Whether you’ve realized it or not, sound designer Michael Babcock has been shaping the soundscapes of some of your favorite films for nearly three decades. This past year, he worked on both ‘Nuremberg’ and ‘KPop: Demon Hunters’. He’s also a multiple MPSE Golden Reel Award winner for his work on ‘War of the Worlds’, ‘The Dark Knight’, ‘Inception’, ‘Mortal Kombat: Legacy’, and ‘Dune: Part Two’. ‘KPop: Demon Hunters’ has been nominated for the MPSE Golden Reel Awards this year.
“James creates an environment where you’re safe to talk about things with such a heavy subject,” Babcock says. “It just allows people to really do their best work.”
In this interview, sound designer Michael Babcock discusses his work on ‘Nuremberg’ and ‘Kpop Demon Hunters’, exploring the meticulous process of creating historically authentic and emotionally resonant soundscapes. He explains how director James fosters a safe and highly creative environment, allowing performers to tackle dark subject matter while maintaining nuanced performances. Babcock details the challenges of sourcing period-accurate effects, building immersive worlds, and mixing music and dialogue to enhance storytelling. He also reflects on his career, the emotional dimension of sound mixing, and his cautious curiosity about the evolving role of AI in the industry.
‘Nuremberg’ is set in the immediate aftermath of World War II where U.S. Army psychiatrist Lt. Col. Douglas Kelley (Rami Malek) is tasked with a daunting assignment: evaluating the mental health of captured Nazi leaders, most notably former Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring (Russell Crowe), Hitler’s powerful second-in-command. As Kelley interviews his subjects, he must confront both their warped justifications and the disturbing human capacity for cruelty.
Meanwhile, the Allies—led by Supreme Court Associate Justice Robert H. Jackson (Michael Shannon) and a team including Sgt. Howie Triest (Leo Woodall), Sir David Maxwell-Fyfe (Richard E. Grant), Dr. Gustave Gilbert (Colin Hanks), Col. John Amen (Mark O’Brien), and Col. Burton C. Andrus (John Slattery)—work to establish the first international tribunal in Nuremberg. As Kelley gets to know his patients, his psychological battle with Göring becomes a chilling reminder that extraordinary evil can spring from ordinary men.
As for ‘KPop: Demon Hunters’, when they aren’t topping the charts, Kpop icons Rumi, Mira, and Zoey fight a secret battle against demons threatening their fans. But a new rival boy band, hiding a deadly supernatural secret, forces the trio into their toughest fight yet.
‘Nuremberg’ is available to buy or rent through digital retailers while ‘KPop: Demon Hunters’ is streaming on Netflix.
Awards Focus: It’s so nice to meet you today. How are you doing?
Michael Babcock: Pretty good. How are you?
AF: I’m doing well. I got back in from LA a bit late last night.
Babcock: Were you flying? Did you have any trouble?
AF: Only on the way to LA from Chicago, but not because of the shutdown. It was because of Mother Nature deciding to have a lake-effect storm.
Babcock: The first one of the year. I’m from upstate New York, and actually, I spent a lot of time in Chicago, too. It’s that time of year.
AF: How did you first become attached to working on ‘Nuremberg’?
Babcock: Through James, the director. I had worked with him once before, and we are just worked really well together. I mean, really, anything that he wants to do, I’d love to be a part of. He’s a great person to work with for personal reasons and for creative reasons. He’s the real deal.
AF: Yeah. So how has the shorthand evolved in your professional relationship with James?
Babcock: On this one, this is a historical drama. We didn’t really need to talk about, at least for the sound parts of it, we didn’t really need to talk about the historical stuff much. He just basically expected, do the research, put that in there, which I did—all the vehicles, all the train horns and even down to the stenograph machines in the courtroom. All those are all authentic.
The first conversations we had was actually talking about the acting, because there’s a really good balance. I think there’s a great balance in this movie. It skirts the gray area as far as making all these people human. He likes to play with the sound and the music as a way of supporting those performances.
I just had a lot of questions about—I was particularly fascinated with the performances of Russell and Rami and Judge Jackson, Michael Shannon, and believe it or not, actually used that as a bit of a conceptual jumping off point as far as what can we get away with. What sounds can we use to help with the mood? How can we use the mix for dynamics to really help the story, actually and more importantly, their performances and how they change, and just how there’s gray area.
That was actually how it started. James is—I’ve heard the actors talk about this recently and I definitely want to reiterate. He creates an environment where you’re safe to talk about things with such a heavy subject. It just allows people to really do their best work and have part of conversations of, ooh, what can we do with this? But also, there’s a lightness because when you’re dealing with all the Holocaust stuff, it’s about as dark as you can get.
He actually creates an environment for everyone where it’s highly creative and it’s highly focused, but there’s a bit of a lightness to it to be able to make serious decisions both creatively and just bigger ideas of what the movie is touching on.
