Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1500189
M OT I O N P I CTU R E S O U N D E D I TO R S 45
how much he and Max Steiner
worked together. Max Steiner
composed the music for King Kong,
and they worked together in a way
where they would hand-off. In a way
that we so rarely do today! "Oh, King
Kong's gonna roar here for the first
time? I'm gonna build to it, then I'm
gonna give it to you, Murray!" And
then Murray would do the roar, and
then the music would take back over.
And then there's a big music element
when they were going to the island
or something on the ship, and then
Murray pulls back, and simplifies
the sound, so that … they hand
back-and-forth to each other. And it
was amazing to me to read just how
much they spoke and how much
they planned ahead.
SL: That's wonderful. Yeah, as I
remember, they had four tracks ( for the
final mix). Just four tracks! So you have
to work together in a situation like that!
GR: And the technique that Murray
Spivack used for doing King Kong
which is recording real animals,
playing them backward, adding
the backward over the forward,
changing the pitch—it's exactly
what I did on Jurassic Park. There
was no difference—I was just using
a Synclavier, and he was using old
optical recorders and things. But the
technique is exactly the same.
SL: You've talked about this, but I would
like to go into it a little here—what are
some of the fun animals that you had? I
understand there were penguins…?
GR: Yeah. For the raptors.
SL: The trilling of the penguins! I tracked
down a lot of penguin recordings, first for
Batman Returns—and it was fascinating
to listen to their vocalizations.
GR: Well, the raptors, especially
in that movie, they had to sound
intelligent. So, I think of all the
dinosaurs in the first Jurassic Park,
the raptors were made up of the
most animal sounds. Different
animals. For breathing, for the
different things they would do. So, I
was reassembling real animal sounds
into a vocabulary for the velociraptor.
And my approach to that movie was
to do as little processing as possible.
Really just changing the pitch.
Really the King Kong approach, and
not over-processing—it's a matter
of collecting, and finding, really
interesting stuff, and then sort of
organizing it… I learned from Ben,
because when he did Chewbacca,
he recorded bear stuff, and he
would organize the bear stuff into
vocabularies. Different moods and
things like that. And then cut by Terry
Eckton, usually. And so that's what it
is. It's just finding interesting animal
sounds, and then reassembling
them into what sounds like a single
new creature. The velociraptor has
got walruses and dolphins and
lynxes and horses and tortoises …
there must be 20 different animals
in there. But that was the way to
make it sound intelligent to me.
So it had an intelligence to it. A
communication to it.
The T-Rex was more of a "I'm
breathing, I'm sniffing around, I
attack!" And it's a fun sound, but
there's not a big range. Once it
decides it's going to eat you, there
isn't a lot of emotion to the T-Rex—
it's just coming after you.
SL: There are several "dinosaur crowd
scenes" too, when they're out there in the
field.
GR: Actually, one of my favorite
sounds, which is in the crowd scene
of the brachiosaurs—and that's the
first dinosaur you see, so it's sort of a
special dinosaur in Jurassic Park.
SL: It has a very "whale" quality to it.
GR: I'm sure I used whales, I used
donkeys, I used things that had pitch.
I remember reading a book—my
one-and-only book for research
on Jurassic Park—about animal
communication. And the thing that
stuck with me was that animals that
aren't predators, that are more the
prey animals—the gentler animals—
their vocals, in general in nature,
their vocals are more pure of pitch.
And the ones that are predators—
the T-Rex—they just "ROAR!" The
spitter. The T-Rex. The raptors. But
the brachiosaurs had song. Taken
from a whale-like idea, that you
would imagine that they would
communicate over long distances
through these whale-like songs.
Some whales, and I actually tried to
use more donkey or other animals
and actually try to find sections in
the animals that had a natural song
quality to them. And then pitch them
and reverb them so they had this
beautiful singing communication.
What I like about Jurassic Park is
it's not just dinosaurs that kill you—
there are also dinosaurs that impress
you. Brachiosaurs and triceratops …
those are always fun to do other than
the ones that want to kill you.
SL: I was going to ask if you had talked
to any paleontologists or any people who
would know—I mean, obviously we don't
have any real recordings of dinosaurs,
yet—but I was wondering if you had any
official word on what they might sound
like, or did you work completely from a
creative mindset?
GR: There were paleontologists—
Jack Horner, a famous paleonto-
logist, was a consultant on the show.
I talked to paleontologists, and they
all said, we have no idea. Literally
no idea. And that was fine with me.
I remember getting criticized after
the movie came out and there was a
scientist somewhere who said that
the T-Rex would not have roared,
it would have no way to roar—the
scientist claimed that the most
common sound for the T-Rex would
have been stomach gurgles. Which
would have made for a very different
movie.
SL: