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Reader SurveyWartime Ambience
Nov 1, 2007 12:00 PM, By Dan Daley
Complex sound for a complicated era in Charlie Wilson's War.
Detailed sound effects
Attention to detail in the sound effects covered the gamut from the minute to the epic. In one scene, actress Julia Roberts answers a late-night telephone call from her bedside. “We got exactly the sound of the phone, which was a Princess phone from the 1980s,” says Bochar. “But Mike felt the ring tone was too harsh for late at night. So we found one that was less distinct and then we added some additional tones to it that brought in the idea that you were also hearing it resonate through the wood of the nightstand.”
When it came to the battle scenes in Afghanistan, aficionados of military technology will be pleased to note that the film's sound comprehends the distinction between a Soviet-made helicopter with the NATO designation “Hind” and an American Black Hawk helicopter. “The Hinds have a very specific sound, and we happened to have a few in the library,” says Bochar, who goes so far as to suggest that the aircraft sounds in the film have a subtle, prescient link to the aircraft used in the Sept. 11 attacks.
But modern film sound reproduction reveals that the Soviet military in the '80s were, sonically, rather one-dimensional — Bochar had to add some Black Hawk sound effects to the mix to deepen the image; he further added a stereotypical “thwap” sound for the rotor blades using an FM synthesizer. “When you hear a jet-engine helicopter, the roar of the engine is so loud that it overwhelms the scene,” he says. “Adding the ‘thwaps’ gives the audience a sense of air being displaced, of movement of the rotor blades. It's another dimension you can get from sound.”
For all its complexity, the sound for Charlie Wilson's War is fairly confined to the front array, with the dialogue rarely deviating from the center channel — which is kind of like home base for Dichter. “I try not to move my dialogue around a lot, even in 5.1,” he says. “Unless a shot absolutely calls for a voice off screen or way to the left or right, I find that it's distracting. Not only does it suit narrative better, but I think that [the tonality of] dialogue holds up better when it's right down the middle in bigger theaters.”
That seems like a good moment to ask Dichter about his feelings on movies with big sound moving from those big theaters, past the home theater and DVD, to the cell phone and the PDA. His response is simultaneously philosophical and pragmatic. “It bugs me if I have to hear my mixes through an iPod,” he says, “but today, it's all about reaching a wider audience through different mediums. That's the trade-off: bad sound but a bigger audience. Hey, you can't fight progress.”
