Tonebenders Podcast

297 - Production Sound Mixer Simon Hayes

Oscar winning production sound mixer Simon Hayes sits down with Tim, for an in-person, one on one talk. He describes his goal of a world where there is no distinction between the production sound team and the audio post team. Everyone is working as one big crew to get the best possible sound for each project, through collaboration and open communication. Simon spins wonderful stories, going all the way back to Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels, about his innovative ways of recording performances so that is ready for a dialog editor to use with ease. He also discusses he techniques to keep everyone on set, working towards the goal of clean dialog. I could listen to Simon all day. This episode is sponsored by Sound Ideas, check out their 50% off sale happening now until Jan 31st: www.sound-ideas.com Notes: https://tonebenderspodcast.com/297-production-sound-mixer-simon-hayes/ Podcast Homepage: https://tonebenderspodcast.com This episode is hosted by Timothy Muirhead

Duration:: 40m
Broadcast on:: 25 Jan 2025
Audio Format:: other

[Music] Welcome to ToneBenders Sound Design Podcast, presented by Sound Ideas. This is the show where we talk with the sonic artists behind our favorite films, games, and series. Check out Sound Ideas 50% Off Sale on all their proprietary libraries on now until January 31st. This includes libraries from Sound Dogs, the Hollywood Edge, DigiFact, SoundStorm, and all of the all-purpose libraries from Sound Ideas, like the General and the General HD. Go to sound-ideas.com for full details on all these amazing deals. Hey everyone, this is Tim Muirhead, I'm really happy you hit play on this episode. Because I think it's a really good one. I got to sit down with production sound mixer Simon Hayes for an in-person one-on-one chat about his career and how he is motivated to close the gap on the divisions between the sound crew on set and the sound crew in post. Simon has worked on some of my favorite films over the years, including Guardians of the Galaxy, No Time to Die, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, Kickass, Shawn of the Dead, Snatch, Lockstalk and Two Smoking Barrels, and many, many more. He's also known for his extensive work and film musicals like Les Misérables for which he won an Oscar, and Wicked for which he just found out this morning, he is nominated again. If after listening to this you find you want to hear more from Simon, make sure you check out episode 293 with the full sound team from Wicked, obviously including Simon. This interview was done in-person while I was in London last fall, and I want to send a big thanks out to the Formosa Group for letting us use their Trident Studios to record this talk in. Okay, let's get to it. Here's my talk with production sound mixer Simon Hayes. Welcome Simon Hayes, it's really great to talk to you today. Tim, thank you so much. I've been looking forward to coming on to Time Benders for a while now. I've listened to your podcasts, you know, they're so exciting. I'm really blown away with what you're doing to get our industry talking to each other about sound, championing sound, making sure that people understand that sound is not just a technical process, it's a creative process. 100%. I'm going to just like write that on our website as our mission statement, you encapsulated it perfectly. We're sitting here at Formosa Trident in London. Last night I found out that right where I'm sitting is where Elton John did a lot of his vocals, and David Bowie did a lot of his vocals. On some of their bigger albums, so I'm feeling quite cool. Apparently they looked it up and right here is where the mics were set up when they were doing the vocals. Well, that's super cool. And you know what, we're in St. Anne's Court, which is right in the middle of Soho. It's a little alleyway which joins together Wardo Street and Dean Street. And here's my connection to this alleyway, Danny Sheehan and Matt Collins, who were the supervising sound editors on Lockstock and Two Smoking Barrels, my first movie. That was also their first movie. I came from commercials, they came from commercials, and they were working literally two doors down at a commercials sound company called Mag Masters. I also started my career in the industry, two alleyways down in Boucher Street, which again is just a little back alley connecting Wardo Street and Dean Street. So it's almost like coming home, I'm super comfortable. It's always fascinating to me when people are like, "Oh, my first project was an international blockbuster." Lockstock and Two Smoking Barrels is a classic film that everybody loves. And especially maybe some of our listeners, it's an older film. When it came out, it was kind of like a game changer. It was a different film for its time. It certainly was, and the sound design was very, very different to anything which had been happening in international film. And I always tell this story, Guy Ritchie really loved Hong Kong martial arts movies. He was really into Kung Fu movies as a teenager. And one of the things that he did in Lockstock, which at that point just wasn't happening in international movies was he started