Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1513564
52 C I N E M O N T A G E F E A T U R E Slater: We obviously have many more tools in our arsenal, sound-wise, than what you get with a stage play or a live musical. And there's a progression in the music in and of itself. It starts o as gospel, and then we go to blues, and then we have jazz. Blitz wanted these musical sequences to be very much part of the sonic fabric of the movie. We h a d f u n u s i n g o rga n i c , n a t u ra l sounds in certain ways. As Renee said earlier, you go from emotional highs to emo- tional lows quite quickly. We had a thing where using cicadas and insects that, on one hand, can be quite laconic and relaxing and a beautiful sound, to something that, if you overplay them, both in their intensity and in their level, they can go to this very intense, ratchety sound. You may notice in the movie that we have this constant theme when Ce- lie is scared and oppressed and threatened, these insects kind of mirror her emotional state and they go from being quite a sooth- ing, relaxing sound to quite an intense sound. There's a moment where she's giving Mister a shave on the back porch, and she's obviously considering doing something a bit different to him than just giving him a shave. And there, we overplay the insects to quite a large degree to kind of amp up the emotional state that she's in. Tondelli: Julian and I wanted to try to get some recordings of the actual dancers doing the Foley, their steps on their own. We had told Blitz about this, and he said, "Oh, okay, that sounds good." And then the pro- ducers we talked to said okay. So we went down the line and kind of talked to all of the people that could do this, and eventually, we had really good sound mixers: there was Steve Morrow and Richard Bullock and Nick Baxter, who was our executive producer, but who did a lot of the work with playbacks and earwigs [sound piece] and all of that. One night when they finished "Push da Button," the song that Shug [Henson] sings inside the juke, Richard and Nick miked the whole place with booms on the top and then they had boom operators doing closeups, and they gave 55 earwigs to the dancers and did playback. And we got the best, just pure Foley. Of course, we enhanced it and things, but it was really nice to be able to get that and to also work early on with the SEE PAGE 75 HOLD HANDS: A scene from "The Color Purple." P H OT O : WA R N E R B R O S . P I C T U R E S Renee Tondelli.