The Oscar-nominated sound team for “A Complete Unknown” broke down some of the key sequences in the film as well as working with James Mangold. Ted Caplan (Supervising Music Editor), Paul Massey (Re-Recording Mixer), and Donald Sylvester (Supervising Sound Editor) all previously worked with the filmmaker. Only Tod Maitland (Sound Mixer) is the newcomer to the team.
In addition to their Oscar nomination, Ted Caplan is nominated for a MPSE Golden Reel Award while the rest of the sound team is up for a CAS Award. Both Paul Massey and Donald Sylvester have previously won an Oscar for their sound work on earlier films.
Because many of the team have been working with Mangold for years, they opened up on the technological advances in cinematic sound, especially since working on “Walk the Line.” The advances worked in the film’s favor, especially when it came to capturing the crowds. While a number of new tools are available, Massey still prefers doing the mix on a console.
“One of the advancements that we’ve had that we could not have done in Walk the Line was we were able to extract the playback from some of those crowds and let the crowds just be crowds again,” shared Caplan.
“A Complete Unknown” received eight Academy Award nominations and follows the journey of Bob Dylan, played by Academy Award Nominee Timothée Chalamet, after arriving in the Greenwich Village folk scene in New York. Based on Elijah Wald’s 2015 book, Dylan Goes Electric!, the film takes audiences all the way through the night that Dylan went electric at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival.
Where most of the sound team got to work during the post-production process, Maitland was there from the beginning. He was there when Timothée Chalamet insisted that he would sing live rather than sing to playback.
“[James Mangold] wanted everything to be happening at the same time, where normally, as a production mixer, you try to get all the elements as clean and individual as you possibly can,” explained Maitland. “Jim wanted everything to happen all the time, which gave the actors a different kind of energy, I think, and much more authenticity to the whole thing.”
The ‘A Complete Unknown’ sound team spoke with Awards Focus about Timothée Chalamet’s performance as Dylan, how their shorthand with James Mangold has evolved over the years, the process of working on the 1965 Newport Folk Festival concert late in the film, and discuss the scenes that provided challenges to the film’s sound design.
Awards Focus: I watched A Complete Unknown in late November and it just blew me away with how Timothée Chalamet just disappears into the role of Bob Dylan.
Donald Sylvester: I agree.
Paul Massey: Absolutely. He did a great job.
Sylvester: I was surprised that we were—I knew he was a producer on the film and had been involved in a long time, but I didn’t know that he was going to be as good as he was. Once we realized that he was going to be carrying the load of basically singing live throughout the movie, I was surprised and pleased because it made everything just more authentic. I was really pleased.
Ted Caplan: He is so deep in the weeds on Bob Dylan. He had audio recordings on his phone that he’s constantly listening to, rare recordings that he would refer to, conversations, little bits of dialogue he pulled out of in little affectations. I know he brought it in production with Tod, but we saw it in post as well and it was pretty impressive.
Tod Maitland: I got to see him from the very beginning. From the very first rehearsals, he just kept developing further and further and further into Bob. It was really quite an amazing amorphous project.
Massey: I couldn’t believe it when I heard all of his live singing and playing as well. Quite amazing. Very consistent, very much like Bob, as I would remember anyway.
Maitland: In the very beginning, he came and he said to me, he said, “Look, I’ve been working to become Bob for six and a half years. There’s no way that I’m going to play back on any of this.”
Caplan: Yeah, I remember hearing a demo they had been rehearsing. I heard a little bit of it and I thought, OK, this is going to be all right, because he’s not doing a Bob Dylan impersonation. He’s doing the spirit of Bob Dylan and it’s really coming through as an authentic presentation, not just we’re going to do a historical reenactment of a movie. That really excited me.
AF: A number of you have a lengthy history of working on James Mangold films. How has the shorthand evolved in the professional relationship?
Caplan: The shorthand is he doesn’t have to tell us what he wants, to some degree.
Maitland: Oh, yes, he does.
Caplan: Realized it. Okay, sorry, Todd.