punctuating camera moves with sound effects. He was putting washes on whip pans, which was unheard of at the time. And Matt Collins and Danny Sheen completely supported him in that. It was groundbreaking. He kind of took that Kung Fu Hong Kong movie genre and just kind of lifted a few ideas from it. When we see those whip pans, it just makes so much sense that's kind of at the time it just wasn't happening. But of course, now it's accepted as absolutely normal in international movies. Yesterday, I was talking with Jillian Daughters. And we were talking about the film Fantastic Beasts, telling me a little bit about her story with it. And she started by saying, the first thing I did when I got hired was I found out who the production sound mixer was. And when I found out it was Simon Hayes, all my stress disappeared. You know, I really, really try and maximize my workflow for every movie that I do. I don't just look at the movie and think, OK, I'm going to come in and record the sound. I look at how the directors, previous movies have been shot, how they like to use cameras, what I think is going to happen with the score, what I think is going to happen with the sound effects. I talk to the director about how they want the movie to sound acoustically. And I think that one of the things that's helped him in my career is that I basically build a specific workflow, a unique workflow for each movie that I'm going to mix. Jillian is an incredibly talented dialogue editor. I think we've probably worked together at least between eight and ten times on completely diverse projects each time I've spoken to Jillian throughout the whole process. And I've also got to say, I've recorded some scenes which I've kind of thought to myself – this is on the edge – are we going to end up having to loop this scene? This was, you know, whether it be rustly radio mics or wind machines or whatever. Whenever that's happened and I've got in touch with Jillian three months later and said, look, I was worried about that scene. How are you getting on? She's like, don't worry, I've got it working. She is an absolute creative magician when it comes to dialogue editing. That's an interesting thing that you just brought up, and this is one of the reasons why I wanted to talk to you. First of all, for any listeners, if you're on Instagram, follow Simon. He's a great follow. When seeing the stuff that you post, a lot of people are posting about, you know, the microphones they're using, the straps they're using, that's gear talk, which you do sometimes as well. But it doesn't seem to be your focus at all. Your focus is how to make filmmaking a team sport kind of thing, you know? It's not about you, it's about the sound that we're capturing and how we can all work together to get that the best possible way. So what you were just saying about talking with Julian, and that kind of expands on that. When you get on a film, are you getting in touch with the dialogue editor and the sound supervisor? How do you go about creating that community feeling that we're all in this together? The first thing I do when I get hired and confirmed on a movie is find out who the sound post team are and get in touch with them and start talking to them about what they want me to deliver. I talk to them about what I've heard about the movie, what I think the challenges are going to be, what I think my work flow is going to be, and to get input from them. Because it's really, really important that we see ourselves as one sound team. This demarcation between production sound and post production sound just shouldn't exist nowadays. We are all one team and what I'm trying to do, as well as obviously produce a fantastic production mix, I'm very, very aware that on any movie now of any budget, my production mix is only going to sit there and create confidence in the production sound through the avid process. It will absolutely be dissected by every single dialogue editor. They will go into my ISO tracks. So I was very, very aware as soon as we started multi-tracking that I needed to prioritize my ISO tracks above all else. My production mix is a given. Of course I want that to sound as good as possible, but my main priority on any movie is making sure that my ISO tracks, first of all, give sound design teams and the director complete choice. We don't know what they're going to do with the score. We don't know how hard they're going to want to hit the sound effects. We don't know in the cutting process whether that script that we've read is actually three scenes that were working as scene one, scene two, scene three are going to suddenly be into cut into one scene, whipping one piece of dialogue from one scene and intercutting it with another piece of dialogue in a different location. And so what I'm very aware of is that I need to give choices. I need to make sure that whatever happens in that cutting room isn't going to railroad a sound design team into using ADR because of the choice that I made on the set. But the bottom line is this, I always think if I was a dialogue editor, what would I want the production sound mixer to supply me? And that's what I try and give them is what I would want if I was dialogue editing this movie. But