Oscar-nominated sound editor Craig Henighan has been working with director Shawn Levy sincecollaborating on “Night at the Museum” in 2006. “Deadpool & Wolverine” mark Henighan’s reunion with Levy as Supervising Sound Editor and Re-Recording Mixer for the film.
“Deadpool & Wolverine” isn’t just the unlikely reunion of Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman. In the film, Deadpool’s universe has lost its anchor with the death of Logan in “Logan”. As such, he takes it upon himself to venture out into the multiverse and find another Logan to take his place, which marks the mutant’s entrance into the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
Henighan previously received an Oscar nomination for his work on Netflix’s “Roma”. In his professional relationship with Levy, which has evolved since 2006, developing a shorthand with the director to understand the vision behind the film.
“When we’re developing the sounds and having discussions on soundscapes and ideas and stuff, [Levy] always has a very strong sense of what he wants the sound to be and clearly what the music is going to be for a film or a project that we work on,” shares Henighan.
Henighan spoke with Awards Focus about the challenges of working on a comedy, how sound plays a role, what actor/producer Ryan Reynolds brings to the sound mix, and the downside of the writers’ strike that prevented Reynolds from adlibbing lines during production.
Deadpool & Wolverine is currently available to buy or rent through digital retailers or streaming on Disney+.
AF: The email from the publicist described you as the Hans Zimmer of sound.
Henighan: Oh my G-d, it’s putting me on the spot. I wouldn’t put myself in the same arena as Hans, that’s for sure. But very, very kind. (Laughs) That’s a good way to open it. I would never anticipate that sort of a comparison, but fantastic, sure.
AF: You’ve worked with Shawn Levy on a number of films. How has the shorthand improved in the professional relationship?
Henighan: Yeah, I’ve known Shawn now since 2006. We started on a “Night at the Museum”, obviously a number of years ago. Shawn is just a fantastic director from all sorts of angles. He sets up a great framework to be able to work within and he knows what he wants. He’s very, very direct and envisions every single thing really strongly, really early on.
Obviously, there was lots of music in “Deadpool,” so the idea was to frame sound and make all the stuff work as one sort of complete soundtrack together.
AF: What were the biggest challenges?
Henighan: Oh, I think the biggest challenges, honestly, were because of it being a comedy and obviously the importance of hearing every single joke and every single line that comes from Deadpool or Wade or any of the other characters, when you’re dealing with that writing and that script in a context of essentially a superhero movie where things can get big and loud and really busy pretty quickly, sonically, it becomes a challenge.
Ideally, like human hearing, there’s a whole theory that Walter Murch came up with—a giant in our industry—where you can really only process two or three sounds at any one time. The idea of sticking Wade and Logan in the middle of a giant battle scene, but you still need to hear every single joke and every single little quip, it becomes really challenging.
You want to hear the explosion, you want to hear the gunshot, you need to hear the joke, you want to hear the music, you want to hear all these different things. You start getting into the world of what frequencies you’re playing with and what you need to hear at any single moment. The rhythmic nature of how the sound is cut, how it works with the music, how it relates to the jokes, those are probably the biggest challenge.
AF: Plus, comedy itself is hard in and of itself.
Henighan: Completely, there’s no doubt about it, that comedy—any single thing can either enhance a joke or it can really ruin a moment and stuff. Comedy writers and people that are into comedy, they spend a lot of time, obviously, writing those lines and they wanna hear them. We got into things where, especially with Deadpool, you got not just one joke, you might have one starter joke and then there’s a middle joke, but then the finisher joke is less than three seconds later or something. The idea of, how do you pace those out? How do you make sure that the audience understands every single thing? That’s where it becomes a challenge.
Kudos to Shawn, Ryan, and our picture editors, Dean Zimmerman and Shane Reed, because without the rhythmical nature of those four working together, sound can become really messy really quickly. We have to depend on each other to make sure that we have the room and the space to fit everything in and actually still make it big, dynamic, and powerful.
AF: How involved was Ryan Reynolds in the process?
Henighan: Oh, 100%. Every single step of the way, he was involved. He’s such a great collaborator. This is our third movie together. Shawn’s done three projects with him so our little gang has just gotten better each time. It’s just gotten more comfortable. Ryan will text me directly, “Hey, I got this great idea. You want to try this or that?” When we do speak, he sometimes will talk in sound effects, in terms of what he kind of wants a scene to play like. Again, between Shawn and Ryan, they’re always sending me ideas. I’m doing stuff here, I’m sending it back into the Avid. By the time we get to a final mix, a lot of the sounds, a lot of the ideas have already been vetted, they’ve already been tried out, they’ve already been lived with.
