Anora Sound Team Talks Elevated Realism & Not Knowing What Kind Of Movie They Were Making

ms6349285@gmail.com
Anora Sound Team Talks Elevated Realism & Not Knowing What Kind Of Movie They Were Making


Warning: SPOILERS for Anora

Sean Baker’s Anora is a serious Oscars contender after being nominated for an impressive five Golden Globes. Written and directed by the filmmaker behind Red Rocket and The Florida Project, Anora tells the story of a young woman from Brooklyn who becomes caught up in a whirlwind romance with the son of an oligarch. It stars Mikey Madison as Anora and Mark Eydelshteyn as her flame Ivan, and has a cast that also includes Yura Borisov, Lindsey Normington, Karren Karagulian, and Emily Weider.

Given Anora’s verité feel and lack of a musical score, audiences may find it easy to overlook the hard work the movie’s sound team put into bringing its world to life (which is arguably the point). Still, sound team members John Warrin and Andy Hay worked hard to augment audio recorded on set with carefully designed and placed sounds that emphasized the drama or comedy at the appropriate moments. Ultimately, Warrin and Hay helped turn Baker’s idea into the movie ScreenRant’s Anora review dubbed “a welcome addition” and “a delight”.

Nicole Kidman in Babygirl

Related


10 Best Movies Like Babygirl

After watching Nicole Kidman’s impressive performance in Babygirl, any of these 10 films would make for a good follow up.

ScreenRant spoke with Anora sound team members John Warrin and Andy Hay about their nuanced work on the film. Unlike Sean Baker’s mother, the pair were excited about the story Baker crafted, and discussed how they leaned into the realistic nature of its filmmaking while still leaving room for surprisingly slapstick comedic moments. The pair also went into detail about how they used sound to make each hallway and room of locations like the HQ club feel authentic to audiences. Note: This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

John Warrin & Andy Hay Discuss Their History Of Collaboration With Sean Baker

Thanks To Previously Built Trust, On Anora, “The Reins Were A Little Looser”

Ivan (Mark Eidelshtein) and Ani (Mikey Madison) get married in Las Vegas in Anora
Image via NEON

ScreenRant: You’ve worked with Sean Baker on a few films, and he directs, writes, and edits. Is your collaboration with him closer than it typically would be with other directors?

Andy Hay: I think it’s been a progression over the totality of the films that we’ve worked with him on. I started with him on The Florida Project and I came in as a mixer, which is sort of the last thing in the post-production process. I didn’t have a hand in any of the sound editing or design parts of that film, but I came in for the mix. It went great, we really clicked, and on Red Rocket, I got the call to do the sound design and the mix. At that point, John and I had already done a few things together, so I brought John in. I thought it would be a perfect match. He’s so good with sound design and sound effects—that’s sort of his wheelhouse—and I’m very much more dialogue and music.

Red Rocket was the first time with Sean that we were executing the entire vision. He had some specifics about the environments and things that he wanted to hear, and as with most of his films, his mandate was, “We’re in a real-world environment. We’re working with realism.” That gave us a bit of a roadmap as to what we were trying to achieve sonically, and that turned out fabulous. We had the best time together working on the mix. He’s someone that likes to be in the mix every minute of the day and is very collaborative with that process. He’s really good with explaining what he wants, how he wants to feel, and the emotional impact he’s looking for in any given moment. Then, he lets us do our things, twiddle the knobs, move the faders, and so on.

Anora was slightly different. He was like, “You’re my guys. Come on back,” and the reins were a little looser. I think we established that level of trust through the prior films. He was also very much deep in the editing process when he turned over the first four reels to us—he hadn’t actually finished cutting the back half of the movie. That’s just the way he works. He works in a linear fashion from beginning to end and doesn’t do a lot of round-tripping and re-editing. Because of the timeline, we had to get started before the movie was even really finished. So, we started a movie that we thought was a romantic comedy, and it’s like, “Oh s***. No, it’s not. It’s actually something else.”

Warrin & Hay Talking Working Creatively With Realism

The Pair Elevated Scenes With “Whatever We Could Use From A Natural Environment”

Ivan (Mark Eidelshtein) and Ani (Mikey Madison) walking through a casino with some friends in ANORA
Image via NEON

With you saying you started on a romantic comedy, something I noticed with this is that there’s so much music in the first half, and then there’s none for the rest of the movie. How are you affected if you think it’s going to be a movie with lots of clubs and loud music, and then jumping into the second half?

Andy Hay: I think finishing a film without score is a bold choice because you’re relying on other cues to tell you how to feel. I’ll let John dive into the aspects of how sound design would iterate and behave as score, but to your question about the music, it’s in service of whatever we’re trying to make the audience feel in that particular moment. Upfront, it is funny and romantic—she’s falling in love, this guy lives in a mansion, and “Isn’t it amazing?” and “I want to spend more time here and less time in my apartment where a subway drives through my bedroom every night.”

