MPSE Wavelength

24 M PS E . O R G reboot, reinstall software sometimes during the day. Steve Flick saw me struggling, and what he did—he's a crazy amazing man—he fronted me all the money to buy an expansion card, a faster processor for the Mac, a bigger hard drive, and I was able then to do Speed without crashing. So, I owe Steve a lot … in that respect, but also for learning techniques from him, and learning how to tell story in a film. TM: I know you're being humble when you say: "It was my first project and it went pretty well." But it went well because you'd used all this information from all these other jobs. You were putting all that knowledge into knocking that out of the park when you got your chance. GH: Yeah, yeah, that's all true. But you know, there were a ton of people who worked on that movie. I worked on that movie for about two months until I found out there was another crew down the street working on the first part of the movie. There were a couple of us who worked on Pro Tools, but Pro Tools was just very rudimentary then. So, I don't think people quite trusted it. They didn't want to devote a whole film to it. TM: You mentioned working on Poetic Justice. You went on to work on a bunch of subsequent movies with director John Singleton. Do you want to talk about that relationship, and maybe just in general, how to interact with directors? GH: That was one of the many films I did with John Singleton. But I'll talk about meeting him. Another one of those things: a phone call. I'm sitting in my apartment, I get a call from this guy I knew, and he said: "Hey, yeah, I talked to this guy who works for John Singleton. You should call him." I said: "Okay." So, I randomly call the guy (Dwight Williams) and we have a good conversation: "Why don't you come over to Sony, and I'll introduce you to John." And so, I did. I was asked over to the editing room to meet with the producer and John and the picture editor Bruce Cannon. I go over there and I'm just talking. I'm talking about theories that I'd learned at Lucasfilm and diˆerent things about story and sound, and how you can focus in on the moment, you know, using sound, by pulling everything else back. And at the end of my rambling, the producer said: "Well, I think I speak for everybody if I'd say we'd like to oˆer you the job to supervise this movie. Would you like to do that?" I didn't even know there was an opening for a sound supervisor because Dennis Drummond and his brother Patrick, had done Boyz N the Hood and I assumed they were doing this one. My brain just went: "Oh, my God, how am I going to do this? I've never supervised anything. Who could I talk to? What do I need to do?" But I immediately said: "Sure, I would love to do this movie. I think I could bring so much to this film." And I'm just, like, sweating on the inside. So, I got the gig, and then I had to prove myself. Fortunately, there were just a lot of great human beings around. One of them was David Stone, who had just won the Academy Award for Dracula. He just walked me through it. He had a book—because back then, you'd have to put everything in a book. Greg & Rebecca Hedgepath at Korean Friendship Bell used in White Men Can't Jump. Greg has worked on movies featuring Tyrese Gibson, including Baby Boy (2001), 2 Fast 2 Furious (2003), and Four Brothers (2005).

• Cover