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Sounds of The Passion

May 1, 2004 12:00 PM, By Blair Jackson

Bringing Jesus' Final Hours to Life Onscreen

It started as a little film, a personal project for the director, who just happens to be one of the biggest movie stars in the world (and an Oscar-winning director), Mel Gibson. Because major studios were wary of the subject matter — a graphic, unflinching account of the final hours of Jesus' life, encompassing his arrest, trial, torture, and crucifixion, with actors speaking in two dead languages, Aramaic and Latin — Gibson largely financed The Passion of the Christ himself. The final budget is estimated to have swelled to around $30 million, inexpensive by Hollywood-epic standards, but a lot for what many believed a commercially risky project.

“This film wasn't made for this summer or to be the biggest movie or critically acclaimed or any of those normal parameters,” comments re-recording mixer Bob Beemer, himself a two-time Oscar winner (for Speed and Gladiator). “This was made as an act of devotion. He never wanted to ‘go Hollywood’ with this film. At the same time, it's so obvious that he's a great artist. It shows in every frame. Obviously, the movie has become a huge phenomenon and a financial windfall. But really, it began as Mel's pet project. It wasn't even intended for wide release originally.”

Now, with domestic grosses edging toward $400 million and the worldwide rollout of the film just underway, Passion of the Christ may eventually pass Titanic and become the most successful movie in history.

This film will always be swathed in controversy. There are those who think that it is anti-Semitic. Others are put off by the unrelenting gore — critics have variously described it as “the first religious splatter film” and “the Jesus Chainsaw Massacre.” But for the most part, audiences — Christians and non-Christians — have embraced Gibson's visceral vision and understand it for what it is: a literal depiction of the central event of Christianity — Jesus' martyrdom and subsequent resurrection. There's nothing abstract about Jesus' suffering here — every punch, push, whip-lashing, and nail pounded into soft flesh is depicted onscreen and heard in surround.

In speaking with four members of the sound team that worked on The Passion of the Christ — Beemer, supervising sound editors Kami Asgar and Sean McCormack, and assistant sound editor Tim Tuchrello — one can't help but be struck by the admiration these craftspeople have for Gibson's dedication, skill, and heart, and by their own devotion to the project. Beemer echoes the thoughts of many who worked on the film, including some of the actors, when he says, “This movie changed my life. There's nothing I've ever done before or since that compares — the boldness, the social significance. People are still going to be watching this film in a hundred years.”

McCormack adds, “Everybody involved with this project was so intrigued by it; it became a personal project for each individual working on it. It wasn't necessarily about the money; it was about the job.”

The Passion of the Christ was shot entirely in Italy, on extensive sets built at the famed Cinecittà Studios outside of Rome and in a couple of small villages that were transformed to look like the hilly outskirts of Jerusalem. Maurizio Argentieri recorded the production dialogue on a four-track Nagra digital machine and by all accounts did a fine job. When the film went back to Los Angeles for posting, McCormack and Kami Asgar, who'd worked together at Sony Pictures for a number of years and now run Sound Choice Post, were hired to put together a sound team and supervise that aspect of the show. They are the first to admit that they were somewhat unlikely candidates for the undertaking because both had worked primarily on series television and movies-of-the-week, rather than theatrical features. But McCormack had an “in” with Gibson's company, Icon Productions.

“Something in Mel gave him confidence in us,” Asgar adds. “There were people in the industry who thought we would be off the show in two weeks, but we came through for Mel and gave it all we had. I'm really proud of the job that everyone on the sound team did.”

It was McCormack who brought in Beemer — one of the most respected re-recording mixers in L.A. “I know [Sean] from Sony Studios,” Beemer says. “About 10 months ago he came up to me and said, ‘Hey, Bob, I've got a project you've got to work on.’ He didn't know I'm Catholic, or anything about me personally. But he knew a little about my sensibilities, I guess, so he mentioned it. I said, ‘Oh, OK, that's cool.’ I'm thinking it's one of his friends' student films. He says, ‘I'm involved with this picture about Jesus, and it's the most amazing movie I've ever seen.’ Then he told me it was by Mel Gibson, and I sort of looked at him funny. So he started telling me about it, and from the excitement he had about the project — I hadn't seen a frame of it — I knew I had to do the movie.

