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38 CINEMONTAGE / FALL 2015 horror. "You didn't see a lot of the things that made up the train yard," Ciccolini says. "It was all sound that was put in, placed properly to give the audience the actual belief that they were outside of a concentration camp; you had the sound of train whistles, trains going, shuffling feet, a gun going off, a watchdog barking." Having read the novel, Ciccolini came to the project with clear ideas of what the characters would be and look like. "I didn't picture Peter MacNicol as Stingo," he says. "Peter was just kind of this slight person — especially when you're seeing him with Sophie. She's so dynamic and he's so meek." But, as he spent time with the film, Ciccolini came around to the actor's interpretation. "I can understand why she took a fancy to him and treated him as a confidante," he says. "He was an innocent, he wasn't judgmental, so in a way she was able to manipulate him to feel for her." But Ciccolini accepted Streep as Sophie almost instantly. "When I see her even in today's movies, I still see a bit of Sophie," he says. "She was Meryl Streep, but she was Sophie." The actress adroitly juggled English, Polish and German; in one scene, she tells Stingo that, during the war, she bought meat on the black market for her tuberculosis-afflicted mother. When Ciccolini and re-recording mixer Lee Dichter, CAS, looked at the selected takes, they realized that Streep left the last syllable off of the word "mieso" (Polish for "meat"). "Listening to the takes, we heard her say the word 'so,'" Ciccolini remembers. "What we wound up doing was physically taking the 'so' and adding it to create 'mieso.'" Another adjustment came during a memorable scene in which a frenzied Nathan cues up a record of Beethoven's Symphony No. 9 and play-acts as the conductor. According to the film's music editor Norman Hollyn, ACE, writing in his book The Film Editing Room Handbook (1984), production sound mixer Chris Newman chose a recording of the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra for Kline to "conduct" on set. "When I was hired as the music editor on the film late in post-production," Hollyn writes, "we discovered that purchasing the rights to that particular version of Symphony No. 9 did not fit into the production's music budget." Another recording would be used, but the tempo differed from that which Kline had acted to. Writes Hollyn: "It took days of detailed work — speeding up and slowing down individual musical phrases — for me to make it look as if Nathan was actually conducting the version we purchased." Ciccolini remembers that the scene was to unfold in a single shot, but that plan was scrapped with the substitute recording. "They had to do a cutaway in order to bring the picture back in sync with the music that they had gotten the rights to," he explains. All told, Ciccolini spent 26 weeks on the film — more than average, owing to the project's complexity. Post-production took place in New York City and in the Hamptons, where Pakula had a summer residence. For the sound editor, it was a uniquely satisfying experience to have read Sophie's Choice and then track its translation into a finished work of cinema — one that won near-unanimous praise and countless admiring audiences. He comments: "To be given the film was not only an honor, but kind of a blessing in a way." But Ciccolini is accustomed to seeing — and hearing — films reach their journeys' end. "Sound is pretty much the end of the line," he concludes. "We get our reels. We prepare the sound for the mix. We do our mix. And that's it. "I chose post over production because I get to see a film being created after the shoot — seeing the rough and the finished." f Sophie's Choice. Universal Pictures/Photofest