- 2 months ago
To date, Slater has earned a BAFTA nomination and a Cinema Audio Society nomination for his work on 'Baby Driver.'
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Short filmTranscript
00:00Welcome to In Studio with The Hollywood Reporter. I'm Carolyn Jardina and we're here at the Kim Novak
00:09Theatre on the Sony lot with Julian Slater who was the sound designer, supervising sound editor
00:15and re-recording mixer on Baby Driver. Congratulations. Thank you so much. And you've had a very good
00:21week, a BAFTA nomination and Cinema Audio Society nominations. Yeah. Congratulations on that.
00:25Thank you. Yeah. It's, uh, to be recognized by your peers to any degree is, um, yeah, it's a career
00:34highlight, undoubtedly. Yeah. And this is a little bit different than the last time you were recognized,
00:39which you told me was an ugly sweater contest. Yes. That's the only thing I've been recognized
00:44for officially, which is two years ago at a Christmas party. Yeah. And what was the sweater?
00:49Just ugly. Just very ugly. Let's just leave it there. Okay. You've worked on all of Edgar Wright's
00:54movies. Yeah. Uh, even before Baby Driver. Uh, your credits also include Mad Max Fury Road.
01:00Mm-hmm. And, uh, and you just finished Jumanji recently. Yeah. Yeah. Out in theaters now.
01:05Yeah. So let's talk about Baby Driver. Um, yeah, this is obviously a very unique movie, the way the,
01:11the music and the sound and the pictures are all choreographed and coordinated. Tell us a little
01:16bit about the process. It was obviously a very different process than many movies. Yeah. Um,
01:22I'd like to say that I approached it from day one with a, a strategic plan of exactly how to do it,
01:28but that's not true at all. And I'll be lying. Uh, you know, because it is so musical and, and
01:34everything is, is choreographed either visually or sonically to the music that's playing at that
01:40particular time, we kind of had to change how we work. So, you know, I've been doing this for not a
01:46small amount of years now. And, uh, in the UK, we work in time code and in over here in America,
01:52we work in feet and frames, but for this, we kind of had to work in, in, uh, bars and beats because
01:56in musical notations. So, um, you know, we had to tempo map every piece of music, find out it's
02:03given tempo at any given time. And then we would pitch and time stretch and tempo map each sound that
02:10wasn't the music to match the music so that everything worked and had a rhythm and, and,
02:15and felt musical. So, you know, hopefully one listens to the soundtrack and here's the sound
02:20design working in conjunction with the music at the whole, pretty much the whole time.
02:26Okay. So how did you collaborate with the other departments?
02:29Well, that's, I feel that's a really good, uh, example of why the movie, uh, you know,
02:37technically works so well is because Edgar has his close collaborators who he's worked with for,
02:42for many years. So his picture editors, uh, I've worked with for many movies. His, uh, uh, I even
02:49know his production designer and his DOP because we get to hang out together and, uh, Stephen Price,
02:55the composer. And Bill Pope, yes, exactly. And Jonathan Amos and Paul Matchless, uh, are the editors.
