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 55 So I'm really grateful that that's been the case and you've always been spot on for what you do, and I appreciate and love you for that. SSS: I thank you. I love Foley, I loved everything about it. My 32-year career was all about the Foley and supervising. It was terrific. My favorite, most unusual Foley that I experienced with you was Twister. When we were doing the tornado that tore up all of the telephone poles and it was on top of the street and they pull up in their truck and they got Dorothy in the back with all those little satellite balls and it was pouring rain. We did the rain-hitting surfaces on the Foley stage. I actually helped with this cue. It was 'rain on asphalt,' 'rain on truck,' 'rain on slicker,' 'rain on Dorothy' the metal container, rain on all these different surfaces. Well, instead of shooting to picture, we actually recorded 100 feet, or a minute of each surface. And in the editing, I cut it like sound effects. So every time we cut to Joe in the windshield, I cut 'windshield rain,' cut to 'asphalt rain,' cut to the 'truck rain,' cut to 'Bill with a slicker on rain.' I did that for the day, and loved it! They went nuts on the dub stage when they heard these different surfaces cut to picture! They were not expecting these different sounds for each surface. So it was a customized Foley opportunity that I took advantage of and I'm very grateful for that. I've always loved telling that story. JR: Oh, I love that and of course, some kind of a six degree thing out of that picture, one of the characters, of course, there's all these tornado chasers if you will, and Todd Field was one of them [as Tim "Beltzer" Lewis]. He was up for multiple Academy Award nominations for the film Tár, and in fact, I ended up along with David Fein doing a couple of his films early on. He's an incredible director, and that's one aspect of the film business I love because he appreciated, I guess the fact that we were willing to help him with a film that did not have a lot of money. He appreciates good sound. We were acquaintances, maybe friends in a sense, you could say, but I just love the fact that that's the way this business works. You meet all sorts of people. SSS: Have you worked with directors that absolutely love Foley? Directors that actually know what Foley is and love it? JR: Oh, sure. Yes. David Fincher. I mean, he's probably the penultimate. He'll listen to each track from what I know, or at least he will go through it with a fine tooth comb and know what's what for sure. Billy Friedkin, the same thing. Yeah, there's a couple others but I'd say Fincher is pretty much one of the zeniths because the guy has an incredible eye for detail, number one, visually his films are stunning, and of course, with Ren Klyce and the people he works with, Jeremy Molod, Coya Elliott, etc., it's a great sound job. In fact, he understands music. He will make sure that the music side and the sound effects side get together and are not clashing with each other, which is really amazing. SSS: Very rare, very rare, that music and sound effects are combined equally, usually the music wins and the sound effects are buried. Switching gears now, we'll be talking about what is it that makes Foley, these cues and setups that have never been done before that you experienced unique? JR: Well, remember the old adage 'necessity is the mother of invention.' As we go along in these films we're going to talk about, we came up against sounds we had to create that weren't necessarily sounds you could just get out of your head from the old radio days. You had to really come up with something new when you came up on 'Gosh, what's that going to sound like? How do we do that?' and perform it. So that's really the crux of what we're going to be chatting about today. SSS: Do you find that the sounds create the unique Foley that you created? Or were they augmenting sound effects? Or were they stand alone cues? JR: Well, to answer the question, it really depended upon who the client that is a supervising sound editor, designer, he/she/they were. If it was Chuck Campbell, he tended to have us do more Foley that could potentially be leaned upon, as a sound effect to some degree versus another editor might not have us do that. I don't know if that answers the question, but that was the reality. SSS: When you do these unusual and unique sounds, do you have production to work with? Or are they created off the top of your head where by trial and error you try all different kinds of ways to do things before you come up with the right sound? JR: Well, production sounds are a good guide to some degree. That being said, of course, we're talking about live action. You know, there's nothing inherent in animation. Even in a live-action film, it could be something like we're going to talk about in The Green Mile. There was a situation where the director did like something, which we'll talk about in a bit, but it just depended upon the project. That's a wonderful aspect of Foley, it is so unique to each film that it just took on a life of its own and really, for me, and the people I worked with, I think, if I could speak for them, just made it a real joy. SSS: I would like to share with our readers the films that you have selected that have unique and unusual Foley