Mr. Mangini, as a sound designer, which sounds do you contribute to a film?
All of them to, a certain degree! Of course, everyone understands that when a movie is shot, there’s a person on the set recording sound, you see the person with the boom pole, right? The objective of that sound team is to capture the spoken word, the dialogue. I am the person responsible for everything that you hear in the film, not only including the dialogue that has already been recorded, because that needs to be edited and massaged and designed, but I have to create, record, and add all those other missing sounds, that in science fiction might not exist, or perhaps simply need to be added. You can’t shoot a talky scene on the streets of New York City and mic it so that you hear the traffic.
And you’re also working collaboratively with the other sonic elements of the film, like the score, right?
Ideally, yes. With Blade Runner 2049 for example, that was great because Denis Villeneuve is one of the great cinematic geniuses, and he understood something that we in sound have understood for decades, that there’s one soundtrack and it needs to be shared by at least three fundamental properties: dialogue, sound effects, and music. Those are the major food groups, if you will, that make up everything that you hear in a film. It goes without saying that we must hear the words. If you don’t hear the words, you don’t understand the story. Then we have these other two competing interests, the music and the sound, and they’re often at odds! It’s not always taught that the composer and the sound designer should collaborate and work symbiotically to prepare a soundtrack that is harmonious and determined and composed. I think we need to learn to get the composer and the sound design together to coordinate more. Smart directors understand this, like Denis.
“Denis Villeneuve didn’t want the audience to know if it’s music or sound design. Think about what that brings to the cinematic experience!”
You can sense that in the film as well, there are moments where it’s not clear if we’re hearing is music or sound.
He actually said, “I want to erase the borders.” He didn’t want the audience to know if it’s music or sound design. Think about what that brings to the cinematic experience! Arguably, one of the objectives of a director is to suspend disbelief. You walk into a cinema and know what you’re seeing is artifice, but it’s the filmmaker’s job to make you believe that everything that you see is real, even if it’s science fiction. So anytime we can prevent the audience from subconsciously or consciously pulling back from their engagement in the film and saying to themselves, “Oh, I really like that music cue,” or “That was an interesting sound effect,” we eliminate some of the audience’s awareness of the filmmaker’s touch.
Does that mean that usually your job starts in post-production?
The tradition has been for 100 years that sound, including music and sound design, is something that starts in post production, yes. That’s the tried and true process that works, and it’s built into templates for budgets for films. But progressive filmmakers like Denis Villeneuve and George Miller recognize that the music process should start as early as pre-production because we can inform some of the decisions that can be made, and we can sometimes even save some of the budget for the film if we have a real clear idea of where we need to go in the first place.
Apparently you did just that during Dune — your allotted time for the a certain worm scene was 21 seconds, but you managed to make the sound effective in only 17 seconds.
I think that that one shot might have actually paid for what would be an over budget item by having us on during production! We were sent a storyboard image of the worm breaching and we were told the shot would last 21 seconds. I tried applying sound to that shot and I felt like it really only wants to be 17 seconds long. I just have this inherent sense of timing and pacing and I felt like I said everything I needed to say about the geology of Arrakis, the sound of the worm in 17 seconds. Why belabor this? It’s just what works and keeps the flow of that scene moving at its intended pace. So it was the visual effects team that adapted to us.
How do you typically craft these sounds? Is it mostly computer generated these days?
My first reflex is always acoustic. But remember that in science fiction, the imagery is an artifice. It’s a thing you’ve never seen before, and we need to convince the audience that this is real. All human beings live in an acoustic universe. We can’t avoid our our ears hearing everything has reverb and reflection and it live. Every sound lives in a space, even in the desert. And so I believe that evolutionarily speaking, we have a subconscious mechanism that recognizes acoustic sound, because we have 100,000 years of of observing it. And if the sounds that I create have an acoustic basis, meaning something I recorded with a microphone in the real world, your brain is already ahead in the game of convincing you that what you’re hearing is real because it sounds like something they’ve heard before.
It seems like you have a couple different approaches when creating a sound from scratch. For example, I read that the War Rig in Mad Max: Fury Road was an allegory for Moby Dick and you used whale sounds for when the truck is hit with harpoons. How do you decide when a sound should be literal, and when it should have its own narrative?
Boy, that’s a great and deeply insightful question! And the short answer is, it’s all instinct. It only happens for me when I am moved as such, often in the face of a challenge I’m struggling to resolve — which is to say, I knew that the War Rig in Mad Max: Fury Road was a character, so much so that it has more screen time than either Mad Max or Furiosa, and I began to see. That triggered what is a very common narrative approach to sound for me: how can I have the sound of this thing I’m trying to create tell a little bit more story than the diegetic? I thought of Moby Dick and Captain Ahab and the chase for the great white whale. I got lucky that they happened to be throwing harpoons! (Laughs)
“As I’ve gotten older, I’ve learned how to understand story better and how sound interacts with story, to support it or work against it…”
Does it get easier to cultivate those references with time and experience? Do you have a big Rolodex of sounds in your memory that you can flip through and choose from?
Well, I have an actual catalogue of sounds to choose from! I have been recording and collecting sounds for 50 years, and I have a collection of more than 700,000 sounds in a library. 50 years ago, I only had a thousand so I have a broader palette from which to draw. But the more important aspect is that as I’ve gotten older, I’ve learned how to understand story better and how sound interacts with story, to support it or work against it, and that has taken a lot more experience. I think as a sound designer you have to be a storyteller. I took screenwriting classes and acting classes and improv acting classes because I wanted to learn the fundamentals of story. What is it? What is a character arc? What is a three act structure? And because I taught myself some of those skills, they inform my approach from the very first frame of a film.
It sounds like you’re very dedicated to the success of the story over everything, rather than competing with the director over the sonic palette.
Unequivocally. I am never competing with the director. That’s a muscle that is strengthened with age, too. If you were to watch me in a collaboration with a director, you would see no competition whatsoever. That’s what collaboration is about. My goal isn’t for me to succeed. And this is the other credo. My goal is for the movie to succeed. I only advocate for what works for that. And if my idea is better than the directors, a good director, a non-ego based director, will recognize it. It is incumbent upon us as artists to always advocate for the project first, and the truths reveal themselves to everyone. This is a job I’ve wanted to do since I was young, when I watched Star Wars fort he first time, a light bulb went off and I thought, that’s what I want to do. I want to be the person who sits with the director and designs sounds for film. So of course, there’s no competition.