03:02And, um, and so what that does, it breeds an environment of what, what I like to think of
03:09as true collaboration where there's no, there's no fear of saying something that could get rejected
03:17or you're feeling that you're stepping outside your own area of expertise. You know, I, I feel
03:23like it's, you know, if you go on a first date, you kind of, you have this, you portray an image
03:27of yourself and you're being quite careful about what you're saying because, you know, you're not
03:31quite sure of the, the other person. And I feel that's the same kind of thing. If you have a long
03:36term collaboration with, with a director and also say the picture editors as well, it breeds this
03:43kind of creative pool of being able to exchange ideas. So, you know, I could walk into John, for
03:50example, and suggest that he, not that it happened a lot, but I could easily go into John because we're
03:55all on the same floor of the cutting room and suggest, could you roll a cut by three frames to
03:58make it work with this? And he would, you know, he'd certainly give it a go without, you know, uh,
04:05being offended by it and try it. And if it works, it works. And if it didn't, it didn't. And likewise
04:10with Stephen Price, the composer, he's a good friend of mine. So every day I'd be on the phone to him
04:14and he'd be on the phone to me and we'd swap ideas and bounce things back and forth. So yeah, I, I, I, I feel that, uh,
04:21uh, long term collaborations like that breed creativity. Now, as I, as I understand it, um,
04:29the, uh, the, it was all storyboarded. The music was all cleared before production began. So when,
04:36when did you come onto the project and what were the early conversations that you and Edgar had to
04:41have? When did you start talking to the other departments? Uh, uh, uh, Edgar has been speaking
04:48about it notionally to me for a good few years. Um, and I know he's been working on it in the
04:54background of his other projects, uh, for a good 10 years. Um, so when he spoke to me officially about
05:02it, I, I had a good idea of what it was, but it wasn't until I actually read the script, uh, you know,
05:08from the beginning to the end, uh, that I realized quite what his vision was for the syncopation
05:14and the music to work together as one thing. And also from the story point of view, the kind of
05:20the sonic world, um, being portrayed through baby's perspective, that was something I hadn't quite
05:26grasped until I read the script because that's kind of what we try and do like with the mix. We're
05:30trying to, we're trying to help tell the story and support, um, you know, the, the characters and
05:37the, and the, and the acting through the sound design in the mix, not, not detract from it, but to help
05:42pull you through and, and, and take on a jet.
06:01Let's elaborate on that. Um, because that's a really important point that it was told through his
06:05perspective, uh, including the tinnitus. Um, talk a little bit about some of the things you did in
06:10order to really, you know, have people see it through his eyes. So, uh, well, I guess you could,
06:15if you, you can break, you can break up the process of what we did into the sound editorial and the,
06:20and the mix. And if you, if you take the mix, for example, with regards to baby's perspective, we,
06:25we, we dubbed it and mixed it in Dolby Atmos native. And, uh, we played the music much more in the
06:34surrounds than is probably traditional, than is traditional. So every time baby hears stuff on
06:39his, uh, on his listening to music on his earbuds, it engulfs you a lot more than perhaps, uh, a more
06:44traditional mix would do. If he takes one of his earbuds out to speak to someone and he pulls his
06:51right earbud out, we then play the music on the left-hand side of the cinema, sometimes throughout
06:55the entire scene, which again is not a conventional thing, but it's because that's how baby's hearing it.
07:00Right. Uh, his tinnitus, I mean, the, the story point of why baby listens to music so much is,
07:07is because he suffers from tinnitus, which is the ringing in the ears caused by a car accident when
07:11he was younger. Why does he listen to music all the time? Story-wise in the movie, if he's not
07:17listening to music, if music is not playing, if he's not listening to it on his earbuds and it's not
07:21playing within the environment, you hear tinnitus as baby does. Tinnitus, sorry, we say tinnitus in the UK.
07:27Um, and, uh, with regards to that, we developed a range of ways to convey tinnitus because a high
07:37pitch ringing in the ears, uh, sometimes pretty loud is, is quite an aggressive sound and, and whilst
07:43that's okay for a 20 second, 30 second burst, we discovered that if you're going to be playing that
07:48over the course of a whole movie, it's going to alienate the audience and it's going to probably
07:53turn them off to what they're listening to. So yeah, with, with this movie, uh, tinnitus is a
07:58myriad of different frequencies. We use different devices. It's, uh, sometimes it's even Hellstrings
08:04and Stephen Price's score. More often than not, it's in the same key as the music that he's just
08:10been listening to or the music that he's about to listen to. So it quite often we use the tinnitus
08:15sound as a bridge between two pieces of music. So yeah, it's, it's really about, uh, uh, uh,
08:23you know, supporting what's happening on the screen, but doing it in a way that hopefully the audience,
08:29you know, totally relate to and understand what baby's going through. And, and sorry,
08:32just to go back to the tinnitus, the more stressed the baby is, the louder the tinnitus is, like, uh,
08:38it can be in real life. So again, it's, we're, we're playing with different elements to, uh, to,
08:43to support what's going on. Right. It's so, it's so subtle what you do, but it makes a huge difference
08:49as a viewer. Yeah, it is. It is. It's pretty, it's, sometimes it's less subtle than others,
08:53but there's a lot of, a lot of subtlety in there, uh, deliberately so because, uh, because it happens
08:59throughout the movie. And, uh, what's been fun is, you know, I've spoken to several people now who've
09:04watched the movie several times and are picking up on different things each time. So it's, it's a,
09:08it's a, it's a, it's a multi-watch movie.