The way the music gets mixed is all about creating a sonic palette that feels as real as possible. Once you get an audience in the first 20 minutes—if you walk them down a path they feel they can sink into and believe in—then you can take them anywhere, right? Once you’ve got them on the hook and suspend their disbelief, you have that freedom to duck and dive in service of, “What does a club feel like? What does that sound like? What do the various rooms sound like? How does that feel?”

As someone who’s a stranger to clubs, it’s like, “Okay, this is what I think these environments sound like.” Then, there are parts of the music that act as score in terms of what the selection of that particular track says and how it reflects what’s on screen and in the story. There’s a little bit of a score-like statement in there. Then, in the absence of music, sound design comes in to behave as that sort of emotional support.

John Warrin: Sean’s very big-picture oriented. He’s very much a storyteller. When he gets to see the whole movie as one, things change based on ideas like, “Let’s put this here.” We’d even do that with little bits of dialogue, like, “I know he says this in another take. Can we get this line?” I remember a scene when Toros is in the mansion during the home invasion where we were putting various little bits in. I think this might’ve even been after Cannes. It is very much that kind of storytelling when it comes to the sound effects.

What’s different with this is that typically, you have a musical score that can help with the tone of the emotions and build out how the audience is supposed to feel. There is tons of opportunity with sound design, but in Sean’s film, we’re limited in that it has to be realistic. It’s more a matter of how we stack the different elements, how active they are, and what types of things we’re hearing—sirens and things like that—that we can use to build the landscape for the tonality of the emotions throughout different scenes. There’s a little bit of slapstick in the movie, so sometimes we allowed some slapstick-y sounds in there that we wouldn’t typically put in, but generally, it was all very much about realism and crafting the elevation of the scenes with whatever we could use from a natural environment.

Warrin & Hay Talk Building Key Anora Scenes Like The Home Invasion & Ending With Sound

The Sound Team Also Worked To Ensure The HQ Club Felt Real To Audiences

Ani in the middle of the dance floor looking up and smiling in Anora

You mentioned the home invasion scene, which I want to ask about because it’s slapstick and horrifying at the same time. How do you find what to emphasize to make certain things funny, and then also for us to hear everything that’s happening while she’s screaming her head off?

Andy Hay: That whole home invasion scene, which is 18 or 20 minutes or something, is such a remarkable transitional scene where we’ve gone from full rom-com into, “Oh my gosh, she’s under threat. What is this? Where are we going with this?” It’s an incredible left turn that Sean walks us through. I think it’s about leaning into each side of that contrast until the pendulum stops swinging, and it stops swinging hard with that shot of Ani gagged. You’re like, “Okay, we’ve landed, and this is horrifying.”

When we did the her running around the couch and kicking over the lamp and all that stuff… I mean, spot the slide whistle. It’s all in there. We were like, “Okay, we can actually push this into a more silly territory than is defined by the box of realism.” Similarly, when she lands on that couch and she’s kicking and flailing around, there are some violent sounds in there like rope twists. It’s that sort of yin and yang of, “This is funny. This is horrifying. This is funny. This is horrifying.”

When Ivan is playing video games, was that something you amped up to be funny? His hands are ridiculous on the controller.

Andy Hay: That’s all built.

John Warrin: The fact of the matter is that we see his hands going crazy. We had to be careful because it was like, “What’s he doing with all that stuff?” This is the scene we’re presented with, and it kind of plays into his character—he probably doesn’t really know how to play the game very well. We got to build that whole environment with all the gameplay, and each little element was all hand-done, and it was a lot of fun.

I’m curious how you managed the club scenes, especially at HQ. We have characters walking through the whole building, and you have to shape sound that feels realistic to somebody walking through these different rooms and how that affects what we hear, on top of allowing an audience to understand dialogue in a loud setting.

John Warrin: I want to give a shout-out to Boris (Krichevsky), who did a great job insisting that everybody speak at a heightened level. A lot of times we’re presented with audio from set where everybody’s quiet and they’re talking normal level, but Boris and Sean are all about that realism, so they handed us something that was more realistic. People were talking like they would in a club even if there wasn’t music playing, which made Andy’s job tremendously easier in that regard.

Andy Hay: Boris is our production sound mixer, so he’s on the shoot and he’s monitoring all of the dialogue. He was very much insistent, and if people would fall off, he’d be like, “Raise your pitch. Project, project, project.” That goes leaps and bounds towards the believability of the moment, because if people are talking normally and you’ve got bumping music, they’re like, “Eh, something’s off here.” Even if the brain doesn’t know what or why, there’s some subliminal messaging there that just says, “This doesn’t feel right.” Kudos to Boris and Sean for insisting that the dialogue was at a projected level.

With respect to HQ, Sean wanted to present HQ exactly as it is. He wanted to faithfully reproduce the geography of that environment, so we sat down and mapped it out, like, “This is the main floor, this is the red room, this is the blue room, this is where the kitchen is, this is the stairs, this is the hallway, this is the VIP area in the back, and then we go around the back into the private room.

We had this sort of model of what the space looked like, and then we started with the main floor, which is the loudest environment. We got to shape that environment in terms of, “What does that sound like? How loud is the music? How many subwoofers are in there?” and all that. Then, we would think about the adjacent rooms—how they sound based on the speaker system that’s in that room, and also how much spillover is coming from the main floor.