Maitland: He may not have to, but he wants to.
Caplan: He wants to tell you. But there’s often long times. I mean, Don, Paul, and I in post, started the movie and we hadn’t talked to Jim But we are just so attuned to his sensibilities that we can get going and then he can tell us what we’re doing wrong completely. But at first, we feel pretty confident having heard his aesthetic over the years that we can get started and work in the right direction, hopefully.
Sylvester: Well, my feeling is that Jim handles us the way he handles almost everybody he works with, and that is you do what you do, and do it to your liking, and then I’ll tell you if I like it. He lets us step up to the plate, and we take a swing. Sometimes, we hit it out of the park. Not often, but a lot of times, we get the idea that what he’s trying to portray, but he lets us sort of interpret things, and then he’ll tell us what he was intending. It works out pretty well. We all try to do our best from the beginning, but our years of experience have helped us at least get halfway there with him in the beginning.
Massey: Yeah, Jim’s films are all about character and storytelling. They always are. It’s not necessarily the subject that’s up on the screen, the person who’s on the screen. It’s all about how the story flows for the audience and how he’s trying to get the character of the story through the film as an arc. With that knowledge, we can always go into music pre-dubbing, and dialogue pre-dubbing and such from a mixing standpoint, and hopefully get within about 70-75% of where we need to get to ultimately, but at least present to Jim something he’s going to be somewhat happy with at least to begin with.
Caplan: The goal always is authenticity, whatever that means. It’s all about feeling like it’s not bullshit, that it feels really real. Whether it’s a sound design element or a piece of score that were never seeming fabricated or overly schmaltzy on the music side, it’s very much a visceral immediacy that he wants out of everything. I think that’s where we always start, whether that’s Dial—with the music, it was like, we don’t want it to be perfect. That’s not the goal here. We want it to seem authentic, right? We don’t want it to be a pop album. We want it to be an experience of watching somebody perform and that includes all the rough edges around that.
Maitland: Because I never worked with him before, what I marveled at is not only does he pay the attention to all the things that you would think he would pay attention to, but he’s watching every background actor, how they’re dressed, what their mannerisms are like, and placing people in specific places like no other director I’ve ever seen. I’ve never seen another director work background like Jim does.
Caplan: That’s in the sound, too. Right, Don?
Sylvester: Yeah. Oh yeah. He said to me at one point—he pointed to this person in this crowd of 15,000 people. He said I don’t hear that woman right there. I went, Oh, you will.
Massey: Now.
Sylvester: Yeah.
AF: For those of you who worked on Walk the Line, how has the technology evolved in the last 19 years?
Caplan: Oh, boy. I don’t think it has for Paul. Paul, what’s different?
Massey: There’s been obvious technology advancements in terms of Pro Tools, workstations, plugins, etc. But to be very honest with you, I still like to mix on a console. I’ll mix on an S6 or within Pro Tools, but my preferred platform is on a console. To that extent, the technology hasn’t really changed that much in how I mix. What has changed is the monitoring environment. Now we’ve got Dolby Atmos. We have better monitoring environments. We have more demands on the deliverables for the film, in terms of different formats and higher quality being distributed. But in terms of mixing style, I haven’t really changed that much, to be honest. It’s incorporated some of the plugins and some of the Pro Tools advantages, but the actual mix is still on a console.
Caplan: Yeah, I think one of the few things—because I also worked on Walk the Line with Don and Paul. I was cutting effects on it at the time. We were doing crowds, a lot of crowd work. And again, in this movie, we’re doing crowd work. Tod just did this great job of recording a lot of the crowds that were in the environments. Sometimes, there’s playback over the crowds. One of the advancements that we’ve had that we could not have done in Walk the Line was we were able to extract the playback from some of those crowds and let the crowds just be crowds again. If they’re singing along, just get that part of it and lose the guitar part of it.
That’s a huge advancement we were able to utilize in ways to save authentic performances rather than to make things recreate them. Weirdly, technology allowed us to be more authentic than if we had been in the past and had to recreate everything from scratch.