AF: Yeah. It’s one that hits close to home for me. My second great-grandmother was murdered by the Nazis.
Babcock: It’s that courtroom scene where they show the film. You watch that a lot. That’s where luckily you’re working with a bunch of—really, he gets a bunch of people around him that we’re all a cohesive group of people. You’re doing it for the greater good. You’re doing it to tell the story. Everything that happens in this movie is true. All of it, down to the interactions between Göring and Kelly and all that.
AF: I was surprised. Obviously, I’ve heard of Nuremberg and the trials, but this particular aspect of the story, I had never even heard about.
Babcock: It’s an amazing story. There’s a lot of other stories that he discovered in doing his research, which is how—it took him a long time to do his script. It took him a long time to make the movie. He had to find ways to focus what really happened, even down to making some of those courtroom scenes. That trial went on for a year.
But even down to the fact that they actually don’t know—there’s some theories, but they don’t know how Göring got cyanide. That’s all true. But there were actually real relationships between the psychiatrists and the Nazis. The Nazis had nothing else to do while they were trapped in prison, and they ended up just talking, which is some of what the movie gets into.
AF: Yeah. How time-consuming was it in finding the sounds for the vehicles and all the other period-accurate backgrounds and sound effects?
Babcock: It actually wasn’t too bad in that—at least for the plane, I had a recording of that exact plane from something else we had shot a few years ago. The set sound people were helpful in helping capture some of the really particular things, like the car horn and a couple other things.
The stenograph machine—there was a guy selling not the one you see in the movie, but a model like you see in the movie, on eBay for $40. Believe it or not, the stenograph machine may have been the hardest thing to find just to be authentic. The rest is relatively either things that recorded or we were able to get relatively easy.
It was kind of the making of the other—I’ll call them the mood sounds. That was more difficult because this is not a movie where you want to feature non-organic sound design. It was all about trying to find a way to make a mood, help some of the scene, and sell some of these locations than actually getting the period stuff.
Although I will say, this is a horrible tangent, it’ll take 10 seconds. There was a lot of research done about the kind of crickets, depending on where they were in Europe, whether they had crickets or not, and what they were. Because crickets are actually a storytelling tool in it, and it helps with the mood of some of the scenes. It was making sure those crickets were authentic.
AF: I don’t think I would have given the time a day to thinking about whether the crickets were accurate to that part of Europe or not.
Babcock: It’s one of those nerdy things that you want to make sure you do. But luckily, he wanted to be as historical as possible, but he was more concerned about the mood. I just wanted to make sure you could do both things.
AF: As far as ‘Nuremberg’ and ‘KPop’, were you working on both of them simultaneously?
Babcock: No, it was actually pretty much one after the other. Talk about two contrasting things. One is very serious and dark. But what’s interesting, the similarities of approach between the two is that both of them are world builders.
Even though you’re dealing with a historical drama in ‘Nuremberg’, you’ve got to come up with vocabulary that’s not just the period sounds. You have to come up with how you’re using dynamics, how you’re treating the dialogue, how you’re using some of—there’s actually some sound design elements that are helping on particularly dark and serious scenes.
There’s a scene in the cell between Göring and Dr. Kelly right after they show the Holocaust film. There’s kind of a dark rumble that we’re always trying to flirt the line of you can’t take away the performances, but you’re trying to add to the mood. That was an example of kind of dark, but taking the sound of a fire-burning stove and processing it a little bit. The idea of the stove was from the images of the camps. Things like that, because the prison is alive for the whole time. That’s kind of world building of coming up with a design vocabulary for that of how you’re playing things.
And then ‘KPop’, it’s the opposite of that. You’re building this warm, magical—this is actually in a way a cultural thing. You have a cultural thing that you have to deal with and some of that world is cute, has to be warm, cute, magical, and powerful because they’re demons, which is not the easiest thing to do. But believe it or not, going back and forth was actually really fun.
AF: Yeah. Do you have a favorite part of the whole sound designing process?
Babcock: Usually the mixing part. It’s always fun to come up with new ways of doing things, but the sound mixing part, you’re dealing with emotions. On both movies, actually, it’s a luxury because a lot of creative decisions were made depending on how you feel.
We would have discussions with how you feel on both movies and particularly on ‘Kpop’. You’re mixing the music, you’re mixing the sound design and sound effects with the music and for the rest of it, you’re making a lot of decisions based on how things are feeling. You’re having these deeper conversations about, how do you feel about this? What about if we tried this? And to me, that’s my favorite part of the process.
AF: Yeah. You’ve been working in the industry for nearly three decades now. What fears do you have about AI and how it’s going to impact sound design?
Babcock: That’s a good question. I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately. My opinions change daily because of what I either see of what AI has done for something else. So far, some of the tools that we have used or I could see coming our direction, some of them have been useful as far as the creative process of seeing what’s new.