when you talk about my Instagram page, thank you for mentioning that. It's something that I've been working on really hard because when I first started in the sound industry in the late 1980s, early 1990s as an assistant, I was very aware immediately that the production sound team was kind of background, the sound mixer would be sitting at the back of the room with his car and they were seen as a technical entity. And what I'm really, really trying to promote is the fact that of course we technicians, we have to be technicians, we have to be great technicians, that's a given. But I want to kind of champion the creative collaboration we have as filmmakers with the rest of the filmmaking team, and I don't think that we talk about that enough. Every production sound mixer on a movie set is making hundreds of creative decisions every minute. We don't realize that because it's just part of the fabric of what we're doing. But I really think it needs talking about, and I think that as an industry, yeah, it's great to talk about what mics we use, but also we need to get away from that and start talking about the films that we're making, the performances that we're championing and the emotions and the heartstrings that we're pulling, because that's what we do as sound people. One of the analogies that I often use is we don't hear interviews with Eric Clapton or Jimi Hendrix talking about what guitar they're using or what they're stringing their guitar with. It's a given, and hey, you know what? We give Eric Clapton or Jimi Hendrix a $200 fender copy. They're going to sound just as good, right? Because it's their creative expression with that guitar, and that's what I like to think that good production sound people could do. It doesn't matter what recorder we're using or what mic front. Of course, there is a small percentage of difference between these great microphones and these great recorders, but the greatest difference comes first of all from the decisions that the production sound mixer is making in real time on the set when they're presented with issues and secondly, what our boom operators are doing with those microphones. What the boom operator does with that microphone is going to have a huge difference in the sound quality that the difference between a sharps or a Sennheiser or a DPA isn't going to have. Those are small percentages and they're a matter of taste. Where that microphone is in relation to the performance that it's picking up has the greatest difference on the sound track that we're recording. So let's talk about your boom operators. You don't go through them. You've got ones that have worked with you for a long time. I've been extremely fortunate in my career and one of the things that happened was my first boom operator Arthur Fenn, who is still with me today, decided very, very early on that he loved boom operating and that he didn't want to be a production sound mixer. And he recognised the fact that his skill set is working with the camera, what good boom operators do is they become part of what I call the dance and it's a creative real time collaboration on a movie set with the cast, the grips, the camera operator, the DP and it's a dance that we all do and we take for granted but it's the most majestic thing. It's the most magical thing in the whole world and it's how we make movies. One who's good at that dance and is a fantastic boom operator, won't necessarily be a great production sound mixer. By the same token, a great production sound mixer wouldn't necessarily be able to do that dance. Now what Arthur can do is he can do that dance and he's absolutely expert at it. And so luckily when we did lock stock and two smoking barrels together afterwards we kind of sat down and we spoke about a number of things, it's funny because we were only 27 years old at the time and we sat down and basically had a debrief after lock stock and spoke about our careers and how the challenges of lock stock, how we thought we performed, what we thought we could do better. And in that meeting one of the things that we decided was that Arthur wanted to be a long term boom operator. His exact words were, "I want to one day be recognised as one of the best boom operators in the world." I personally think he's achieved that many times over. One of the other things that we decided in that debrief after lock stock was that we were never ever going to do a movie again, just the two of us. Lock stock was shot on one camera. We didn't use any radio mics for a number of reasons. One because I was terrible with radio mics at the time, okay, I wasn't great at rigging them. Secondly, radio mics weren't great at that time. We didn't have great range. We didn't have DPA, so the lavs themselves, I don't think, sounded great. I think that they sounded like the lavs. You could never mistake a lav at that point in 1997 for a boom. It was like, "Whoa, we're on the lavs now." And because we were shooting one camera, we could celebrate the camera perspective. So we did the whole of lock stock on a boom. We had a magic arm with a second boom mic. And so if there was a wide shot or a line that Arthur couldn't get to, we'd stick that magic arm out and put that on the other track of