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Dialogue Reigns Supreme

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

In the Field for John Sayles’ Silver City

Since making his directorial debut in 1980 with the low-budget independent film Return of the Secaucus 7, John Sayles has earned a reputation as one of this country's most intriguing mavericks. His credits include writing and directing such diverse character-driven films as the alien-in-Harlem comedy Brother From Another Planet, the grim period baseball film Eight Men Out, the wondrous Irish fable The Secret of Roan Inish, the acclaimed Texas border drama Lone Star, and last year's Casa De Los Babys, about American women forced to live in Latin America to adopt children there.

Sayles' latest is Silver City, a noir-ish potboiler about a bungling Colorado gubernatorial candidate caught up in a mystery involving a corpse he fishes out of a rural lake while filming a political commercial. When the candidate's manager hires someone to look into what appears to have been a murder, the web of suspicion entangles friends and foes. That's a simplistic summary of what is, by Sayles' own admission, actually intended to be a provocative lampoon of the Bush administration, with Oscar winner Chris Cooper playing candidate Dicky Pilager with “W” firmly in his sights. The timing of the film's release, during the fall presidential election, is purely intentional.

The film was shot all over Colorado in the fall of 2003, “in every location imaginable and every weather imaginable,” says production sound mixer Judy Karp, a veteran of Sayles' films since the 1997 release Men With Guns. “One morning, up in the mountains near Leadville, it got down to 12 degrees. Other times we were in dry, open plains. A lot of the film takes place outside, but there were also a lot of nice indoor locations. From my perspective, there was a lot of variety.”

Although Sayles never has huge budgets to work with, he seems to have no trouble attracting great actors and top-flight crews — many have worked with him on multiple films. In Judy Karp's case, most of her experience had been on documentaries, when she landed her first gig with Sayles, in part because she speaks Spanish. (It helped, too, that her husband — and boom operator — Jaime Reyes, is Chilean.)

“Besides being a really nice guy and so easy to work with, John is great for a production mixer because he writes all his films, and the words are really important to him,” says Karp. “He hears all that dialogue in his head, way before anyone's saying it, and he likes it to sound how he hears it in his head. Usually production sound is the last concern [of the filmmaker]. Nobody really cares that much — ‘We can fix it later.’ But John's not that way at all. He wants a strong production track, and he likes dialogue to sound spontaneous. He'll loop things that need to be looped, but a lot of times we'll be at the mix, and he'll listen to a line that's been looped and say, ‘Can I hear the production track again?’ And I'd say nine times out of 10 it's the production track that he goes with. And by the way, I never get invited to mixes, except by John.”

Karp's production sound rig is fairly basic: “The first three films I did with John I used a stereo timecode Nagra; now I'm using a Fostex PD-4 [DAT] — two tracks, digital, timecode,” she says. “I use Lectrosonic microphones; I'm using mostly Sonotrim lavaliers, which are made by Trans. I like the 'Trims because they're a bit more refined-sounding than some other brands. For John I use mostly Schoeps hypercardioids for the interiors we do and Sennheisers for the exteriors. My mixer is a 4-channel SQN [Electronics, model 4-S], and if I need more inputs I'll stack a second one on my cart.”

Like a lot of directors these days, Sayles has gone to using two cameras at once when he's shooting, which always poses problems for the production sound mixer because it requires coverage of two different perspectives. If Karp is lucky, it will be two close-ups. But just as often it's a close-up and a wide shot at the same time, and that requires a delicate balancing act between boom and radio mics.

“I like to use a boom and then wireless on anybody I think will play in the scene,” she says. “Then, depending on the scene, I'll decide whose mic is going to be up [at a given moment] and who we're going to reach with the boom. I think the boom always sounds better, so if it's a main character or someone who's closest in the shot, I'll usually go for the boom. There will be times, too, that I'll use two booms. If there are two cameras going, for instance, you want the sound on camera B to be as good as it is on camera A, and you just can't get a wireless mic to sound as good as a boom, so that's when I'll go with two [booms].”

Then there are other challenges that crop up: “There's a shot of Chris Cooper and Kris Kristofferson riding on horses and talking quite a while — it's several pages of dialogue. We couldn't use the boom, so it had to be all wirelesses, and my boom person and a cable puller had to run with [wireless] receivers the entire time, keeping up with the horses. Sometimes, if a wireless fails, you can fill it in with a boom, but here was no way I could be anywhere near them with the boom, so there was nothing to do except pray.”

And then there's also help in the form of the postproduction crew. For many years, the New York-based Sayles has used Manhattan's C5 for most of his post needs, including dialogue editing, Foley, effects, and mixing. C5 principal and dialogue cutting specialist Phil Stockton has worked with Sayles since his 1987 triumph Matewan, and for the last several films he has been a supervising sound editor on his productions. He helped mix the film with Robert Fernandez at Sound One in New York on a Neve DFC console.

Stockton remembers working on that scene with the horses. “Basically, what you could hear was the dialogue and a lot of saddle creaking. You didn't hear the horses much, didn't hear much background. It was a very, very quiet and still location, so [in post] we threw in a hawk or two, some wind through bushes, and then the horse footsteps. We have lots of recorded horses we've done for other films, like [Ang Lee's] Ride With the Devil. It's nice to have material that's tailor-made for a scene, and we try to record original sound whenever the budget permits and is appropriate. But we weren't really able to do that so much in this film, so a lot of it is from our own libraries.”

Like Karp, Stockton finds that Sayles is concerned mostly with having the dialogue nice and clear and crisp. “I've found that with most writer-directors,” he says. “They want to hear what they wrote first and foremost. His films are always very straightforward [sound-wise]. They're not heavy in sound design. Usually he'll have a montage sequence where we get to experiment a little, but mostly we're just trying to support the dialogue and not call too much attention to things that might distract from the dialogue.”

It helps, too, that Sayles does his own film editing. “You can tell that he's editing as he goes along; he's editing in his head,” Karp offers. “He knows what he wants and when he gets it. Most directors will say ‘Very good, let's do it again,’ or, ‘Now let's get a protection [take].’ But with John, it's, ‘Bueno. Let's move on to the next shot.’ For a feature it's a relatively relaxed way to work. With John there's always a great feeling on the set.”

Adds Stockton, “When he's writing it he's already visualizing it and determining what the coverage is going to be. He doesn't always have a lot of money to make his films, and sometimes he'll economize in a good way: He does a lot of long, moving shots where two people will be having a conversation and two different people will come in the frame, and he'll pick it up. There are a lot of films where he'll have five-minute takes of mostly conversation, which is fairly unusual. But he makes it work because he writes such good dialogue, and the acting is always really good.”

“He's always thinking,” marvels Karp. “When we were working on Men With Guns in the jungle, we got totally rained out one day. Most directors would be going crazy, tearing out their hair. But John was fine — he'd say, ‘So, do you want to hear about my next movie? I've been doing some writing.’ Or he'll be at the mix, and he'll be working on the script of his next film, and even though you're paying complete attention, and it might seem like he's not paying attention, he'll look up and say, ‘Can you make that horn in the background a little louder?’”

Karp laughs. “He's the original multi-tasker. He's paying attention to everything.”

© 2008 Penton Media, Inc.