“So he got me an entrée to go meet with Mel and his producer, Steve McEveety. [And] I could see the devotion and the correctness of the motivation of both Steve and Mel, and I was fascinated by it. It's such a trend-breaker because it's so un-PC to be religious; the boldness was very impressive to me. Later, Mel took me in the back and showed me a frame on the Avid, which was a profile of Jim Caviezel as Jesus up on the cross, all bloody and looking up into the sky — I swear it looked like a painting from the Renaissance. It was so violently beautiful. And from seeing one frame, I could tell the depth he was going to on this movie.”

Asgar recalls, “The first cut we saw was the first time Mel had seen the cut, too. We all sat in a screening room and watched the film with the editor [John Wright] and the producer and a few other people, and we were told to just watch it — not to take notes or anything — and then we'd talk about how we felt about that film. It had no subtitles yet, and it was very rough, but it was still one of the most amazing experiences I've ever had, even in that form. We actually started work right after that screening. We went and pre-dubbed the whole show and pretty much took it about three-quarters of the way through the process before Mel actually heard any of our work.

“For a couple of guys who had never really been out in the big picture, as they say, we were given quite a lot of freedom. But we had multiple conversations with Mel and with the picture editor as far as what they wanted in certain areas. Audio-wise, the goal was to make it as realistic as possible. From the opening shot, he wanted the viewer to be drawn into the environment that was being shown on the screen, and it was important to him to never go too far over the top.”

Which is not to say there wasn't still plenty of room for creative sound design. Indeed, there are moments in the film, particularly as Jesus is struggling to carry his cross up to Calvary, when the sound becomes almost hallucinatory, with the shouts of the taunting crowd fading in and out, the dull thud of the cross hitting and dragging on the stone pathway exaggerated, and we, the viewers, are almost as disoriented as Jesus. And then there is Satan — a shadowy, mysterious, malevolent presence — made all the more sinister by having the conventional sound shift eerily each time he/she/it is onscreen.

“In all of Mel's films, he has a stylistic approach to sound and picture where there are peaks and valleys,” comments assistant sound editor Tim Tuchrello. “Reel one is a good example: It draws you in by the realism of the surroundings with the night and the crickets and bugs and all that. Then the fight breaks out [between Roman soldiers and Jesus' disciples], and you also have Satan there and the quiet moments with Mary, so it's a whole cornucopia of sounds — these peaks and valleys. And not everything is literal. In the fight with the Romans, you don't hear every whoosh and punch, but you do hear the detailed creaking of the leather [of their uniforms], which was a big thing with Mel. It's a film with a realistic base, but we did match [the visual] when it became stylized.”

“There's a part where Mary goes into a sort of Zen moment, and all the sounds drop away, except for her breath,” Beemer adds. “She puts her head down on the floor, and then the camera goes through the floor, and we see Jesus in chains. That was totally a Mel thing: all the sounds go out; then they recorded some breaths for Mary — those weren't the original actress' breath; it was Renee Tondelli, who was the ADR supervisor. She was on the stage [at Sony Studios in L.A.], and we recorded breaths right then and there. It was a very fluid environment where we recorded a lot of little embellishments to Pro Tools on the stage.”

Tondelli definitely had her work cut out for her on this film because there was so much group ADR needed for the film's many crowd scenes. “She did an amazing job sorting it all out,” Asgar says, “You have to remember that all of this was in Aramaic and Latin, and they had a language advisor [Fr. William Fulco] making sure that every call-out and shout was done correctly, and then there were layers and layers of group ADR to give it depth.”

According to Asgar and McCormack, The Passion was a very Foley-intensive film, with the sandaled crowds, the bloody flaying, and the long march up Calvary posing particular challenges to both the sound editors and Foley artists.

“The whipping scene alone required so much work,” Asgar says. “Every whip hit you hear has a certain amount of layers to it — from the arm coming up, to the actual moment of contact, to the decay of the sound and when the whip is pulled away.”