the that tape that we were recording onto. So it was a very simple, simplistic, but a very beautiful and raw way of working. But at the end of it, we said, "Listen, that was tough, just the two of us shooting that whole movie." And we made a decision that we were never going to shoot a movie, just production sound mix from boom operator again. And the next movie that we got offered, I demanded that we have a third person. And they said, "Look, we can't afford someone that's experienced. There's a kid who's done sound at the local film school. We were shooting up north in Yorkshire. And this kid who'd done sound at the local film school, who by the way, Arthur and I were very, very concerned that we were getting someone inexperienced. This kid came in, his name's Robin Johnson, and he was just incredible. One of the reasons he was incredible was because he was the only person at his film school, which was a tiny film school that had wanted to do sound. So he'd recorded every single student's movie. He'd also done this post-production, because no one wanted to do sound post. So he came to us and he'd done 15 short films, post and production recorded them. We said to him at the end of this, "Look, you've done a fantastic job. Would you move to London if you do, you can work with us full time?" Within two or three movies, he became my second boom operator. I was probably one of the first production sound mixes in the UK to start using two boom operators on every single project. If a project didn't want to have two boom operators, we weren't really that interested in doing it. I realized that one of the things that would have an absolutely huge impact on the tracks that I was delivering to the dialogue editor was if we could have two boom operators. And this was around about the same time where we switched from film onto digital, so we were shooting two cameras on everything, and of course, cross close-ups, wides and tights. If you could have two boom operators, as everyone listening to this knows, it's really, really helpful. Also, the other thing is that was really helpful. Two boom operators meant that I didn't have to say to directors, "Hey, would you mind if we don't run with these overlaps because they're going to cause problems in post?" I knew that if we had the overlaps between two characters on two booms, there was a root out of it for a dialogue editor, and the dialogue editor wouldn't just have to say, "Okay, that's an off-mic line that's overlapping, we're just going to have to loop this part of the scene." Me and Robin and Arthur have been together since then. We've done, I think, 65 plus movies together, and there's absolutely no way that I would have the career that I'm enjoying today if it hadn't have been for their support and creative collaboration. A lot of production sound mixers, they're in charge, the booms do it, they're told. And I get the impression that's not how it is on your crew, it's much more collaborative. Yeah, it really is collaborative. I work with the boom operators, but I don't try and tell them how to do their jobs. They're by far, far better at boom operating than I ever was and far more experienced. So I trust them. One of the things that we do, I've never been looking at my faders and looking at levels. Because I've been doing this since I was a teenager, really, I've always been very, very comfortable to trust my ears. And so, rather than being locked to my faders and locked to a needle, a set of bars on a digital recorder, I'm locked to a screen or two screens or three screens depending on how many cameras we're shooting. And I've got talkback comms, we've moved into having talkback comms very, very early. Ridley Scott actually was the person that motivated me because Ridley shoots three cameras and it's so challenging. Those cameras are on zoom lenses, Ridley's got talkback to all of his camera operators. And the only way we could really do a good job for Ridley was having our own talkback. And so I'm not just talking about one way where I'm able to talk to the boom operators. I'm talking about they've got boom mics in front of their mouths coming off their cans and they can whisper to me in the middle of a scene. They can whisper to each other in the middle of a scene. And one of the ways that we've devised that potentially give us a head start and really, really help the tracks that we're putting into our ISOs for dialogue editors. It is one big creative collaboration. And I'm looking at the screens and I'm talking to them about where the camera is. I'm talking to them about edges. I'm talking to them about what B camera and C camera are doing. I'm talking to them about what the zoom's doing with its width of lens. One of the things that I realized very early on is that if I can get the booms onto the edge of frame as much as possible and not leave an inordinate amount of safety, I can bring my gain levels down. And if I can bring my gain levels down, guess what? The background noise is going to be lower. Nowadays that means that we're going to just have to hit the denoising with a far lighter touch in post as a viewer. And I'm not really talking about films and talking about television. I just feel that television sound, we're