Sylvester: Yeah, I’m gonna second that because there was a lot of music being played throughout this movie, which was intentional, but there are certain scenes where people are talking and the music is playing and it’s at a different point in the music so it was not wanted. If you’ve got a conversation going on off stage, literally off the stage, the Newport stage in the wings, Jim would still have the concert going on for the crowd. Everything was going on and on the whole time and we had to just get rid of that music because we couldn’t cut to the music. We had to cut to the scene. Thank goodness, we had these new tools that could actually salvage that sound. It’s pretty remarkable what we could do in that regard.
Maitland: Yeah, Jim wanted—on set, the whole environment on set was that live feel. He wanted everything to be happening at the same time, where normally as a production mixer, you try to get all the elements as clean and individual as you possibly can. Jim wanted everything to happen all the time, and that gave the actors a really different kind of energy, I think, and much more authenticity to the whole thing.
AF: What were some of the challenges that came with mixing and designing the sound for the Newport Folk Festival performance in 1965?
Maitland: With this movie, it was like every day, you went to work, and it was like you were recording an album. I think that we had you felt the weight of that. It wasn’t just any album, it was an historic album. The movie is so much about music. It’s 90%, 98% of it is live so almost 60 live music pieces and 110 cues or something like that. I don’t know anything else that’s ever had it like that. Jim went into the Newport scenes, and we did, particularly 65, we did the entire scene live from beginning to end. It was a 23-minute scene. It started with the railroad men and went all the way up through all of Timmy’s songs and Timmy’s exit. The finale, the onstage finale by everybody, that was one single take. We did that multiple, multiple times.
Sylvester: Also, the picture editors would contest that when you’re using live takes, it could be problematic to cut between takes because being live, it could be a different rhythm. It could be slightly unique that doesn’t really make it when you put it up against another take. It brings attention to the set itself that it’s live. It’s not a pre-record. It’s not done in the studio.
I wish they were here to tell you that, but that’s exactly the problem that they had of piecing this all together was to make sure that even though it was real and live, even though it was being sung right then and there, it didn’t actually always match. But if you look at it now, of course it does. They did a great job and I think that was a real challenge.
My challenge was to put in enormous crowds of people that didn’t step on the music and didn’t get in the way because the crowds are a real character. They really are telling Dylan what they think of him throughout this film. People in parties and on the street and everywhere you go, they’re always interacting with him and he’s hearing everything they’re saying. It’s a real, it’s a real character in this film.
Massey: One of the challenges mixing-wise in that sequence was that, as Don just said, not only is the sync potentially different or the rhythm different between takes, but also just the tonality and the mic positions and such. Most of them were maintained, but there’s slight differences as you go between takes. Matching all of that was a huge job for Ted and myself. Also, during that sequence, that was gonna be obviously the loudest sequence in the entire film and intentionally, because he’s gone electric and he’s gone rebellious.
We also needed to maintain a build through the three electric songs in that sequence. Couldn’t just start off at a hundred percent and have nowhere to go. That was a challenge to make sure that we were loud enough for Jim right off the top and it had impact for the audience and defiance. The PA became a character, the reverbs and delays became a character that developed through the three songs. The low end, the base EQ of the songs, increased as the three songs progressed. I had to find ways acoustically and with compression and such to make those songs build without them getting to a point where you’re actually hurting and wanting to run away by the time you get to the third song. That was a challenge. Right, Ted?
Caplan: Oh, yeah. The electric guitars, in addition to Bob, is a character in that scene. It’s a very harsh element. It was when they played it originally, and it’s supposed to be here. But the mastery of this was getting it to sound aggressive and bigger as you went on through the songs, without it hurting your audience, that the audience watching the movie could still enjoy the sequence. That was always a struggle because Jim’s aesthetic is always like, let’s go too far and then dial back two. It’s always, let’s just see how far we can push it before we’re hurting ourselves.
