The Score
by David John Farinella
Surprises are the last things mixer Lee Dichter wants to hear
when he sits down to start working on a feature, yet that's just
what he got when he started mixing The Score. The good
news was that it was all good news. “I am very happy with the
way the soundtrack ended up,” he says from the Sound One dub
stage in New York. “There was very little looping, amazingly
little. I think the least amount of looping on a film that I've
worked on, except for a Woody Allen film, who does no
looping.”
Dichter credits location sound recorder Glen Gauthier for the
stellar production tracks. Gauthier used a Nagra D to record on
location.
Of course, that didn't mean that Dichter didn't have his
hands full with other sonic issues. The biggest was the fact
that he had to mix a combination of lavalier and boom mics,
because main character Marlon Brando did not want to be wired.
The film's other main characters, Ed Norton and Robert DeNiro,
used lavaliers. “So, all of [Brando's] scenes were being
picked up by a boom microphone,” Dichter explains. “That
made it very interesting on my end, because I had to marry the
wireless sound with the boom sound. It's a different tonality
and equalization curve, and some of the scenes were difficult to
make seamless at the end of the mix. It worked out fine, but it
was a challenge.”
Dichter made it work by using equalization and what he calls
“roomizing” the lavalier tracks. “We did have a distant
boom mic, but I usually didn't use that, because the pickup was
too far away,” he says. “So I ended up going with the
lavalier on DeNiro and Norton and putting them through a
half-second to a quarter-second Lexicon stereo delay to match
the sound of the microphones from Brando. It worked out pretty
well.
I don't think you'll be able to pick up on where the
shifts happen.”
One of the most challenging scenes he had to work on was also
one of the movie's most important. The scene takes place in the
basement of Brando's home. “He's got a swimming pool that's
empty because it's under renovation, and he's 20 to 30 feet away
from the camera with a boom picking him up,” Dichter explains.
“They kept cutting in to close-ups, and eventually DeNiro and
him come together. That was a quite interesting use of different
microphones and different sound space. Fortunately, I had that
distance to work with visually, so you could live with the
reverb and the echo. As they got closer, we kept some of that
going so you wouldn't be jarred by long shot, medium shot,
close-up, even though I'm cutting from a long shot to
close-up.”
Though much of The Score takes place inside, the few
street scenes in the film enabled Dichter to enact his dialog
cleaning philosophy, which boils down to less is more. “
I
really hate to use those things,” he says of compressors and
filters. “Any piece of outboard equipment that you can hear, I
hate it. I'd rather you hear the background pulsing than to shut
down the sound between words. It just takes me out of it, so I
try to minimize when it comes to lowering background tones.”
Indeed, the only filtering he uses removes set noise from
cameras and equipment buzz. “In most of the dialog scenes I
work with in any film, my technique is to use the least amount
of filters and background suppressors, because I don't like what
it does with the voice. I'd rather live with more of the
background, but with a fuller, natural sound to the dialog,”
he says.
In the final analysis, Dichter adds, these days, films are a
sonic smorgasbord.
The Score was no different. “The
film is a great combination of a musical score by Howard Shore,
the effects design and mixing, and the dialog mixing,” Dichter
says. “Each one needs the other for support. The dialog just
sits there by itself with nothing else going on. It doesn't come
to life until you bring the effects in, and the tension in the
scene is increased tremendously when you get the right music
score behind it. So it's all a combination.”
Mix, Jun 1, 2001
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