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36 CINEMONTAGE / WINTER 2015 mix of director Angelina Jolie's Unbroken. "I'm super, super happy to have been nominated," Taylor confides enthusiastically. "We put so much creative work into the film that, in 27 years of mixing soundtracks, Unbroken was the ultimate experience." For Montaño, it was "a perfect product — including ADR, Foley and the other components, with no gimmicks. We kept it simple." The duo also received a CAS nomination for the film. "We spent a total of 60 days carefully crafting the soundtrack, including 14 days for dialogue pre-dubs and 15 for effects pre-dubs," Taylor explains. "Although the film involves three separate acts, the music maintains the overall story flow. While the score tells us a lot about the drama unfolding on the screen, the quality of the dialogue and backgrounds needs to fit into that space." "The key came when we realized that [lead character] Louis Zamperini is an enabler who, in the pivotal scenes, looks after his colleagues," offers Montaño. "When he is moving around the interior [of the damaged B-24 Liberator during the ill-fated bombing raid], we needed to hear everything he was saying to his crew members [despite the high-speed action]. We felt that the spirit of Louis was in the room all the time, no matter what the scene." "Given his role as caretaker, dialogue mattered throughout the film," Taylor points out. "Louis took care of people and Angelina wanted very much to have the audience feel what he was going through during the film's action. We wanted the film soundtrack to feel very real, with no gimmicks. After all, Unbroken is a true story; we did our very best to tell that story as realistically as we could." Co-writer/director Christopher Nolan's Interstellar was re-recorded on Warner Bros. Studio Services' Stage 9, with Rizzo handling dialogue, backgrounds and Foley, and Landaker overseeing sound effects and music. The film marks the fourth nomination for Rizzo, who won an Oscar for Inception (2010), and the eighth for Landaker, who received one each for Speed (1994), Raiders of The Lost Ark (1981) and The Empire Strikes Back (1980). "Given the negative reactions we had seen in the media about the film's soundtrack, I was thrilled, excited and bewildered at the nomination," Landaker says. "You never get over that thrill of hearing your name being announced," adds Rizzo. "I was completely overwhelmed!" The re-recording team also received a CAS nomination. "We had no preconceived ideas going into the soundtrack," Landaker recalls. Rizzo elaborates: "Chris let us lay out the mix as we heard it — he wanted our reactions — and then refined our directions. He didn't want the soundtrack to be over-conceptual or too layered, just clean and real. We just had a few lines of ADR, for example." "We relied on the production track, to ensure a heightened sense of realism," Landaker adds. "The director wanted to hear on the stage what he had heard during the shoot. "The mix, which lasted for 14 weeks, was Chris' final process," Landaker continues. "Since we did no pre-dubs, that was when all the elements came together. We mixed in 5.1-channel format, with the LFE being on all of the time to fill the room with low-end frequencies. During the final seven weeks, we would mix the entire film for four days, and then each Friday Gregg Landaker, left, and Gary Rizzo. Photo by Martin Cohen