09:25So the other thing that we should talk about from a story standpoint is the different car chases,
09:30um, were different stories, if you will. The first one, everything went perfectly.
09:35Then we have the ones that go astray. So would you talk a little bit about your approach to the
09:40different chases? Yeah. So, um, there are, there are several car chases in the movie. The first one,
09:47I mean, the movie starts straight off, you know, um, like a, like a bullet out of a gun with a car
09:53chase. And that car chase is, is the, it's in many ways, it's the perfect car chase. Nothing goes wrong
09:59for baby. Everything, uh, goes just sweet as it should do. And you understand how great he is as
10:06a car driver. Uh, so for that, for that sequence, it's a very stylized sequence. We have, uh, you know,
10:14we design loads of different whooshes to go on the car paths. All the engine revs are not only in time
10:19with the music, but they're, they're pitched to work perfectly, hopefully with the music.
10:23Um, and all the police sirens are timed, uh, uh, to work with the music. The next car chase,
10:32where things start to go wrong, uh, uh, an off duty Marine, off duty Marine starts shooting at them.
10:38So we made that a much more visceral kind of, uh, uh, vibe and less stylized. And also the sounds are
10:47detuned a little bit compared to being perfectly tuned to the music. So yeah, each car chase,
10:53depending on what is happening again, to play it from baby's perspective and from that character,
10:58each car chase has been designed and mixed in a, in a slightly different way to each other. Yeah.
11:04Okay. Um, and, uh, let's talk a little bit about the recording of the different sounds. Uh, so the
11:11driving, um, I know there were a lot of stunt drivers on the show. Did you go out and record them?
11:16Did you get behind the wheel? Unfortunately not. Um, I didn't get to, to drive the cars. We had,
11:23uh, we had a guy who went to, who, who went to Atlanta for us and spent two days recording on a,
11:29on a closed racetrack. And we got all the cars back that we used in the shoot, all the main cars.
11:35And he had fun kind of driving around the, the, the circuit for two days endlessly. And then we get
11:40that all back to the cutting room. And a lot of them are in the movie. Uh, but quite often,
11:47you know, you get something back. So for example, the first car chase is a red Subaru WRX. I know
11:51nothing about cars, but it has what's called a dump valve. So every time you change gear,
11:55it kind of goes, but if you're doing a movie, that's all about syncopation to music,
12:00you can't have that sound happening the whole time. Cause it breaks up the rhythm.
12:03So for the Subaru WRX, we, we, we use some of that original recordings, but most of it has been
12:10replaced with different kinds of cars. Each car is actually an amalgam in the movie. When you hear
12:15that car, it's an amalgam of say five or six different cars. Hmm. Yeah. Okay. What were some
12:20of the other more challenging sounds? It was all challenging. And it sounds, uh, it really was all
12:28challenging to do things like, um, if you're going to keep a police, a set of police sirens
12:35perfectly in sync with the music that's being played is one thing. If the music is a very tempo,
12:41like the first track is the John Spencer blues explosion, the tempo is not a one, two, three,
12:46four. It's a one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four.
12:50And the tempo just does this and the, and the track is used in its entirety. So once you map a
12:57police siren to that sound, it may work musically, but it sounds ridiculous. At times it sounds
13:02ridiculous because it's going so fast. The police siren wouldn't sound like that. So
13:05we had to figure out ways in the mix to introduce the sounds when they work musically and work
13:10cinematically so that you believe it and you get that it's in sync and in tempo with the, with the music.
