Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1436283
92 I m ps e . o rg amazing qualities, but it is leading, guiding the emotions somehow, whereas sound puts a question mark often behind what it is exactly we have to feel. And that's a big part of how Robert is telling stories, that it's ambiguous and by that also comes this thing of using sound in a way where you can really interpret the sound in many different ways. And where sound is telling stories just through the tactile quality of the sound. The sound in The Killing of Two Lovers is often quite rough; it has this gritty feeling. It's by no means a clean soundtrack. And that gives us, this feeling of intimacy with the characters because it feels very real. So that's also something we really explored with the sound. DB: I really enjoyed the lack of a traditional score as well, because there's nothing telling you how to feel in a certain moment. Even though we're tracking the story and emotions of David, he is by no means the protagonist or "hero." We don't know what happened before his split with Nikki. We don't know what happens after. We are viewing this slice of his life. And I think that to put music in this film would have started to dictate to the audience what they should be feeling, so it was a great decision not to do that. MA: Furthering that, David, with the fact we don't have music, dialogue really doesn't have anything to hide behind. You did a fantastic job of keeping the tone of the dialogue consistent. Why don't you give a little bit of insight into how you got the dialogue track to where it is in the mix. DB: I love dialogue editing and mixing because I feel like it's a new puzzle every time. Every shot, every mic, every situation is going to have a different tonality to it and the job is to assemble it and make it seamless. Ryan Cota did an excellent job with the edit and smoothing of this dialogue. While there was a lot of cleanup done in pre-dubs. I think I unwound some of the cleanup during the final mix. I try to not go too far with processing in a pre-dub or in an edit. If you have a noisier, gritty environment, you can really do less and it blends more naturally with what's going on around it. In this film for the most part, the focus on dialogue cleanup was getting the "filmmaking" aspects out of the dialogue. That's not to say there wasn't more than your standard share of lav scratches, rustles, and other anomalies that needed to be addressed! There was a lot of work there. And then there was a lot of work when we decided to walk down the separation and panning route. Mic choices or lack thereof, made for some interesting decisions as well. For example, in the opening scene between David and his dad, we hear voices coming from multiple, changing locations—the dad from downstairs, then David coming down the stairs, then the dad off to the left and so on. This scene was a bit of a trick and I ended up using a mixed bag of sources—a plant mic for one or the other character, David's mic upstairs picking up the dad's voice downstairs, or some combination if it made it sound real. It was a lot of fun because without big musical pieces to hide behind or huge gunfights and stuff like that, we had to really work the dialogue to make sure that we got what we wanted in the mix. Just make it feel. Make it emote. MA: While we're on dialogue, there's two more scenes I'd like to discuss that must have had some tricks to separate the dialogue. The first one is in the house where the family is separated across the screen before David and Nikki go on their date, and the second is the fireworks scene where some of the kids leave the frame laughing and having fun while David and his daughter remain on camera having an intimate conversation. How did you tackle this? DB: The house scene was actually a product of Peter throwing down the gauntlet in our pre-mix meeting. "Be creative. Go outside the box. If you can think it, try to do it." And I thought, "Oh man, what can I possibly do that might even be within that category?!" And while I'm sure he meant that as an option, it somewhat felt like a challenge. During my pre-mix, when I got to the scene where David is coming to pick up Nikki for the date and the kids are watching TV, it seemed like an opportunity to try some panning on the voices to kind of establish the geography of the scene. We hang on the opening shot of the scene for a good amount of time, and then cut to the kitchen perspective and the scene plays out from there. In the opening shot, I wanted to establish Nikki and the daughter arguing in the kitchen on the left, keep the boys in the center watching TV, and have David knock and enter from the right. We didn't necessarily have the mic coverage and separation to do that. So I dug pretty deep into RX8 Advanced, duplicated mics, and removed elements from the various sources that would ruin the illusion that I was trying to create. As the scene goes on, it became apparent that I could not only hard pan