hitting the denoising, the plug-in so hard these days. And one of the things that I'm trying to do is to just give clarity in my ISO tracks. Just raw clarity with less background noise so that if any denoising does have to happen in the dialogue editing stage, it can be done with a far lighter touch. And so that's what we try and do. I've heard you talk about something that I believe you call continuity of sound within a scene. And the idea that you don't mic up and record each shot you think about the entire scene, which is something as somebody who works in post, I've dealt with a lot where the close up sounds completely different than the one there in two shots. What was really, really instrumental in my understanding of filmmaking and film sound? Well, and again, it all rewinds back to lock, stock and two smoking barrels. I was a commercial sound mixer before lock, stock and two smoking barrels. And the way that I used to record commercials was I would try and get the very best sound for any given camera angle. I had no thought process about continuity. It probably worked okay for commercials because frankly a commercial you're selling something, there isn't too many intercuts and close up sound works on a commercial because you're trying to sell a product. First of all, when we finished lock stock, I had no work because I hadn't been available for any of my commercial clients for six weeks while we shot lock stock. Commercial clients get frustrated very quick if you're not around and they're on to the next guy or girl. I finished lock stock, I didn't have any commercials to do, I had a bit of time off and Guy Ritchie phoned me out and said, look, we're in this cutting room in Soho. It's great. We've got free coffee. There's fresh croissants every morning. We're having a great time. Why don't you come up and spend the day with us? So I went up there for free coffee to see Guy, to chill with Guy, the producer, the editor and eat some croissants. And I looked at this avid as I watched the cutting process. In fact, it wasn't avid, it was lightworks at that point. I started looking at the cut and the first thing that jumped out the screen at me was what I'd done well. The second thing that jumped out the screen at me was what I'd done badly. And what I'd done badly was I hadn't thought enough about continuity of sound across a scene. And at the end of the day, Guy said, well, what are you doing tomorrow? And I said, I'm not doing anything. Guy said, actually Guy, I'm not doing anything for the next few weeks. I've gained so much out of today. Would you mind if I just came in and sat in the background? I won't make a nuisance of myself. Can I just watch this movie be cut? And so I spent probably for 75% of the cutting process, I was sat quietly in the back of the cutting room eating croissants, eating croissants, drinking coffee, listening to the mistakes that I'd made, watching how Niven Howie, our fantastic picture editor, got around the problems. Then at the end of that, I went and listened to Danny Hambrook, our dialogue editor on Lockstock. Because I didn't have any other work to go to, I sat through the post-production process pretty much in its entirety on Lockstock. I then did the same thing on Snatch, where we had a little bit more money. I didn't make as many mistakes. Same dialogue editing team, same sound design team, Matt Collins and Danny Sheehan. Who runs Phaise today? Who runs Phaise UK with close friends of mine and have taught me so much. And then when Guy and Matthew went their separate ways because Matthew wanted to start directing Matthew Vaughn, Matthew had always known me to come into the final mix. And he started inviting me as a matter of course into the final mix. On his first movie, Layer Cake, there was a couple of scenes where he wanted to change the performance slightly and he wanted to ADR. Because he'd never ADR'd anything with Guy Ritchie, I'd been fortunate enough to get good enough sound and to have Danny Sheehan working that dialogue, editing, working his magic that none of Guy Ritchie's early movies had any ADR in them whatsoever. And so by the time we got to Layer Cake and Matthew said, "Matt, there's a couple of performances that I'd quite like to change the tone of." There was one scene in particular where the guys are trudging down a very slippery hill on an exterior and he said, "I don't want them to just stood static in an ADR studio. It's never going to sound right. Can we bring your boom operator and can Arthur come in and can you come in and work with the ADR mixer, we'll boom it, we'll get them walking across the ADR suite and try and get some movement and some effort into their voices. Throughout my career, I've had this magical fortuitous ability to move into sound post and to work with the sound post teams across all of Guy Ritchie's movies, the early movies, the first kind of six movies and all of Matthew Vaughn's early movies as well. And what that did was it gave me an incredible opportunity to understand how important the continuity of sound is and how it's a real mistake to treat every shot as its own vignette and try and make it sound as good as possible because what you're then going to potentially do