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MillimeterCapturing Audio for Scorsese’s Gangs Of New York
 Eugene Gearty worked to capture audio that accurately reflected Scorsese’s violent yet poetic depiction of life in 19th century New York. (Photo: Mario Tursi) |
The film was shot entirely in the controlled environs of indoor and outdoor soundstages at Cinecittá, outside of Rome, between August 2000 and April 2001. Production designer Dante Ferretti and his team worked for months transforming acres of backlot into the squalid, tenement-filled streets of Manhattan's notorious Five Points Irish ghetto, as well as the city's tony Uptown neighborhoods, its bustling seaport, and much more. It's a rich, vibrant world, and the film serves up a splendid evocation of time and place. It seems somehow appropriate, then, that the post crew did its work in the city the film depicts: The bulk of the posting took place at C5 Editorial in Manhattan and at that company's new Foley facility in nearby northern New Jersey.
“Probably my biggest challenge was to replicate New York circa 1860,” Gearty says. “We had a full-time historian who did a lot of research for me, tracking down what sounds you would hear, what the streets were like, what the port would have sounded like.
“One thing that was surprising to me is the number of steam whistles. New York was a tremendously busy port, and steam played a significant part. It turns out that the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn has a large collection of period steam whistles, which they took out and propped up in the courtyard of the college one Saturday so I could record them,” Gearty says. “I recorded dozens of steam whistles using a Schoeps stereo MS pair and the Schoeps preamp to an HHB DAT recorder. You wouldn't believe how loud those whistles are. They're frightening, easily 110dB or higher. I literally had to turn the mic away from the source at 60 yards away to get more reflection.”
Of course a film like this requires hundreds of sound elements, from backgrounds to Foley to effects of every sort, and though Gearty's canvas was limited somewhat by the historical period he was dealing with, he still found plenty of room for creative sound work. For example, during the intense, bloody battle sequences, where gangs pummel and hack each other with clubs, boards, axes, knives, and other crude implements, Gearty augmented realistic Foley “hits” with other, unrelated sound sources to heighten the drama and violence of the scenes.
“That battle in reel one is one of the most vicious I've ever seen,” adds Gearty. “We started out pretty authentic, and during the process of premixing and feeding the material for the scratch mixes early on in the picture edit, [Scorsese and editor Thelma Schoonmaker] liked the sound effects and the visceralness of the punches and the hits. Then they got feedback from Miramax to soften the violence, and they thought that lightening up on the effects would help that. So we did that, and then when we got to the final, of course Marty [Scorsese] wants to hear everything back to where it was. So we did that, and it was also an opportunity for us to go one step further and put in a lot more sound design elements within the realistic sounds of the fight, and that comes across as a texture under Peter Gabriel's music [for the scene]. It allows you to see these men and women in this animalistic orgy of killing, so the obligatory [sfx] animal growls and pitched-down noises come out, but it's still subtle. It's a compelling element.”
Gearty notes that even some of the smallest sound elements demanded a creative approach. “There's a cool shot in there of somebody blowing a horn that signals the end of a battle, and Thelma approached me and said, ‘Eugene, I was listening to NPR, and I heard a recording of a female lemur — it makes a really interesting sound, and I was wondering if you would consider that for the horn sound.’ So I tracked it down, and it needed some serious modification in terms of pitch-shifting and other things, but it was brilliant. I added some other elements and it came out really nicely.”
There are also a number of gunshots in the film, and it was Gearty's inclination to be as authentic to the period as possible. “Of course, but we ended up not using them,” he says with a laugh. “The guns of that period are what they call ‘cap and ball.’ I had very good recordings, because I also did Ang Lee's Ride With the Devil. So I put those into Gangs and Tommy [Fleischman] and Marty both said, ‘Eugene, what's up with that gun? It sounds like a cap gun.’ ‘Well, fellas, that's authentic. That's what they sounded like.’ They were very good, accurate recordings, but a lot of the sound is the poof of the gunpowder, which isn't dramatic enough. I'd sweeten them sometimes with some low-end oomph. In the end, we put in more of a big kaboom to beef that up.
 During the film’s intense battle sequences, Gearty augmented realistic Foley hits with other unrelated sound sources to heighten drama and violence. (Photo: Mario Tursi) |
“We took the opportunity to premix everything in my 5.1 sound design suite at C5,” he continues. “I used to have a Mackie [console] in there, but now I'm entirely internal in the Pro Tools, and I absolutely love it. Larry Wineland, my assistant, did an excellent job keeping me up to date with conformations from the picture department, and he's very knowledgeable with Pro Tools. We weren't just editing or conforming effects, we were conforming mixes with automation, including reverb settings, and that was the beauty of doing everything in Pro Tools. Everything got conformed as we went on, and that was the coup de grâce — we could continually update our premixes, which was really efficient.
“We premixed the Foley and the effects using the Pro Controller, and the plan was that in my premixing I would set things up for the delivery format for the mix. For instance, everything was going to be delivered on 8-track Akai MO, so in the case of the effects, an 8-track MO would consist of a 5.0 bus and an LCR bus. I generated four or five of those, and that included the backgrounds and the effects. The Foley was mixed down to 16 tracks, and one thing I did that was a little different there is [that] I had a principal footstep LCR and background footstep LCR.”
Gearty says that picture editor Schoonmaker is always very involved in sound decisions. “She acts as Marty's spokesperson for a lot of the preliminary stuff that he, because of the schedule, might not have a chance to go over with me directly. You come in knowing that the sound of the movie is going to be determined through the picture-editing process, and on a daily basis, I'm feeding ideas to Thelma as they're cutting picture. Generally, [Marty's] very interested in organically conceptualized sound design — in other words, the sound design comes out of the fabric of the production track [to determine] where we might process something. But other times it's manipulating sound effects to more appropriately work with the music.
“As he's shown over and over again, he's very involved with music as part of the storytelling. The other thing Marty likes to do, which is very much appreciated, is he'll do scenes that are entirely sound without music, and he'll challenge us to make it interesting.
“Marty is very receptive to sound and very receptive to any idea you bring him,” Gearty concludes. “His ears will prick up, and he'll tell you very quickly whether he likes it or not. But the good thing from my perspective is that he's always open to suggestion.”
As for Gearty's next project? He's hard at work on Ang Lee's greatly anticipated film, The Hulk.
“That's a very interesting sound job,” Gearty says with a chuckle. “A very different kind of mayhem than Gangs of New York.”
