Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/1197255
hands on any kind of material and try doing some mixing. Learn to use the tools. Find out what an equalizer does, what a compressor does, how volume can affect the emotional impact of a music cue or a line of dialogue. The gear—the workstations, the plugins, the technology—has become a thing. My philosophy is that all that stuff is really secondary. Those are just the tools we use to manipulate the sound to tell the story. As a mixer, I'm always focused on the story, on what's happening on screen. Is the scene playing? Is there anything in the track that will distract the audience from the story? Movies are about telling a story and mixing is about finding a way to make the dialogue be heard, understood, and blended with the other elements in the track without drawing attention to the fact that anything is being manipulated. How I use the gear is just muscle memory. All of that has to become second nature. It requires learning the gear, learning how to use a fader, an equalizer, a compressor, and whatever plugins you might be using until it becomes second nature. I once mixed a film in Germany, in Munich. There was a young mixer there who was helping me. He spoke English and he was translating and helping me negotiate an unfamiliar console. He started asking me about panning sound effects. "How do you decide whether to pan a sound effect?" I said to him, "Look, the first thing I think about is whether the sound effect belongs there in the first place. Is the panning going to affect the way the audience perceives it? Is it going to distract them from the story?" It's not about how cool you can make something sound. It's about whether it serves the story. I mean, that's really the bottom line. I read a lot of stuff online. Young post- production people talk about all the different plugins that they use with a certain setting, and to me, it's like … have you read any Shakespeare? Do you understand dramatic structure? Do you know when a scene is working and when it's not? To me, the important part of the job is understanding how the sound is working dramatically to help move the story along. I COULDN'T AGREE MORE. BUT THERE'S ALSO ANOTHER COMPONENT TO YOUR SUCCESS I WANT TO TALK ABOUT: YOUR PEOPLE SKILLS. YOU'VE FORMED THESE INCREDIBLY LONG, LOYAL RELATIONSHIPS WITH FILMMAKERS. WHILE THE JOB IS ABSOLUTELY ABOUT SERVING THE STORY, IT'S ALSO ABOUT PEOPLE, TOO. HOW DO YOU MAKE THESE PEOPLE FEEL LIKE YOU ARE THEIR CREATIVE PARTNER? WHAT'S YOUR SECRET TO BUILDING THAT CONNECTION? HOW DO YOU DO THAT? I don't know. They just keep hiring me! THERE'S CLEARLY A MAGNETISM. YOU HAVE INCREDIBLY LONG RELATIONSHIPS WITH SOME REALLY ICONIC DIRECTORS. I had met Martin Scorsese in college. He was teaching at NYU when I was there, but it was at least 10 years later that we started interacting. The first Scorsese film I worked on was Raging Bull. I was working at Trans/Audio and I had done Melvin and Howard, Honeysuckle Rose, One-Trick Pony, and Reds. [Picture editor] Thelma Schoonmaker came in with one scene from Raging Bull; when De Niro comes into the restaurant and drags Frank Vincent out into the street and beats him, slams his head in the taxicab door. It was that scene. And they wanted to add a music cue. Thelma brought in a dialogue track and a music track and we did a temp mix for a screening. About a week later, she brought another scene. She said, "Marty really liked what you did. Here's another one." I think I did temp mixes on three or four scenes in Raging Bull. And then they took it out to Hollywood and mixed it there. The next film was The King of Comedy, which Dick Vorisek was slated to mix. But Dick had suffered a heart attack and couldn't work overtime under doctor's orders. Marty used to start late in the day and work into the night. So, they brought me on as a second mixer. And Dick would leave at 6:00 and I'd stay until 10:00 or 11:00 or midnight. That was the beginning of our relationship. After that, he kept bringing me back. It was a similar situation with Jonathan Demme. I mixed Melvin and Howard, my first feature. I was in way over my head and I felt I had no idea what I was doing. [Picture editor] Craig McKay guided me. He held my hand through that whole film, really helped me. In the end, it was successful. They were very happy with it, and Jonathan kept coming back, too. I don't know—you just asked me what my secret is. I don't have one. I THINK I SEE IT. YOU ARE CLEARLY PASSIONATE AND YOU'RE REALLY PRESENT FOR THE NARRATIVE. IT SOUNDS LIKE YOU'RE THE FIRST IN AND THE LAST ONE OUT AND YOU ARE HAVING A GREAT TIME. WHO WOULDN'T WANT ALL THAT? I HAVE A CLIENT WHO DESCRIBES THE PEOPLE WHO DO MORE THAN JUST WORK ON HER PROJECTS AS "HUGGING IT." THEY DON'T JUST DO THE PROJECT. THEY GIVE IT A HUG. Oh, yes. THAT'S EXACTLY WHAT I'M THINKING OF AS I'M HEARING YOU TALK … YOU CLEARLY "HUG IT." Even the bad films… I've worked on a lot of bad films, but you still try and make them sound good. I mean, there's no reason—even if a film doesn't work as a film—that it can't still sound good, and I take pride in that. • Mixing Melvin and Howard with Jonathan Demme and Bruce Langhorne.