is although your dailies are going to sound great, the moment the editor starts cutting your sound together, it's going to be jumping around all over the place. And so very, very early on in my career, I understood that what I needed to do was to create an acoustic signature for a scene. Of course, an acoustic signature for a film as well, but more importantly than acoustic signature for a whole film, which is a little bit of a lucid deal, I needed to have a very, very tight acoustic signature for each scene so that that scene cut together and sounded smooth. It's a great way to think about it and I don't think enough people think on that second level, film sets are chaos. Being able to step back enough to think it's not just about this exact moment, let's think about the bigger picture is something that I would assume many people starting out, it's very difficult, but it's something that when you do it, it makes a huge difference. It does. And you know, again, we never know where the director and the re-recording mixer are going to go with the composer's beautiful score. We don't know whether that score is going to be a bit of orchestral underscore or whether it's going to be a skate rock band. It could be either. And we should always think nowadays, now we have got the ability to supply multi-tracks. We should always give the re-recording mixer the ability to use the score, however, being asked to by the director, and if we only record in one way, then we are dictating how loud that score can be used. And what I always think about is what if they want to go really, really hard with the score under this. Nowadays, what I'm doing is I'm recording two different scenes in one scene. I'm recording the scene which matches the camera perspective with the booms, the scene which is going to sound smooth if they don't want to run any score or if there's just a little bit of mild orchestral underscore, but I'm also thinking about the labs. They're not a secondary priority for me. They're not something where I just say, okay, we've got to put the labs on because we multi-track now. I'm going to concentrate on the booms because I believe they sound better and I leave a lab buried and it is what it is. I'm dipping into those ISO tracks as we're shooting, listening to those labs, adjusting them if they need adjusting between takes, because you don't just put a lab on and have it sound good. Getting a lab sounding good requires a little bit of adjustment. Of course, we've got to be sensitive to the cast. We've got to make sure that we don't get in the way of the actors process. We've got to read the room and understand and make adjustments very, very quickly and deftly, which is what Arthur does so well with our actors. The idea that you can just bang a lab on in an actors trailer at the beginning of the day and leave it is a problem. It's not going to sound good. It's going to sound muffled and that's going to lead to ADR. I'm really, really trying to supply excellent lab tracks so that if the re-recorded mixer does go with that skate rock track and has really got the room thumping, then they've got that close-up sound from the lab that means they're going to be able to use the score harder, louder. A lot of people invite the production sound mixer to the final mix and they come in after it's all been cleaned up, after all the schnazs been put on it, but you have advocated that production sound mixer shouldn't go to the mix. Well, maybe in addition to going to the mix, they should be at the picture editing. You just kind of explained a bit about with Lockstock, but if you could elaborate on it somewhere. Look, I think that when I'm doing a $200 million picture for a major US studio, it's not appropriate for me to be in the picture editing room. That's not the right kind of project for me to demand to be there with the picture editor. That's the sort of project where when picture editing is getting to a stage where it's locked, I should be saying to the dialogue editor, right, have you received the cut yet? Can I come in? Can we go through it and spot it together? Can we talk about each scene in its own entity and I can talk about the challenges of the scene, I can talk about what I did with my mix track to perhaps give the dialogue editor a starting point, and it may be that I say, listen, on this scene here, I went with this choice of boom, Mike, and this is why I did it. But retrospectively, I think I was wrong and I should have gone with the labs. So rather than use my mix track as a basis for your ingredients for when you start cutting in Pro Tools, I made a mistake. I think that you should listen to the labs first and just to have that very open conversation with the dialogue editor, because look, dialogue editors have got a tough job to do now. We're supplying 10, 12 tracks on a normal dialogue scene. That was unheard of back in the day. That's a lot of real time listening, and I think that if there's that collaborative stage between the production sound mixture and the dialogue editor, I'm not saying that the dialogue editor then doesn't have to listen to all of the tracks, but I think it's really helpful to give the dialogue editor a heads up and to say, this is where