Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1513564
56 C I N E M O N T A G E F E A T U R E editor with whom he had worked on his first feature as a director, "A Star Is Born" (2018). "I got an early copy of the script that was in progress, and he said, 'Look, we've had so much success on 'A Star Is Born' with live vocals and doing things live on set. What do you think about tackling this in the same fashion?'" Ruder said. "I got excited and extremely scared at the same time. I said, 'You mean with full orchestra doing Leonard Bernstein?" . . . It sounded absolutely amazing, and it sounded like one of the biggest challenges I've ever heard of in our line of work." Cooper decided that any music shown to be performed live on camera would be recorded live on set. "We never let go of his vision: 'If we see it, we've got to capture it live,'" Ruder said, and that especially a p p l i e d to t h e s e q u e n c e o f B e r n s te i n conducting Mahler at the Ely Cathedral. "The tech scout was an intricate piece of the puzzle," Ruder said. "Ely is not the best-sounding [venue]. It's beautiful, but it's just like this enormous cavern. We were like, 'This is going to be hard to record.'" The filmmakers partnered with classical recording engineers at a company called Classic Sound. "I said, 'Have you recorded anything at Ely?' And they said they had done years ago a couple of recordings," Ruder said, noting that Classic Sound uses Puremix rather than Pro Tools. "I thought, 'These are our guys,'" Ruder said. "We discussed how to sling microphones. We f igured out whether any microphones would be in frame. There were a couple you could see in the archives [of the actual performance] . . . . We came up with a strategy to shoot, and it actually, magically, worked out." When it came time to film the scene, Cooper, inhabiting Bernstein, stood in front of musicians from the London Symphony Orchestra, as well as a chorus of singers, who then performed selections from the Mahler symphony. "We kind of mapped it out roughly, because we were short on time," Ruder said. "Bradley was very good about: 'This is the section. Let's map out the measures.'" Multiple cameras, used in several different setups, captured the scene. "When you have that many players and singers live, it's kind of a wild animal," Ruder said. "It was really down to a few magic takes, to be honest with you." For scenes that used Bernstein's music as score, however, Cooper and Ruder dis- cussed using the original masters from the composer's recordings. "All we had is stereo masters," Ruder said. "I thought, 'Surely some sort of multi-tracks that exist, and that might help us make a little more of a 7.1 or an Atmos mix.' But we really couldn't get our hands on them." Then the idea emerged for the London Symphony Orchestra to recreate the pieces. Conducting consultant Yannick Nezet-Seguin used the actual Ber- nstein recordings, which were being used as the film's "temp score," as a reference. "Yannick really studied the scenes that we had put together and the actual record- ings that we were working with," Ruder said. "At that point, we were able to do an Atmos scoring session and bring it back to a dub stage." The sound world of the film often had to be subservient to the music, as in a dream- like scene in which Lenny and Felicia find themselves onstage in a performance of the classic Bernstein-scored ballet "Fancy Free." "With those more dreamlike or imag- inative moments, like 'Fancy Free,' there's very little Foley, if any," Richard King said. "It's all production sound and it's all music. Even a lot of the production movement, like footsteps, were taken out." (During the Mahler scene, too, any background sound has been eliminated. "The world kind of comes back after [the musicians] finish," King said.) The "Fancy Free" scene was a delightful detour for Tesoro as well. "I love cutting ballet and dance," she said. "I worked on a television show years ago that was all ballet dancers. You have to be able to see the whole body and know where to go. It was such a joy to cut this sequence because I knew how to do this. The music is always there, and it's really a little microcosm of their story." On the other hand, scenes of the Bern- steins' day-to-day domestic existence were full of the everyday noise of life. "There are several dierent locations that we are in, in Connecticut and Long Island and Manhat- tan, and we have a good sense of where we are sonically," King said, also pointing to scenes at the Tanglewood music venue in Massachusetts, where Bernstein conducted and taught. "Tanglewood had its own kind of sound to it. You're using dierent birds and dierent types of wind through dier- ent types of trees," King said. One scene has very little sound at all: a devastating moment when Felicia sits in a doctor's office, her husband beside her, to learn that she has breast cancer. "Every- body knows the cold feeling of a doctor's examination room," King said. "Foley in that scene was really important — just the contact between Felicia and Leonard. They're holding one another and touching one another and hugging after she gets the news. It's a very emotional film." And it's a picture that continued to evolve until the very end. "It's like a sculp- ture," Tesoro said. "You have to start off with this idea of what it's supposed to be, and as you continue to carve, things just start to become more clear over time. You have to go through the process of all these steps that come in-between. For us, even during the last two months, there were certain puzzles that hadn't been solved." Two sequences that originally stood inde- pendent of each other — of Lenny ending his relationship with David, and of Lenny talking with Felicia about getting married — are now intercut. "But intercutting the scenes a little bit more, you're seeing more clearly the dissolving of the relationship with David into something else, but you're also seeing the evolving of the relationship with Felicia," Tesoro said. Perhaps it's even fair to say that the maestro was overseeing the production — from afar. " T h e w h o l e g o a l w a s : ' H o w d o w e k e e p L e n n y 's h e a r t b e a t a n d h u m a n nature alive through the whole thing?'" Ruder said. "That was the goal from day one, five years ago." ■