It’s funny, ‘Nuremberg’ of all things, I use some tools that have just become available in the last two or three years to clean up the dialogue track. The production sound people did an absolutely amazing job on that movie, but you have to remove anything that sounds like it’s modern day. I’m speaking of being historical. I was able to embrace some tools that are, I would call them on the way to AI is the way the software works. It’s not AI, but to be able to embrace those things and be able to really save all their set performances was extremely useful.
There’s some things coming that sound interesting to me as far as the way you can search for sounds. That might be an interesting way that AI could be applied. There’s some things that actually do scare me. For a while, I was actually not too scared of it. I’m like, oh, this might be a fun tool that gives you some ideas, but it still has to go through a human. I still think that’s the case.
But I have heard some music created lately from AI that has scared me because it’s really good. I’m very conflicted about it because listening to what somebody did, just the idea is clever. It took a human to come up with the idea but what AI did in a very small amount of time and the detail it did it in scares me. I still like to think that can be harnessed for people like us because at the end of the day, we’re being judged by the humanity of the work that we’re doing. I’m trying to keep an open mind, but things are moving fast, which is scary.
AF: Yeah. And how did you first get an interest in sound design?
Babcock: I come from music. I actually have a music degree and an electrical engineering degree. I’m a musician, but I was also studying and doing music recording and mixing. I actually didn’t know what it was. I was always a big fan of film sound, and I paid a lot of attention to it.
At home, I would watch certain movies over and over and over again, studying them, and even listening to individual channels of what people were putting where. I’ve always had a fascination with multi-channel anything.
I went the film route because for me, it’s all those things. It’s using your music ears, it’s using some of your right brain. I can’t say I fell into it, but I definitely ended up doing exactly what I should be doing with my life.
AF: Even though the Academy didn’t give you an Oscar for those Oscar-winning sound teams, how honored were you to be a part of the teams that contributed to winning those Oscars?
Babcock: Great. I mean, it’s pretty awesome because it’s truly—projects, especially those projects, are truly a team effort.
AF: Since a few of them were Chris Nolan movies, I figured I’d ask this: why is it that there are times when I have to turn the volume up when they’re talking, only to have to turn it down as soon as Hans Zimmer’s score restarts?
Babcock: I’m probably not the best person to answer this, but I will say he wants the most theatrical experience he can do and there’s great logic in that. I think he’s right. He wants it to be the biggest theatrical experience that is technically or even more than technically possible.
AF: Yeah. The worst is when I’m watching a Chris Nolan movie while competing with the AC and wanting to also be respectful of the person living next door with the volume. It could be a challenge.
Babcock: Yeah, well, I’m pretty sure he would prefer he would love for every single person to watch every single one of those movies every single time in a theater.
AF: Yeah. I mean, obviously, that’s my preference. ‘Tenet’ was the only one where my first time was in my apartment.
Babcock: Oh, wow.
AF: That was the Covid year.
Babcock: Yeah.
AF: What were the biggest challenges when it came to the sound design for either ‘Nuremberg’ or ‘KPop’ or both?
Babcock: For ‘Nuremberg’, it was trying to find ways to add sound design and help intensify the mood. Coming up with, whether it’s winds or background sounds to help intense it, cleaning up the dialogue. The dialogue mix on ‘Nuremberg’ is—it may stand in my career as the hardest thing I’ve had to do and no one will ever hear it. Hopefully it worked.
On the ‘KPop’ side, there were a lot of huge challenges. Every single piece of sound design you hear in ‘KPop’ has gone through a rhythm check and a pitch check so it can play with the music. ‘KPop’ has a very particular sound to it in that it’s very highly produced. It has a big sheen to it and has a lot of layers. I looked at everything in that movie—dialogue, sound effects, music—through the lens of ‘KPop’ production. All the sound design went through that lens—whether it’s delays, reverbs, pitch or layers—down to the fact that when they gave me all the elements for the tunes, they wanted to make the music as theatrical and immersive. We did it big theatrically—Dolby Atmos—as possible. But also, there had to be some reverse engineering of how those songs get mastered. It was actually building a whole mastering situation in Dolby Atmos.
There was a lot of challenges in that movie and one of it was about making things magical but powerful because you can’t make it scary. It has to be warm and fuzzy, really, but they also have to be badasses. I could go on and on about ‘KPop’. ‘KPop’ was one of the most interesting, where all the departments—dialogue, music, sound effects, everything—were so intertwined. Certainly sonically, they’re probably the most intertwined of anything I’ve ever worked on. But being able to basically think about everything, literally everything, through a musical lens. I don’t mean like watching musical, but with looking at everything through a music filter was a very rewarding and not the easiest challenge.
AF:All right. Thank you so much. That was everything I had. It’s been a pleasure.
Babcock: Thanks for asking. I love when we think about some of that stuff.