I think I made the right choices. This is where I think I made the wrong choices. If I were you, these are the tracks that I'd start listening to first. However, moving back to picture editing, I think that if you're a production sound mixer at the beginning of your career, speak to the director, say I'd like to spend some time in the cutting room, go and make friends with the picture editor, listen to your sound roar in the avid when literally the picture editor is just cutting your mix track with your mix track, and there has been no massage of the ISO tracks. There's been no denoising. There is someone that is intent on cutting together the very best emotional performances visually and sound is just a very much a secondary part of that process. It's when our choices are exposed and when we hear our sound for what it really is. And if your sound sounds good in the avid, if your mix track sounds good in the avid, you're doing a great job. But like me, it may be that there are some scenes that aren't sounding great and you can adjust your decision making process on the next project. What I think is also kind of genius about that is it also gives the director, the picture editor, the producer, lets them all know that you're serious about this, gives you time with them. You're not in the edit room chatting them up, you sit in the back and learn, but it shows everybody that you care about something that they'll remember when they're crewing up for their next project. Exactly. You know, relationships are key in this business. Again, I want directors to feel that I'm a collaborative filmmaker with them. I don't want them to feel like I'm the technical guy who's sat at the back doing weird things with a mixing desk. We need to champion the fact that we're filmmakers and that we are making a creative contribution. And I'm talking about production sound mixers. Fortunately, you guys in sound posts get to spend a lot of time with the director and your creative contribution is absolutely accepted. Production sound is a bit mysterious. You can't see it. The director is there and he or she is presented with the lighting of the scene, which they can see, the costumes, which they can see, the production design, which they can see, the makeup that they can see, the camera move that they can see. The only thing that they can't see in the filmmaking process when they're on the set making the movie is the sound. So of course, it's very, very easy to kind of forget about it and just accept it as something that happens. What I try and do is make directors aware of exactly the process that we're doing. And I often, and I won't just be the guy that comes over and says, "Hey, we need one more." There was a plane through that. That's the opposite of what I want to do. I want to talk to them and say, "Hey, you know what? I'm using the labs on this setup because I'm pretty sure that you're going to have some quite loud score through this. Of course, we're running the booms as well in case you decide to go without the score and we can put some air around the microphones. And I'll just kind of go in and give them a couple of little sentences. I won't bore them to death about sound. I will just collaborate with them and let them know that I'm making creative decisions on their behalf on the set and that I've got them, and that they don't need to worry, and that I care about what we're doing and that I have their film and their original performances and thus their best interests at heart. That makes me think of a story that you posted on Instagram, and we'll go back to that for a second, about how you were able to solve a sound problem without being confrontational. It was without taking the hood off of a car and then trying to get them to put it back on. I'm wondering if you can kind of tell us that story and what the lessons that you want people to learn from it. Look, it was a high-pressure moment. You know, I was working with Guy Ritchie's fantastic DP, Ed Wild, who is an absolute masterful director of photography. He shoots two or three cameras at all times for Guy. Guy shoots really fast, and we had a situation where the weather was coming in. We were about to lose the light. We were going to do a car chase, and it was about to rain, and we needed grip on cobblestones. Otherwise, the car chase that we were doing wasn't going to be possible because we wouldn't have had enough grip. What's it got wet? It got wet. Basically, I got to the car. It was an AC Cobra. We wanted to shoot because we knew the weather was coming in. We had three cameras on this car. We had two close-up cameras on the driver and the passenger. Mounted right on the car. Mounted right on the car. Then a third camera, getting a two-shot mounted right on the car. To get these three angles, Ed had said, "We need to take the bonnet off because we need to get the cameras lower than the bonnet will allow us to do." The bonnet had come off. The grips had rigged the cameras. With Guy and Max, Guy's producer in his ear saying, "Come on. We've got to shoot. It's going to rain." Ed said, "Okay. We're ready to go." I looked at it, and I could see that although the cameras had come very, very low to get the exact angle that Ed and