Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1470109
70 I m ps e . o rg MIGUEL ARAUJO MPSE: Since the late '90s, you've been working together in various capacities leading up to co-supervising on Nightmare Alley. What was your journey to get to this point? JILL PURDY MPSE: Well, it's funny because when I think of us starting together, I see you Nathan sitting with glasses and your long hair and that ponytail and it just makes me smile every time. We were kind of brought together through Sound Dogs. I started working with Guillermo through Nelson Ferreira, on The Strain. I cut production dialogue on all four seasons. Nathan also came on in season one. From that point on, we spent more and more time on projects together. NATHAN ROBITAILLE MPSE: Nelson was one of the founders of Sound Dogs, and he brought me in when I was 17 years old. I was in a high school co-op program. Jill was one of the OG Sound Dogs to me. When I came in there, she was one of the fixtures, one of the faces in the hallway, and one of the people that you follow around and shyly try and sit in with and learn from. And yes, a lot of that early stuff in the '90s, I would have been packing boxes, fetching coffees and assisting on shows that Jill was editing on. Over enough time, I started cutting, I learned enough to be trusted with this stuff, and I guess I was just weird enough to fit in. JP: Just weird enough. NR: [laughs] Thank you. I did the first season of The Strain. There was a lot of sound design set up, and I think that's kind of what got my foot in the door, at least with Guillermo, because after that it was Shape of Water, which was a love story. Once that went well and he was able to see that the team that I work with can deliver on a broader scope. It's not just like horror or creatures or action. He could hear that detail, and he liked that detail. That's when I got brought on to Antlers and then Nightmare Alley. MA: While Nightmare Alley might not be made up of a fantastical world of creatures which del Toro has become so well known for, this story has a lot of depth that gets heightened by the soundtrack. What was your overall approach to this film? NR: Guillermo has always been a monster fan. In this movie, the kind of people it revolves around, they're all monsters. There are very few redeeming qualities in these people. I think he wanted to make sure that came through in other ways rather than strange creatures and non-human entities. The early discussions on that were really more to do with sort of what happens to people when they allow their greed to guide most of their decisions and the consequences of that and the overarching arc of it all was that we start in freedom, but poverty with the carnival. And then once his greed starts to become realized, we wind up in this wealthy cityscape where everything is isolated and enclosed and kind of claustrophobic. Those are the two main things that I remember taking away from the early discussions with Guillermo, there's freedom in poverty and isolation and wealth. MA: The opening act of the film is riddled with detailed sound. Let's start by discussing the setup to the continuing flashbacks relating to the death of Stanton's father. For the most part with these, we have a juxtaposition between the visual and the sound. What was the thought behind this? NR: Guillermo is a big fan of symmetry and planting seeds early on that don't really take effect until we get later into the film. And this is a perfect example of that because two of the big motifs in those flashbacks were the rickety cabin, which to me symbolizes the sort of shattered family life in Stanton's youth. Then the other sound that you heard was something that we came to know as the void, which was sort of an eternal decaying ring off of an old steam train horn. It would just sit there and it sounded haunting enough that it would lace through all of those flashbacks. So you'd often hear those two elements Jill Purdy Nathan Robitaille