I’m going to nerd out for a couple of minutes here, but the song comes in as just a stereo song. We don’t have splits—we don’t have the different instruments laid out or vocal separate—which you sometimes will have. We’re just working with the stereo track. I kind of stole this from Michael Semanick, who’s a feature film mixer who’s done a ton of amazing work. He mixed The Social Network, and he talked about this process that he used in that film, which is something that I keyed into years ago. I was like, “That’s super cool. I hope I get to use that someday,” and here was that opportunity.

Every speaker in the club is represented in virtual space within the mix. Instead of just taking the stereo music track and throwing it on the front wall, printing some reverb on it, and calling it a day, you actually duplicate the music track several times over and say, “Okay, this one is this speaker up here, this one is that one over there that’s maybe distorting a little bit,” and, “this one is the one that’s behind us that’s got a blown out tweeter or whatever.” You are able to build those positions within the space, and then you iterate that for every environment.

Then, when there’s that return to HQ after they’ve figured out that Ivan is there, there are those shots where they’re walking through the club, coming up the stairs and down the hallway, and they walk past the speaker. That’s where you get dynamic, because you’re actually shifting their perspective and thus the audience’s perspective with respect to where these virtual speakers are living in the environment. It takes time because you’re really building the world and then organizing it very dynamically, but it goes a long way toward making it feel like you’re really there.

Then, you’re just getting it as loud as you can and knowing that you’re going to sacrifice some of the dialogue frequencies for music frequencies, and that’s okay. If you’re in the real world, it’s those upper frequencies of the voice that poke you in the ear if you’re in a loud club like that. You’re trying to create that same sort of sound in the theater and just find that delicate balance where we can hear every word and there’s clarity there, but we still feel like we’re in the club.

The last scene I want to ask about is the ending. I know you did a lot with the sounds of the car and telling a story through them. Do you mind walking me through that process?

Andy Hay: I think that’s a good example of design sound design behaving like score in that it’s supportive of what’s happening on screen. The thing that kicked off the creation of that whole sonic landscape was that the windshield wiper on the Mercedes was going through its own sonic arc based on the amount of snowfall that was landing on the windshield. As we were going through, prepping that scene, and pulling all the takes, we noticed that the windshield wiper had a very interesting and cool unique character to it that was shifting over time. It was really in your face and squeaky and annoying up front, and then as more snowfall would come, it ultimately ended up as this whisper breath kind of thing.

I’m like, “Oh, that’s interesting.” We got all the takes and found all the bits along the way, took all of those, and laid it out within the scene following the emotionality of Annie’s experience so that character voice would also underscore that moment. The bed is the Mercedes engine, which is largely production, spread out and enhanced so that it feels like it fills the screen. Then, all the leather is partly production and then very much enhanced with Foley recordings so that when we’re supposed to be holding our breath, that stuff is more in your face. Every squeak, every clothing rustle, every movement is right in front of you. Then, once we get to the other side of it all, it’s all come down to a level where we can finally exhale.

That was the genesis of that idea, and then Sean was the one who said, “We should let it run through the credits. We should stay in this moment in the car with Ani and give us all a moment to digest everything,” rather than “Cut to black. Here’s a cool song.” It was a really cool decision to let us layer and give us pause to really assimilate everything that we’ve just been through and give us a gentle landing, if you will.

John Warrin: The one other part of it is that there’s a very metronomic element to the engine as well as the windshield wiper. You have this pace, and we can see the windshield wiper, but there were times we couldn’t see it where we had the opportunity to play with stuff. The engine, as opposed to a modern car which has a purr, had an old diesel sound, and we found we had actual recordings of that car.

All of the seat stuff is of that actual car, as is all the metal. In those old Mercedes, you heard that stuff. We could amplify the sounds of the movement. The sound of the leather—or pleather, I’m not sure—is thick, so you had elements that we could play with. As the scene progresses, all of that gets amped up. We spent probably longer on that scene than any other scene collectively because it was the final moment. It was almost like orchestrating a ballet, in a sense, and everything has its part. If anything goes too much, you lose the moment, and if anything is not enough, you don’t get it. We went back and forth and combed over that scene until we felt that the orchestration was just right, and it’s great. We’re not taking credit for the performances and Sean’s incredible directing, but we made sure that we held up on our part. People really are connecting with it, which is great. It’s a lot of people’s favorite scene.

About Anora

Anora, a young sex worker from Brooklyn, gets her chance at a Cinderella story when she meets and impulsively marries the son of an oligarch. Once the news reaches Russia, her fairytale is threatened as the parents set out for New York to get the marriage annulled.

Check out our other Anora interviews here:

Anora is available to watch on digital platforms now.



Source link

Related Posts

10 Most Tragic TV Characters, Ranked
10 Most Tragic TV Characters, Ranked

Content Warning: The following article contains spoilers for the shows mentioned.The best television shows, particularly dramas, have characters that fans…

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

x
x