Guy needed on these actors, we could have had the bonnet on. I said, "Guys, listen. We're going to be in so much trouble. This is a big VA engine." I understand why you took the bonnet off, which is why I didn't complain or try and justify keeping it on because I knew that you needed to get the bonnet off to set up these shots. Actually, having looked at where your camera positions are now, we could get the bonnet back on. Ed was like, "Simon, that's going to take 15 minutes. The way he's coming in, Guy wants to shoot. We've got to go, mate." I said, "Listen, Ed, your grips are the best grips in the world. Let's talk about this for a second. I reckon I bet you dinner tonight that it wouldn't be 15 minutes." I think that all of those cameras are set. They could just come off their heads very, very quickly. We've got a team stood here. I said, "The car boys will get that bonnet on in less than 90 seconds." I said, "The grips can just remove the cameras without adjusting the lock off points. How about this? I bet you dinner that this could be achieved in two and a half minutes." Ed said, "That could never happen. It just couldn't happen." He turned to his grips and said, "Could it?" The grips were, "We reckon we could do it, Ed." Suddenly, everyone's invested in trying to make this happen. Rather than thinking the sound guys are going to cost us loads of time, I turned it into something that was fun and I turned it into something that I knew could be achieved, which was we could get the bonnet on in two and a half minutes. I said, "Well, all right then. The dinner's going to be on you and you're going to have to explain to the governor which is what we call guy. If this doesn't work, I'm trusting you," and turned to his grips and said, "You're the guys that said that we can make this work for Simon." We got the bonnet on in two and a half minutes. What I can tell you now, I've been speaking to the dialogue editor recently about that scene and there's no ADR in it. It's an AC Cobra with a V8 engine. Obviously, AC Cobra doesn't have a roof on it. It's doing donuts which is spinning around and around and around on cobblestones with the two actors, albeit screaming dialogue at each other because they're scared they're in the middle of a chase, but there's no ADR in it. If I hadn't got that bonnet on, it 100% would have been ADR. What have I saved the movie? I don't know. It's not tangible. That's the thing about sound and that's the thing about original performances. It's not mathematics, we can't say, "Oh, well, it's 30% better because they didn't loop that scene." All we know is that there is a magic and a truth in the original performance that may or may not be there in an ADR track. We just don't know how good or how bad the ADR track is going to be from a performance perspective. What we do know is that when someone goes into a cinema, they don't have to buy a real performance because it is the real performance. No one's selling anything because that is the real actors' performance and potentially when that AC Cobble was spinning and it's got two actors in it, there is a real fear in their voice that may be very, very hard to replicate three months later in a nice warm, calm ADR suite. Some people can do it. Some people can't. And so, although I can't say, "Well, it was 30% better," and this is where I talk about the technical side of sound versus the creative side of sound, if something's technical, we can talk about percentages. If something's creative, we're talking about perception. We're talking about truth. We're talking about does our audience believe and that is the magic of filmmaking and sound? I love that story because not only is it about saving sound and going the extra mile, but it's about doing it in a way that isn't confrontational and doesn't make anyone feel like the bad guy. Yeah. And because that's a lot of the problem that we find is that when production sound mixers go and say, "Well, this isn't going to work," it's more adversarial than collaborative. And when I heard you tell that story previously, you were talking about how the whole crew ended up doing like a countdown. That's right. That's exactly what happened. That was awesome. I have to tell you that I felt like I could talk and hang out with Simon all day. He was just a great guy to spend time with. I love his energy and enthusiasm. Thanks for joining us today. My name is Tim Mearhead. Thanks for listening to ToneBenders. This episode is sponsored by Sound Ideas. Check out Sound Ideas 50% off sale on all their proprietary libraries on now until January 31st. This includes libraries from Sound Dogs, The Hollywood Edge, DigiFX, SoundStorm, and all of the all-purpose libraries from Sound Ideas like the General and the General HD. Go to sound-ideas.com for full details on all these amazing deals. ToneBenders is produced by Timothy Mearhead, theme music's by Jim Guthrie. You can reach me via email at info@tonebenderspodcast.com. Follow us on Instagram by @tonebenders. If you like this show, you can help us out by spreading the word to your friends and colleagues. Or you can leave us a tip. Just go to tonebenderspodcast.com and click on support. Thanks for listening. [Music] [MUSIC PLAYING]