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42 CINEMONTAGE / Q1 2016 to be there for a couple of months, but he had to be there for years," he says. "We had to hear how it would all slowly degrade." One of the most challenging scenes was when Mark operates on himself. "The Foley was a joy to mix," Taylor adds. "There was so much detail, I just knew what to do with it." Likewise, the storm on Mars was also difficult. "You get all the dialogue and still feel assaulted by thousands of tons of Martian dust," he says. Dialogue required futz treatments — and lots of them, says Massey. "There were over 50 treatments needed for the dialogue in different locations," he says. "It was very challenging to keep them all different, but believable, and also intelligible. In some instances, we took clean recordings, did standard futzes to them and then supervising sound editor Oliver Tarney broadcast them over a small AM transmitter to a receiver and we re-mic'ed them on the receiver." The score, composed by Harry Gregson- Williams and recorded by Peter Cobbin at Abbey Road Studios, gave Massey "lots of control over instrumentation." Watney's final rescue was perhaps the toughest scene to build. "The integration of dialogue, music and effects, each having its own moment, was most challenging," he says, "and possibly the most rewarding in the final analysis." On the NBCUniversal StudioPost's Alfred Hitchcock stage, Jon Taylor handled dialogue and music, and Montaño sound effects for director Alejandro G. Iñárritu's The Revenant, for which they also received BAFTA and CAS nominations. Taylor (who has worked on all of Iñárittu's movies since 21 Grams in 2003) and Montaño started as a team three years ago on Fast and Furious 5, and have been working together ever since. Last year, the duo was nominated for Iñárritu's Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance). Taylor has two previous nominations, including last year's Unbroken, and Montaño has seven. Due to the overwhelming amount of sound effects mixing, Thom, who has 14 prior Oscar nominations, joined Taylor and Montaño. The core challenge in The Revenant is the contrast between the film's look and its soundscape. "The film is beautiful to look at, and the camerawork lent itself for us to be immersive with the soundscape," says Montaño. "We really tried to make it real, raw, haunting, dark. Every sound counts." The notoriously difficult production conditions impacted dialogue coverage, although Taylor gives kudos to the production mixer's "fantastic job," adding, "We didn't have separation for each character. We pre-dubbed to get clarity, figured out where our problems would be with regards to space and direction, and created an ADR list very early on." Montaño notes that because of the ubiquity of nature sounds, part of the challenge was to give wind, trees and snow "a lot of flavors," as well as to strip things Frank Montaño. Paul Massey. Randy Thom. Photo by Gregory Schwartz Jon Taylor.