13:17And then when it starts sounding ridiculous, you pull it out of the mix, bury it for a bit. And then when
13:22it's working again, you reintroduce it. So the, so the mix is this kind of,
13:27it's like a 3d puzzle of different elements that are all within the mix at the right time that
13:35works both musically and cinematically. And when it doesn't, which is quite often,
13:39it's pulled out of the mix. So, so that's one thing. And I guess that the toughest thing that we
13:45went round a few times was, there's a scene towards the end of the movie when
13:51a baby gets his ears blown out by a buddy and he goes deaf. If you're going to convey deafness,
13:58it means he cannot hear what's happening around him. But if you've got a lead character who's
14:02speaking to him, you need to hear what she's saying. So trying to convey a loss of hearing,
14:08but yet still hearing the words so the audience aren't struggling to understand what's being said,
14:14that was, that was quite tough. We went through several iterations of that over a good few months
14:19to get that right. Okay. Should we give a shout out to your production sound mixer and some of the
14:24other key members? I would love to give a shout out to various people. Mary Ellis was our production sound
14:29mixer. My crew who worked with me tirelessly, Dan Morgan, my dialogue ADR supervisor, Jeremy Price,
14:37Martin Cantwell, Arthur Grayley, Rowan Watson, Buster. I'll stop there. Okay. So let's talk a little
14:47bit about your career. So how did you get into the business? When did you become interested in sound?
14:53I have always been interested in sound, whether it was doing cassette to cassette editing and listening
15:01to the top 40 show in the UK and doing pause button editing. I always knew I wanted to get
15:07into sound. I just didn't really know what aspect of sound. I originally studied at a place called
15:13the School of Audio Engineering in the UK because I originally wanted to get into music and be a music
15:18engineer. And I kind of sidelined into, um, into the film side just after I went to that college.
15:26And so from around 1991 to about nine, uh, 2008, I ran my own post facility in the UK,
15:35um, pretty successful and decided to leave and get out of that and become a freelancer in London,
15:42which I was for five years. And then four and a half years ago, I, I took my family on this crazy
15:48journey and we moved here to Hollywood and, uh, and, uh, here I be.
15:52Well, you mentioned initially you were interested in, um, music. Um, I would imagine that that
15:57background served you well on this particular film.
16:00Yeah, I think so. I, uh, with, uh, you know, undoubtedly, uh, you know, help from people around
16:07me who know more about that side than I do. People like Steven Price, and I should have shouted out
16:12Bradley Farmer, who was the music editor, who, you know, we had an open, uh, Skype session pretty much
16:19all day, every day. So we could just talk about ideas and he would take stuff and pitch it how he
16:24felt was working to the, to the music or, you know, so yeah, it's like any, any, uh, person who is good
16:34at what they do is surrounded by people who are equally as good as what they do in their own area.
16:39So, um, yeah, I, I'm blessed to have a great team of people around me. And I should also say,
16:44of course, working for someone like Edgar, you know, every movie that I do with him, um,
16:52for me sounds pretty, pretty spot on because he's a director who understands sound.
16:57And so, uh, you know, let alone baby driver, but just every movie that he works with, of course,
17:03and I, I, and I feel I'm, I can only be as good as the director that I'm working with. So, um,
17:09yeah, I, I follow his lead. How did you get your meet?
17:14I, I don't actually know the germ of where it began. I, I know that we were, uh, interviewed
17:20for Shaun of the Dead and in the UK, um, my facility and I, I and my facility worked on a
17:26lot of comedy stuff that was quite, uh, quite risque and was known for its sound. There's a guy
17:32called Chris Morris, who does this kind of crazy stuff in the UK. And I think Edgar was a fan of that.
17:36And I think that's where the original kind of introduction came from, but I actually don't
17:41know. I just know that he's been lucky enough to continue using me ever since Shaun of the Dead.
17:45So clearly, yeah, okay. I think we're ready to wrap up, but thank you so much for joining us.
17:52Congratulations on the nominations. Thank you so much.
17:54And thanks for watching. Thanks.
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