Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/600849
37 FALL 2015 / CINEMONTAGE about a decade. Neither of which made the task any easier. "When Alan was putting the film together, he had a really heavy-duty job," Ciccolini remembers. "He adapted the book to fit the screen, and on top of that, he had to go even further and dig out the things that were considered essential for the movie and take away the things that were slowing it down." Even with Pakula's attempts at paring, however, the film initially ran four hours and 45 minutes. "And it was tight then," Ciccolini says. "When he cuts, Evan lets the scenes do their thing. And, from my perspective, it's like, 'How do you begin to nip and tuck?'" In fact, the story lent itself to excesses in length. In scenes marked by a quiet intensity, Sophie imparts events from her life to Stingo. "She slowly opens the doors to the different things that are going on in her life and in her mind, and Alan didn't want to push her along," Ciccolini comments. "He didn't want to hurry her up, because the character was just so incredible." Threaded throughout are flashbacks that make the printed word visual, as we see Sophie in Auschwitz, as well as her early days in America. Pakula and Lottman would eventually trim the film by over two hours, but Ciccolini recognized that its tone was unlikely to change; thus, he was reluctant to introduce sound elements that would distract. "This is a dialogue-oriented film; a lot of storytelling and flashbacks and reminiscing," he says. "There wasn't a lot of room for sound that could possibly interrupt and interfere with what was going on emotionally in the film." Consequently, the sound editor looked for subtler ways to embellish the film's soundscape. For example, he suggested discreetly adding background noises to the scenes set in the Pink Palace — people yelling and phonographs playing. After production wrapped, special recording sessions were held in the Brooklyn house that had originally stood in for exteriors of the Pink Palace. "We had the actors doing shout-outs and doing conversation that we were able to then sprinkle into the film to kind of make it alive, to give it the sense that this is not a set, that there's really things going on," Ciccolini recalls. "I wound up going even further than that by getting a couple of Brooklyn women with real thick accents shouting out into the street calling their kids, and then hiring kids to give their moms a hard time, saying, 'I don't want to go home yet!'" To add authenticity to the sounds of neighborhood children jumping rope or playing hopscotch, Ciccolini looked up which nursery rhymes would have been popular in Brooklyn in 1947. "We sprinkled those things in, especially before Sophie and Stingo are talking and she's reminiscing," he says. "And some of the things that trigger her memory are these sounds that we spotted in, and then we'd also put in additional sounds to bring her out of it." In one powerful scene, the camera of cinematographer Nestor Almendros, ASC, dollies in on Sophie as she sits, opposite Stingo, beside the windows in her room. She is preparing to discuss her father — including his virulent anti-Semitism — as the bells of a Good Humor ice cream truck draw her eyes outside. The row of children congregating around the truck can be discerned. After a few moments, as if cued by the sounds, the film switches to flashbacks of Poland. "All of a sudden, you hear the sound of the bells of the ice cream truck, and then you hear these kids," Ciccolini recounts. "We added enough reverb on it, so it helps bring this flashback into play." Over the course of the film, as the flashbacks progress to scenes of Sophie's imprisonment in Auschwitz, what we hear is as horrific as what we see. "There's a shot of the smoke stack, and we put in the sound of this low rumble, which was a furnace-type sound," Ciccolini recalls. "It gave the indication what was going on: Extermination." In time, the film reaches its most devastating flashback; in a train yard in Auschwitz in the dead of night, the fates of Sophie's two children are settled. The sound design contributes to the scene's Chic Ciccolini in 1981, working on Sophie's Choice. "When I see her even in today's movies, I still see a bit of Sophie," Ciccolini says. "She was Meryl Streep, but she was Sophie."