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.
