Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/756468
50 CINEMONTAGE / Q4 2016 get it. But then maybe he can't break down in this scene because it's almost too painful for him to do so? It was something Kenny spoke to Casey about a lot. This person is feeling so much pain that he has to shut himself off. If even a little pin pricks it, he will be destroyed. You don't want people to think the character is cold, but that if he felt anything at all for a moment, he would explode. So there was the mystery of figuring out when the pin should finally prick him and he comes apart, and even how much he comes apart. Kenny had done so much work on that performance with Casey leading up to the shooting, and he brought that to the edit room. CM: Is there something you've come to appreciate about Baumbach and Lonergan, which you hope to get again? JL: Their obsession with getting it right. Neither one compromises, and by not compromising, they're constantly explaining why they can't compromise. Also, they both speak about their movies in ways that are so eloquent. JACOB RIBICOFF CineMontage: Manchester was your second project with Lonergan on a very different sound- scape. How has your process with him developed? Jacob Ribicoff: You always like working with a director who knows exactly what he wants, and that's Kenny. I did sound supervising on the theatrical release version of Margaret. I did a spotting session with Kenny initially; he began talking about recording on the street, having voices of New York permeate the movie. I grew up in New York and was really excited about that. But by the time we finally mixed the theatrical movie, Kenny was not involved anymore due to legal reasons. We weren't supposed to talk to each other. There was a guy from the bond company who was the authority figure on the stage. It was really weird, like playing in a band to an empty house. I tried to retain as much from the spotting session I had with Kenny to honor his aesthetics. The movie sat on a shelf for four years until it was released theatrically, but for the DVD release, Kenny was allowed to do a director's cut. I got to go back and redo the whole soundtrack with him. We retained chunks from the theatrical release, but really got to do it his way this time. In that mix he had very specific ideas of how he was hearing the city and how he wanted the viewer to hear it. You might normally use group ADR, but we wanted to use this huge collection of on-the-street voices he had recorded. His idea was that if people are walking toward you and passing you on the street, you don't fade up on their voices slowly until they reach you and then fade out as they walk away. Instead, you're in a conversation, not paying attention, and suddenly the person's right there — you hear three words and then they're gone. That's how we treated the voices in Margaret. We tried this approach in Manchester, but Kenny quickly found it to be distracting. So we shifted away because it's not New York City; it's a completely different environment. For Kenny, it was a different aesthetic to keep the voices not essential to the scene to a minimum. CM: Would you call that realism? JR: I would describe his approach as being a form of realism, except when music takes over. For example, in the fire flashback at the center of the movie. It becomes an operatic moment where music takes over and you have many sections of that MOS, no dialogue or any other sound. We played around with that fire scene, listening to the beginning and end where you see a fireman poking around in the rubble. We tried to have it so you just hear them poking around within the background music, then fell back from that reality to only music. CM: So what was the need of Manchester from the sound design perspective? JR: Manchester was about giving a real environment to the characters that never calls attention to itself, but really informs the dramatic situation the characters are in. Their words and the situation they're in are first and foremost, but they are placed within an environment that makes sense. It had to be a place any viewer could associate with and not be pulled out of it in any kind of unorthodox way. With that, Kenny's view of which sounds belonged in that reality and which didn't was very specific scene to scene. And if you were going to hear an engine throttling up to full speed or a dog barking, the timing had to be exact. It would be okay for a dog to bark between two particular Jacob Ribicoff.