Sound & Visionaries
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Kept in Sync: Paul Rogers on Editing Everything Everywhere All At Once
Everything Everywhere All At Once editor Paul Rogers first met co-directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, or the Daniels, at OMG CAMERAS EVERYWHERE, a free filmmaking summer camp pairing kids with established filmmakers to shoot videos for musicians like Daft Punk, Diplo and Benny Blanco. When I called Rogers via Zoom to interview him, Scheinert sat beside him with a guitar and occasionally chimed in: “The first thing we worked on together was a silly music video with kids—no rules, directions or studio notes. We just had to make something that would make the kids excited about what they did […]
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Within the Silences: The Sound Team Behind TÁR
TÁR opens with its namesake, played by Cate Blanchett, being interviewed in front of a packed audience at The New Yorker Festival. The chat serves multiple functions. It delivers the character’s backstory as an EGOT-winning classical composer and conductor, establishes the film’s immersive, observational style and lets the viewer experience sound the way that Lydia Tár experiences it. During the interview, the festival’s audience is only heard as a communal mass. It laughs together. It applauds together. There is no ambient chatter, no whispered asides, no rustling clothes or shuffling feet. It’s only when the interviewer asks about the influence […]
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After the Curtain: The Tragedy of Macbeth Production Designer Stefan Dechant
Shot by director of photography Bruno Delbonnel in stark black and white using the Academy aspect ratio, Joel Coen’s The Tragedy of Macbeth is an impressively lean (105 minutes total runtime) and stylized take. A reserved Denzel Washington stars in the title role alongside Coen’s wife Frances McDormand as Lady Macbeth, reprising a performance she gave for the Berkeley Repertory Theatre in 2016. In his first film without his brother Ethan, Coen eschews halfhearted attempts to “open up the text,” instead choosing to embrace its theatricality by filming the entire production on Warner Brothers’s soundstages in Burbank, California before and, […]
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Particular Fabrics: Belfast Costume Designer Charlotte Walter
Belfast offers a poignant look at a working class childhood in an era of increasing political tumult. Set in 1969, during the early days of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, writer/director Kenneth Branagh’s deeply personal film is shot in black and white and centers on a family doing its best to get by. The protagonist, Buddy (played by Jude Hill in his debut feature role) is a charming 9-year-old Branagh surrogate with a toothy smile and rough-and-tumble costumes of collared shirts, shorts, and high socks. The ’60s has long been one of the most frequently referenced decades in fashion, and while […]
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Western Promises: The Power of the Dog Composer Jonny Greenwood
Wailing French horns, recorded in the vastness of an Oxford cathedral; the mechanized sputtering of a player piano; the anxious propulsion of an ascending and descending cello, defamiliarized by being plucked like a banjo—these are some of the seemingly counterintuitive approaches composer Jonny Greenwood took to scoring Jane Campion’s brooding and suspenseful Western, The Power of the Dog. But just as Campion’s film, set in the early 20th century, tacks away from genre signifiers to tell an unexpectedly intimate tale of fraternal rivalry and stifled desire, so too does Greenwood’s score subvert the expectations of a “big sky” Western soundtrack […]
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In the Quiet Moments: The Memoria Sound Team of Akritchalerm Kalayanamitr, Richard Hocks and Javier Umpierrez
“When I work on sound for Joe’s films, it’s very similar to meditation,” says Akritchalerm Kalayanamitr, sound designer for all of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s work since Tropical Malady (2004), including his latest picture, Memoria. “I need to be super focused on every detail. Because it’s like meditating when you watch them, we need to mix the film in a kind of line”— here, on a Zoom call, he makes a slow, horizontal motion with his right hand—“so it’s not too much.” Despite the fact that sections of Memoria, which is about a Scottish woman in Colombia attempting to understand mysterious explosions […]
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Hard Light and Shadows: Passing Cinematographer Edu Grau
Five weeks is not an unusually truncated preproduction period for a cinematographer on a modestly budgeted independent film like Passing. However, the interval between landing the gig and starting that work is typically longer than the time needed to pack a suitcase. That’s the extent of the notice Spanish DP Edu Grau had before hopping aboard the project—and a flight to New York—after a last-minute crew change left Passing director Rebecca Hall without a cinematographer on the eve of prep. “Rebecca called me on a Saturday, and I jumped on a plane the next day to start prepping the movie,” […]
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Deep Cuts: Licorice Pizza Editor Andy Jurgensen
Paul Thomas Anderson’s films can all be described as “episodic” in various ways—some more explicitly than others. Boogie Nights, Magnolia and Inherent Vice are divided into subplots and adventures, but even more austere character portraits (There Will Be Blood, The Master, Phantom Thread) have a “and that’s when this happened…” bent. But Licorice Pizza, which follows the tumultuous flirtation between 15-year-old actor/entrepreneur Gary Valentine (Cooper Hoffman) and wayward 20-something Alana Kane (Alana Haim) against the backdrop of early-1970s San Fernando Valley, is the first to adopt a memory-based style, in which various sequences flow into each other like a series […]
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Echoes From the Past
In recreating in Mank the experiences from 1930 to 1940 that led screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz to write Citizen Kane, David Fincher has said his goal was to make a film that looked and felt of its era. But that fidelity only goes so far: On the visual side, Mank’s black-and-white look is captured in period-anomalous widescreen. Similarly, Mank uses a LCR (left-center-right) sound mix rather than pure mono. “We’re not trying to fool anybody by saying this is a mono mix,” says Fincher’s career-long sound designer Ren Klyce. “The goal was to make the film sound old-fashioned and from […]
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Liberties in the Room
The night after Cassius Clay clobbered Sonny Liston in their first bout at the Miami Beach Convention Center in 1964, the new heavyweight champion, who would later change his name to Muhammad Ali, celebrated his win in a hotel room flush with icons: his friends Malcolm X, Jim Brown and Sam Cooke. They stayed in a room at the Hampton House, a known safe haven for Black people during Jim Crow where social gatherings of various Black icons were not uncommon. Regina King’s feature debut, One Night in Miami, adapted from Kemp Powers’s one-act play of the same name, imagines […]
