Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1470109
a bunch of games and even pegs hammering into the ground for the tents. One of the things that actually instigated, that is, I was working on another scene, and I got a clip from Cam McLaughlin, the picture editor, referencing the sound of the tents. These tents just had this voice, they were singing and breathing. It was like moving the posts and all the mooring and the anchors and things like that. So that kind of instigated that visit. MA: There's so much great background dialogue in the film that helps ground us in the locations and the actions. Can you talk a bit about the crowd recordings from set and the loop group? JP: I was dealing with what Greg had recorded on set with crowds in that respect, and those were supplemented by the loop group, which we recorded afterward. Touching on remote recordings, during the first wave of COVID, the actors had to be separated within a small group. This turned out to be the best possible scenario, because of that separation I had the ability to thin out the group where I wanted. Normally when we record 8 to 10 people in a room, they're all mixed down into one track. The loop group casting happened through Dann Fink and Bruce Winant, who are just amazing. I've worked with them over the past 12 years. We recorded the group at Harbor Post. They had set up two or three different rooms and then had several actors patched in remotely and individually. Because some of the talent ended up being actor couples who lived together, we were able to put these couples together in a room—one couple per room—thereby allowing more people in the studio than we would have had if they'd have been single actors. Bobby Johanson, our engineer, would record each studio room on one track and the remote recordings on another track, it was just so organized. It was like an 8-hour dream of amazing group that I had the ability to mix and match, place, pull and create conversations that I wouldn't have been able to do had it been our usual recording style. Now I love that so much that I'm constantly asking: "Hey, can you give me four mono tracks instead of a mixed track? Or can you give me a mixed track and four mono tracks?" The recordists are going to start rolling their eyes at me. [All laugh] Guillermo was very specific in terms of wanting only Southern accents for the first half of the film. Southern had to be Kentucky and Louisiana. It couldn't be Texas, it had to be these specific accents. And then in the back half of the film, it had to be Buffalo, it had to be upstate New York or nothing at all. These actors were just phenomenal, I can't express enough how much life they added to the film and how grateful I am for that. For the opening, when Stanton first arrives at the carnival, it was all scripted and placed very early on in the cut. So, everything else kind of supplemented that, and we didn't get into too many specifics loop group wise, until we went into the Geek pit. MA: There is such a great crowd interaction when we get to the Geek pit. How did this scene come together? JP: We did several passes of general walla going from the exterior leading into the pit and then broken up a bit just to gauge the reaction. Then we did some crowd swells with the reaction of the chicken being dropped, being bitten, that whole thing. Then we did some specifics where the loop group would ad lib reactions and a lot of those ended up specifically placed in the mix. Guillermo would then say "I want to use that, and I'm going to put it here and I want to move these three frames earlier and I want it to come out of this speaker." As Nathan was saying, you provide some ideas and Willem Dafoe as carnival owner Clem Hoatley. © Searchlight Pictures The Geek pit show was a carnival favorite attraction. © Searchlight Pictures