three Sennheiser 416s attached to bendable wires for little stands. I keep them ready and deploy them out. If I hear there's a bicycle going by, a car passing behind, kids playing in the distance, or something else going on, I'll run and put those mics out there near so that I can try to capture the effects of that. Again, they can add as much of that in post as they want to. I take a sandbag to secure the mics and I have a wireless transmitter on the sandbag, and we can run the mics out fast in the heat of the moment.
It must be hard for you to watch films and not hear the errors. Are there any trends in film music sound that irks you?
Well, in general, everything's become so much more wireless. I'm not the biggest fan of lavalier sound, in general. If you think about it, a lavalier is a tiny little diaphragm. A MK 416 has a bigger diaphragm, and obviously a high quality studio tube mic has a big fat diaphragm. With musicals, when you switch from the scene that's happening on a set to a prerecorded vocal, the sound changes radically because you're going from a microscopic wireless mic to a massive, studio microphone. That transition is one that’s jarring and has always bothered me. One of the things that I do with musical projects to avoid that sort of transition is that when the actors are doing their vocal prerecords, I have the music engineers use one of my lavaliers and also my 416, each recorded on their own separate track, to be used potentially along with the studio microphone. If it's a practical microphone scene, where the singer is going to have a microphone visible in front of them on screen, we'll use that same mic in advance in the studio also. You can potentially go from my lavalier, crossfade, and then transition into the big fat studio mic over the first line of the song and you won't hear that abrupt change – it’s a smooth transition. You can stay with the new mic, and the audience is none the wiser.
Since West Side Story [2021], you've used an Allen & Heath SQ-5 digital mixer with 48 channels, and 32 channels of wireless. From that you often have to send out different mixes on wireless headphones to the director, as well as up to 30 other various department members?
That is correct.
What size sound crew do you use?
My normal crew for non-musicals is myself, a boom operator, and then a utility person who's really my tech person who does everything – they are the second boom operator, they're a tech person, they handle headphones and earwigs, and all of that kind of stuff. But when I do a musical, I bring on one other person as a Pro Tools operator. That person handles the music. They also generally handle most of the earwigs, as well as the earpieces that we give out to all of the singers.
Is all of your setup now cordless?
Everything now is wireless. That was something that I fought against because the quality wasn’t that good for a long time, but I switched around 2010. The Shure Axient Digital ADX1M wireless transmitters are just amazing. I held out going to digital for as long as I could because I loved Dolby SR [noise reduction]. It was such a beautiful, warm sound with no tape noise. I refused to ever use DAT [digital audio tape] because the quality was so inferior. But I finally switched to digital in 2003 when Fostex came out with the PD-6 – a 20-bit, 6-track, MiniDisc recorder.
I've heard that a lot of times for singers on film they'll use what’s called a “hero mic” – a mic that is featured simply because the director likes the way it looks.
Yeah, if we're just playing back prerecords it doesn't matter what mic we're using for that. But if we're doing it live, that's a whole other ballgame. Joshua Lutz [Lutz Multimedia] was the music gear consultant on A Complete Unknown. I asked the team to source microphones from 1960 to 1965; all period accurate and all functioning well. We tested every one of them before production, and then we chose – in chronological order – which microphones worked best. From there, sometimes we also sorted things further based on visually which ones looked like they would be more realistic for a given environment. When you're in the church, you're not going to have a really great microphone – they'd probably have a less expensive microphone. But when you're at Carnegie Hall, you're going to have a much more expensive microphone. We would switch those mics around, while being sure to maintain the time period accuracy. We’d also match any archival photos of actual setups. For A Complete Unknown, even across that short span from 1960 to 1965, the microphones sound very different. The technology developed extremely quickly from being more midrange-y and tinny in the earlier days, and then the mics got richer with more low end to them as time went on. That was one of the things I was also trying to accomplish with A Complete Unknown – capturing more of that late-1950s/early-1960s tone in the beginning and then becoming a fuller and richer sound as Dylan’s career progressed.
What about for Springsteen?
On the Springsteen film, I used the same model TEAC [144] Portastudio that Springsteen used to record Nebraska. I split my feeds from his two Shure mics, one going to my normal, digital recorder and the other to the TEAC. I knew that they probably wouldn’t use those tracks in the post-production anyway, but nonetheless I wanted to recreate how the album had been made, just the same.
And that’s fitting, given that album’s homegrown, feral nature and its legacy. And that very machine is the first multitrack that I and many Tape Op readers from that generation ever recorded on.
One of the things that was interesting on A Complete Unknown, was that the director, James Mangold, was very into the sound and into my mix. Anytime that I'm mixing, I’m doing a temp mix and also I’m giving them all the ISO [isolated tracks] to match camera as best that I can. Jim Mangold loved that mix so much, and he came to me and said, “I am going to be on top of this mix, because this is the mix that's going to stay with me throughout all of temp editing, and this will be my temp mix for the first four months while I'm living with this film. This is what the studio's going to see and hear, and this is what everyone else is going to be hearing.” It was great, because he was so into it and truly loved it, and listened as much as any director I've ever worked with. It was just a real pleasure. I don't get that level of interest and investment often. He stressed how important it was for this mix to be as good and accurate as possible. I think that's one of the reasons we got along so well, was that I was striving to make a record. I mean, that's kind of what my goal was: to really record an actual record, and to do it live.
You did succeed in making a record, because both films were actually released as albums featuring some of that work.
They became records. Exactly. I’ve got one right here!