The great thing about Ryan this time, he actually came to the final mix. He was with us for about seven or eight days. Sometimes, director and actors, they’ll come in, and let the director do the thing, but the actor usually will hang out for a little bit and then takes off. Ryan, obviously, because Deadpool is literally him, and producer, actor, star, all of it, he just wants to be there to be able to feed off of everybody’s energy, and actually give back. He had so many great ideas.
He wanted to try out different jokes, he wanted to get quick lines of ADR added, so he could try out a new idea and by that time in the process, it’s a short yard game, right? You have the movie, you have the framework of everything, but the idea is how can you plus a certain idea, how can you plus a certain scene? That’s where Ryan really comes to life, because you see him sitting on a mix stage and he’s looking, and he’s like, I know what I can do, and then he’ll try a couple different ideas. He’ll riff an idea 10 different ways, we’ll put it in, and we’ll see if it actually makes the scene better, and quite often, it did.
AF: I was thinking about the writers’ strike and all these comedies that were filming at that time. One thing with Ryan’s character is wearing the mask. I would assume after the strike ended that he could go back in there in ADR and just improv any lines.
Henighan: That was it. That’s exactly it. We just did it all the way through. We did it right through to the last possible moment with him. It was great because he would be able to plus a few things, but the danger in some of that is when you go too far almost, right? They just don’t want to stop on some levels. They want to keep trying ideas and trying ideas.
You’re like, okay, well, we’ve all been living with this movie for a while and these lines have been in. Now you’ve changed the line and yeah, it may be funny for us on the stage right now, because we’re like, oh, it’s a fresh line. It’s a new thing. But is it really making the scene better? There’s that constant balance and double checking yourself to make sure that, yeah, it’s a funny line, but does it fit in the overall scope of everything?
Do we need to bring other people in? Quite often, the Marvel execs would come in and be like, okay, we want to play you these couple of scenes because we’ve changed one phrase or something. You get other people to weigh in because quite often, you can go down that rabbit hole of just trying to always plus it and always make it funny.
Most of the time, it worked, but there’s always that danger of if you go too far or if it’s funny in the moment, but maybe not funny overall.
AF: Can you talk about working on the minivan fight scene?
Henighan: The song was in for a long, long time. The fun thing about that idea was just how to how to have fun with a “Grease” song and the contradictory nature of that uplifting song with two guys beating the crap out of each other. Of course, the two guys can’t actually even die so the irony of that against the song just really made it made it a scene that was just a lot of fun to figure out. Obviously, the music leads that moment, but you still need to feel all the punches and the stabs and the body falls and the crashing through the windshield and all that kind of stuff. The challenge there, again, was just sort of making the rhythmical nature of the sounds feel fun and exciting and fun, but not too—it’s almost like we could not go super realistic with it, we could go in a fun way with it. But again, the song was the driving nature of that and just framing all the sounds around it was the important part.
AF: What about the “Bye Bye Bye” sequence?
Henighan: Oh, the title sequence. How great was that? The guys obviously tried a bunch of different a bunch of different songs for that title sequence but when they landed on that, it all sort of locked in. And again, with sound, being a title sequence and wanting that song to fill the theater, my job and the crew that’s with me is like, you want to feel those sounds, you want to feel the stabs, you want to feel some of the some of the gore and the blood splashing across the screen.
You’re not taking the front line of it, right? In a title sequence, you’re looking to be able to almost feel the sounds versus hear them. That makes sense. You just want to make sure that you’re supporting the narrative of what you’re seeing visually.
The important part was because the song is so rhythmical, that we lined up a lot of the sounds with the music. If you actually listen to that version without the music and you watched it, you would hear stabs that would lookout of sync with the picture. You need to put the music in and then everything is lining up with the music. It becomes this whole amazing opening title sequence and stuff.
It was a challenge, but it was like, how do you get to feel correct in a title sequence when you’re playing a song that big and that important to the movie. That whole sequence—once we nailed that sequence, we knew that the audience would be like, okay, we know what kind of movie we’re in for.
AF: How did you first get an interest in sound editing?
Henighan: Oh G-d. Honestly, I think, obviously through music. I played in bands. I was always the kid that would go and rent the PA or go and rent the recorder and stuff. I always had this technical aptitude for it. Once I got into college, I was exposed to a lot of film.