“We actually had the Foley artists make different whips,” McCormack adds. “In the movie, the whipping starts out with a cane, and we had to get a specific sound for that. Then, when they switch to a whip that is like a cat-o-nine tails, with these bits of metal on the end and knots, we had to make that completely different, obviously. We individually created the leather whip part and then added each of the individual pieces. When you see it for the first time on the table, one of the little barbs falls off, so we wanted to carry that through and pick a moment where we hear something falling off after a hit. It's a little thing, but it's disturbing.”

As for the actual noise of the whip's impact, Asgar says, “That's another layer. We used a chamois for some of that, and we also used vegetables and fruits and whatnot, the typical things. It's weird, because a lot of people close their eyes during that scene, but they can still hear it, and we went for realism of it as much as we could. It was hard for us to sit there and watch it over and over and over. Sometimes you had to get out of the room to get a little air. Even when we were sitting there print-mastering the film, it was difficult to watch. But Bob [Beemer] really did an amazing job of making the elements come together.” All the effects recording was done directly into Pro Tools, mostly using Neumann shotgun mics (but occasionally other models). Jonathan Klein was Foley supervisor and Don Yale was Foley editor.

From Beemer's perspective as the mixer, “With any movie that has a lot of blows, or repeated events of any kind — whether it's gunshots, or waves in a surfing movie — what I always try to do is make each event sound slightly different, so it doesn't become boring. Sean and Kami gave me lots of variety in sounds of whips, and hits and whooshes, so instead of making it sound like some sampled sound effect that got repeated over and over, I did my best to make each event sound somewhat different. I used a Lexicon 480 [as the main reverb], [but] it's more using EQ and different balances of the hits, different types of whooshes. I might exaggerate the panning a little bit with a very stereo image, so when things are repeating over and over, it's coming from here, then it's coming from there; I like to mix it up.”

Asgar says that Foley artists Vince Guisetti and Pam Kahn went to extraordinary lengths to find the right materials for the different sound moments, at one point making sandals from scratch because they weren't satisfied with ones they had. There was a day spent recording nails being pounded into wood. “They even made a giant cross out of railroad ties,” McCormack says.

“The sound of the dragging of the cross is even multiple layers, dragging on dirt and scraping and a lot of low end to give it weight. The ringing of the wood was probably one of the harder sounds to get. We used big planks of wood so you'd get that resonance we needed.”

And then Beemer “put the hits [of the cross on the ground] through the boom channel to make it extraordinarily heavy. In general, I used the subwoofer sparingly, but to me that was the perfect device for it, because the metaphor of [the cross representing] the sins of the world and all that, it seemed to be the correct thing to do.”

Beemer and his partner Scott Millan (who mixes dialogue and music) did their work at Sony Studios in L.A. on a Harrison digital console. For two key weeks, though, Millan was off working on another film and was ably replaced by Kevin O'Connell, truly one of the most respected veterans in the business. The three share the re-recording mixer credit.

In the end, it was one of those projects where all the different pieces of the puzzle fell into place perfectly. The acting (particularly Jim Caviezel as Jesus) was superb, Caleb Deschenel's cinematography strikingly beautiful, John Debney's score a wonderful combination of Middle Eastern and European flavors, and the overall sound design powerful and imaginative.

“We had such an amazing collaboration between the sound effects department and the music department,” Asgar says. “We turned over all our sound design and sound effects right after the predub to John Debney, and some of it was actually incorporated into the music — there are places you can't tell which is sound design and which is music.”

But inevitably, the conversation always returns to Mel Gibson and the huge role he played in every aspect of the film. “Everyone gave 110 percent,” Asgar says, “and that includes Mel. I've got to say, Mel knows exactly what he wants. When he didn't hear something he wanted, he'd go up on the mic and try it himself, yell something, or have us try it. He would do body Foley. He was really so much part of the process and of course was the final say on everything.”

“This is a movie where everyone seemed to do their very best work,” agrees Beemer. “None of us had ever done a movie like this, because there's never been a movie like this, so we were all sort of painting outside the lines.”

© 2008 Penton Media, Inc.