Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1543327
And I think he's just keen on the sounds and the rhythms of New York City. He likes to capture that and imbue the pro- cess with that kind of feeling." What was your timeframe to work on this? "I think we started about three months ago. And we finished about one month ago." That doesn't sound like a long time for a big film like this? "No, we didn't have that much time. And it's not a bad thing. There's a pressure- cooker aspect to it, and the movie is like that. The movie's a pressure cooker. Things are compacted and compressed, and the storytelling is torrid. The pace of it is really blazing. And in a way, it's sort of appropriate that our filmmaking pro- cess is kind of torrid and blazing." Were you working on the film from beginning to end or on pieces at a time? "My crew is working very hard, and they're not attached to the timeline. They do whatever's the most important thing at the moment. A lot of it has to do with who's available to record tomorrow, who's can't do it until next week. There's kind of a calendar. There's a lot of people on that calendar, including filmmakers and us, as well and studio availability. (There are) so many tasks. If you can't do one thing, there's another thing that needs to be done. It is pretty nonlinear until we start mixing…Once we start mixing, especially the final mix, we're working linearly. We had a stopwatch and a deadline we had to meet. We mixed the movie in three weeks basically. We have a crew. We've got two or three people working on dialog. In this case we had Paul Urmson and Chris Chae working on sound design, and Wyatt Sprague and a bunch of other people working on sound editing." Is there a lot of ADR in this film, and what determines the need for dialogue replacement? "Most of the filmmakers that I work with, the ADR is a is a tool that we use to make the story more understandable. Occasionally we're doing ADR to change a line or connect two lines together that don't really sound like they're the same person. But most of the ADR we're doing is about noise, being off mic. Maybe a line starts on mic and then the actor turns away or the something happens technically. We have those kind of tech- nical demands…We have a long process that we go through, which is very labor intensive, where we go back to all the original audio. And the original audio, I mean original audio being the location recordings. Those are usually pretty deep. There can be 10 or 15 recordings from for every take. Once you start digging back in, you can go pretty deep. Something that sounds really bad as a composite of all those sounds — because what they do is, from the set, they make a composite mix, and they use that to edit. Oftentimes you have one or two booms and a bunch of radios all mixed together because you don't want to make that decision until you're editing. Then you can go back and say, 'Out of all of these, I'm going to go with the best capture. The clearest one.' Sometimes it's very clear and it sounds fine." What's next for you? "I'm working on The Devil Wears Prada 2. There's a Robert DeNiro movie, called (The) Whisper Man, which I was sup- posed to be working on now, but it's been delayed a bit." www.postmagazine.com 17 POST JAN/FEB 2026 The Japan competition was one of the more challenging scenes. The mix took place at Warner Bros. in New York City. Avid Pro Tools was used for editing.