Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1512183
40 M PS E . O R G sound design. Nuendo is a tool that allows so many more tracks and so much more live processing. I can keep a film on my laptop and update things as I want to. Another big benefit of working with the whole mix in one box, which Nuendo does well, is that I kind of encourage my team members not to be specifically Foley or dialogue or effects. I want them to think about how the sound works on the film as a whole and to feel enabled to get under the bonnet of any of the tracks. I'll watch a scene or reel and I'll have a marker track with 400 notes in it and any one of my team members can go and pick up any note and do whatever they feel like they're good at or they have an idea for so long as we all clear the notes. I first came across Nuendo in 2003. I was still using Pro Tools at the time, but went back to Nuendo for Under the Skin because it just allowed me what I thought was a better workflow and have used it ever since. On Nope, I was really concerned that when I got to Universal that they'd be like, "You want to work on what?" But, the tech and security department gave me the green light. Korey: You've worked with Yorgos on a number of projects. Can you talk about where that relationship started and how it's evolved? Johnnie: I met Yorgos in 2014. He had watched Under the Skin and found out where I worked and came in for a cup of tea. He thought the film sounded amazing. He was working on a music video at the time and asked me if I wanted to do the sound on it. I said, "Sign me up!" That went well and he asked me to work on The Lobster, which he was about to start shooting. For that film, I went to Ireland with him for the shoot. On the night before filming commenced, he took the cast and the crew on a bus to a cinema in Dublin, like two hours away, and made them watch Under the Skin. He told everyone, "This is the bar, we've got to make a film as good as this." He really took the time to let the production record wild tracks or ADR on set while the actors were still in the right headspace. That is the dream as a sound editor. He also gave me the time and the budget to go around and record a huge amount of wild sounds. The Lobster was a success. When it came time for Yorgos to do The Killing of a Sacred Deer, he said, "You did the last one, so you may as well do the next one"' On The Lobster, he'd been very involved, but when we got into post-production on The Killing of a Sacred Deer, Rachel Weisz had suddenly become available so he had to go immediately into production on The Favourite. So, he said, "Look, Johnnie, you're just going to have to finish this one on your own." Then on one gray Tuesday, a Fox Searchlight car came delivering a very tired mid-shoot director to a mix stage and I played the final mix of The Killing of a Sacred Deer for him. We were taking the film to Cannes the following week. I played it for him and I said, "What do you think?" His head was so completely in the other movie, but there wasn't anything he didn't like, so that is what we played at Cannes. When it came to doing The Favourite, I had certainly gained his trust. He encourages me to do whatever I want to do. I'll play him the most outlandish weird ideas and he'll sort of laugh. If he doesn't like something, he will tell me. If he says nothing, we are good to go. He does that with all the departments. This gives you the confidence to make mistakes and push the sound a little farther. I just finished Poor Things with him, which was a fantastic movie to work on. There's a lot of rudeness in it and very interesting Foley recordings for that. It's another film with an immersive soundscape. Yorgos had previously always chosen his own music. He spent ages, probably two months during pre-production on a film finding classical music that he loved and precise recordings that he thought were texturally significant. It was a huge tax on his time. For Poor Things, he finally found a composer he wanted to work with. This made for a slightly different approach. Previously, I'd be bending and reshaping bits of