Being a kid of the 70s, being a latchkey kid to a degree, I watched a lot of films, a lot of movies. I always had a real interest in soundscapes. There’s the Doors song, “Riders on the Storm.” I always remember they set up the ambiance of the rain and the thunder and all this kind of soundscape-y stuff. Pink Floyd and other bands did that a lot. The Beatles did it with atmospheres. That weirdly enough was the interesting side of sound design to me.
I went to a media arts college where there was a bunch of aspiring directors, editors, writers and stuff. You were in this environment of making short films and helping everybody else out. Me being a sound person, I felt my contributions can be doing the sound for these short, short movies. That’s honestly how it started in terms of my professional path.
The actual idea of sound and all those things, I think it’s always just been in me since I was little, just to always resonate with music and resonate with sound effects and sound design and all that kind of stuff.
AF: How has the job changed through the years with all the technological advances?
Henighan: I often say the things I did for the short films while I was in college, which were—I was the boom person, I had the recorder around my neck, and I was on set doing that. I would do the Foley and then I would do the sound effects. I’d cut the dialogue. A lot of that idea, that utopian idea of being able to do a whole film soundtrack as one thing hasn’t really changed a ton.
I’m not on set anymore. I have a whole crew with me and we take care of dialogue, ADR, Foley, sound effects, sound design, what have you. But the technology, it’s just allowed our job to become more efficient, obviously. There’s the amount of tools and the amount of things that are available to you are amazing.
What hasn’t changed is the ability to do storytelling and to use sound as a storytelling tool. That’s something that I try to—when a younger person would come along and want to get into what we’re doing, it’s great that you know all the latest and greatest gear. It’s great that you know all that stuff.
When you look at a scene, what do you envision? What do you imagine? What do you hear in your head when you’re trying to put together an action scene or something very simple, just two people sitting in a room and the challenges—how do you make two people sitting in a room feel appropriate and feel like you’re actually there?
That’s the trick. It’s not necessarily a trick, but it’s something that sound, no matter what the technology is out there, the idea of sound is always to support narrative and always support story and create these worlds and ambiances that these movies can live in.
AF: I know there’s been a lot of talk about AI in recent years. Has that had an impact on sound editing or do you foresee it having any kind of major impact going forward?
Henighan: I think it certainly will. A lot of people are discussing it. There’s a lot of tools that are coming on the market now that claim to type in a quick sentence of sitting on a beach, and then AI will create sounds for you. Look, I think if it’s used as a tool and it can be used to maybe open some doors that you might not have thought of sonically, if you can use it from an experimental idea, for sure.
But there’s certainly the thing of replacing actors’ voices and replacing actors altogether and looking at an actor and their voice and their likeness as an asset, like you would in a video game. To me, that’s just a slippery slope. I don’t necessarily think it’ll make it a better world. I think the tools, if they’re used in an interesting way, in a creative way, I think can help. But yeah, I won’t lie.
I think there are people that are nervous. There’s people that are nervous in sound, for sure. Look, honestly, technology has shrunk our crews over time anyways. When I first started, a crew would be 10 or 15 people, and now it’s maybe four or five or six people, depending on the size of the film you’re working on.
Could I see a world where it’s two people, and one of those people are an AI guru—they can do audio, they also understand the AI tools, and therefore they can manipulate a soundtrack a certain way. We’ve obviously seen it in desktop publishing, right? We’ve seen it where whole parts of industries have gone away because AI is able to do that.
I think it’s here. I think it’s our job, obviously, as humans to figure out where the role is for that. It’s an interesting time for it, absolutely. Scary on some levels, too, because when things are money-driven and let’s not kid ourselves, we’re in a business. When producers and movie makers are like, you have less and less money, you’re forced to come up with ideas of how to do something more efficiently.
AF: How do you stay grounded after having received an Oscar nomination for Roma and a number of Emmy wins through the years?
Henighan: Honestly, the accolades are great. I’m just incredibly fortunate to be working on great projects with people that I consider my friends—directors and collaborators that I consider friends. Nothing’s ever promised, right? No new project from Shawn, Alfonso, or anybody. You still got to bring your “A” game every single project. The idea that I’ve had a little bit of good fortune and good luck and some awards, it’s just icing on the cake. But honestly, one of the biggest thrills is when you get that email, phone call, text or whatever and they’re like, hey, we’re making another film. Let’s go. Let’s put the band back together. Those are the moments—that’s why I feel I do it, because you want to collaborate with people that are like-minded, that really care about what they’re doing, and you have a shorthand with and you have a comfortable working relationship so you can actually do your best work.