That’s how we kind of found our calibration on each of these things. We’d go a little bit too much and then, all of us would say, maybe that’s a little too far. When you watch it, you really feel the aggression without it feeling painful or it being unpleasant to watch. It takes a long time to find that very specific bandwidth to work in.
Massey: You also have to be careful that if we went into the second song in that sequence and made a change, which probably resulted in something being louder or more highlighted, that it didn’t take away the impact of the third song, which was coming after it. Anytime those large adjustments were made, I always tried to get Jim to watch it from earlier on so we can see it in a run and just not make a bit of a knee jerk reaction at that moment in the mix.
AF: Outside of the festival performances, were there any other scenes or sequences that provided a challenge?
Caplan: I think we all really got a lot out of the Cuban Missile Crisis sequence just because it’s an area of the movie that we’re doing a lot of offscreen storytelling. Don, Paul. and even Todd—we all had elements and the music, too, are all telling the story that’s not on camera most of the time. It’s creating this entire story that you can just listen to and follow along with the character’s experience. Right, Don?
Sylvester: Yeah, the Cuban Missile Crisis was probably not experienced by most people who are going to see this film. We really had to explain the danger that these people were facing in their lives and it was a real deal. The media was very important in that moment but it was limited as what we have today is instantaneous and prevalent everywhere. They only had three channels then and they had radio and so basically, they could run for their lives is what they felt. We wanted to make sure that people realize that that this was not just a historical footnote. This was literally something that they thought was going to kill them tonight. That was challenging and it was fun at the same time. We had to add a lot of newscasts, a lot of terrified people running around, and sirens and so forth. I think it represents what they really went through at the time
AF: I thought I did a nice job of paying attention during the credits, but was that Timothée singing or Bob singing? I couldn’t really tell.
Caplan: Oh, the whole movie’s Timothée singing. There’s no Bob in this movie. Timmy sings every last lick of this and so does Monica, Boyd and Ed Norton. Every actor is performing their own songs and doing it live right there. Tod’s recording it. I think what makes the movie feel unique is that you’re not just watching a biopic narrative. You’re watching an experience of what it’s like to be there, to be at a concert, to really feel that time, the excitement of the time, the danger of the time, and watching Bob come into fruition in a way that we don’t often see in movies.
Massey: I think the fact that you couldn’t tell, Danielle, by the time you got to the credits is really great because that means you’d bought into Timothée as Bob or his rendition of Bob.
Sylvester: Either that or you’re pulling our leg. (Laughs)
AF: Well, by that point, everyone had left the screening room, so I had the freedom to actually sing along with the film, because I wasn’t going to do that with the others in there.
Massey: Well, everyone else missed the little thing at the end. I’m not going to give it away.
Caplan: Yeah. To the credit of everyone else involved—including Timothée—the sound of the band and everything, all of that, the mics that were used, the instruments that were used, great lengths were put in to make it feel like exactly like the album or the live performance. No detail was spared. Right, Tod?
Maitland: Yeah, no, absolutely. One of the main things was miking techniques because right from the initial rehearsals, I saw the way that Timmy played guitar and for the pieces that weren’t performance pieces that didn’t have stage microphones, I had to find a really creative way to wire them because he would hold the bass of the guitar really up high, way up high on his chest where a wireless microphone would normally be. We came up with the idea of putting it in his hair and aiming it straight down here and it was the only way to capture the vocals and the guitar live and it worked out amazing. I think we went through so many practical period microphones on this. I think we had almost 50 microphones that we went through and we used different ones in different venues to really create a different texture and sound for each different venue just to give it more depth and creativity.
AF: I will say that when I first heard Johnny Cash’s name mentioned in the film, I half expected Joaquin to walk in.
Massey: I did, too.
Maitland: A younger Joaquin.
Caplan: Right. I have to say, because we worked on Walk the Line and we also thought that for a second. But the first time I saw Boyd, I thought, oh, G-d, this is a great different take on this. It’s so fun. I want the Boyd and Timmy road trip movie where it’s Bob and Johnny Cash drunk and going cross country.