'Mank': Sound Designer Ren Klyce Talks The Authenticity Of David Fincher's Latest Film [Interview]

You are likely to feel whisked away to the Golden Age of Hollywood while watching “Mank,” David Fincher’s historical character study about legendary studio screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz (Gary Oldman) and his painstaking process of writing Orson Welles’ “Citizen Kane.” Still, Fincher’s Hollywood epic won’t necessarily register as tritely nostalgic or melancholic about the past in a way showbiz movies often do. That’s because “Mank” is far more concerned about seizing a frozen-in-time type of authenticity. It’s a picture one could swear to be of the era as opposed to an homage to the era—a quality its sound design gloriously emulates by ditching contemporary sonic attributes and embracing monaural sound in order to match that of “Citizen Kane.”

“That was one of the very first things David was most eager to speak about,” recalls 7-time Academy Award-nominated sound designer Ren Klyce, who worked on 10 out of 11 Fincher movies and might win his first Oscar with “Mank.” “The original words he said to me were, ‘I want this to feel like this film was literally on the shelf next to “Citizen Kane,” existing on actual celluloid with the soundtrack on it. And I want it to sound like somebody made it back in that period.’ And that was a very interesting idea to start off with. Authenticity is the perfect word for it actually—that’s a very important thing for David in all of his movies. He wants it to feel like it’s coming from a genuine place.”

For Klyce, designing the sound of a film that hypothetically has “always been there the whole time” meant using today’s technology to fabricate a set of means and methods for the past to ultimately telegraph the feeling that the film was made then, with the technology of then. “How do we still make it feel sophisticated, but limit ourselves with an imaginary toolset of the 1940s?”

In an interview with The Playlist, Klyce detailed out his technical process and collaboration with Fincher, explaining how he achieved the vintage sound of “Mank” as well as that old-timey aural grandeur, as if the film is bouncing off the walls of a majestic movie theater.

You worked on the sound of a movie that feels like it’s from the era when the shift to the “Talkies” happened or was still happening. I feel like there is an interesting philosophical parallel there.
That’s a really good point. What was interesting for us working on the soundtrack was, now we are making these films that are very dense and complicated; visually and sonically. We have all these speakers, all this fidelity. So we can put a lot of things in front of an audience and still have the film make sense, a modern science fiction film with lots of sound effects, music, visual effects, and so on. And even films that David has made, we have a tendency to fill them in with lots of sound, to create a tapestry in a world that supports his idea of the story he’s trying to tell at any given moment. However, with “Mank,”—as you pointed out, a talkie, and that’s a really good word here—the most important part of its soundtrack is the dialogue. Obviously, the music and sound design is part of the emotion. But really they’re supporting characters to the written word, the dialogue. And then to be able to have this dialogue heard, we really needed to clear out as much space around it that we would normally fill in. And there are plenty of instances where we crowd the dialogue and challenge the audience. It’s typical in David Fincher style, like in “The Social Network.” It’s really hard to hear what the two characters are saying at the beginning of that film. What we learned was, because we were creating this patina, the old-fashioned sound, we had to be careful challenging the dialogue. And we learned that we had to play other sounds, even the music, a little bit under so that the talkie part of it could come through.

So you’ve mentioned this word, patina. Is that basically what you were calling the vintage soundscape that you were creating? Tell me more about the patina.
Yeah, we didn’t have the word patina initially. But David, as he was starting to shoot the movie, was eager to know what he was going to make sonically. Obviously, he and [DP] Erik Messerschmidt figured out their visual constraints, the cameras, the look… But he was concerned with how it was going to sound and he wanted to hear some tests. When David’s making his films, he wants to test things before he commits to them. Because you don’t want to wait until the very end to realize that we made a mistake that we could have solved months earlier. So he said, “I’m going to be doing some tests to make the film look old, but I want to hear some tests of the soundtrack of how it’s going to sound old.” And I said, “Oh, you want to do some patina tests?” And he goes, “Yes, patina tests.”

And that became the word.
It’s funny because it’s a good way to describe it. It’s just something getting old, really. It’s like when you have a copper roof on a building in Paris and it turns green, that’s a patina. It was beautiful once, and now it’s aged.” The first assignment was trying to find what that was. That set us on a whole journey of exploration and dead-ends. I don’t know how technical you want to get. It can get really boring fast.

Please get as technical as possible.
Okay. I think what’s important or interesting is, what David wanted to have in terms of the soundtrack and the patina was actually two sounds. The first sound was the old fashioned sound itself. And that was what we call the patina. But on top of the patina, he wanted to have another sound. And that [second] sound was the sound of the experience of the patina. He wanted the audience to feel as if they were actually in a movie theater, listening to the patina. And what is that sound? Well, to David, it is the sound of the memory of being in a large echo-y theater with a group of people watching a talkie and hearing someone talk and that dialogue filling the theater like an echo. And he wanted that to be in the movie as well. So we had to first mix the film as if it was a modern-day film without the patina. Then we did the patina, and then we did the experience of the patina, sonically.

Even at home, I felt that “experience of the patina”…like the sound was bouncing off the walls. And it made me really, really miss movie theaters during this ongoing quarantine. It sounds like it was multiple layers of work. What was that trial-and-error period like, and then finally arriving at something that felt true to what you were going after?
The first thing that David wanted to do with his picture editor, Kirk Baxter, was; while he was filming, he wanted to go to the editing room later, or have Kirk send him assembly cuts of the film. He wanted to start experiencing the emotion of the patina. And so in the beginning we created a sort of a cheap version, a not very well-defined version of the patina, which was in essence, a filter that emulated the shape of “Citizen Kane,” the soundtrack of “Citizen Kane.” How we arrived at that was to play “Citizen Kane” through a software that would have analyzed the frequencies that “Citizen Kane” had that accentuated the mid-range, didn’t have low frequencies, didn’t have high frequencies. And it has an interesting shape to it. It looks like a mountain, if you will.

And then I created a filter that was sort of reverse-engineered to that. And I gave that to Kirk so that he could bolt it onto the output of his soundtrack to then show David. I don’t think David loved it but it worked as sort of a facsimile. We had to start with something and he wants it right away. What ended up happening with that though was, it was too extreme. David of course knows every inch of dialogue backward and forwards as does Kirk. And as David started cutting the film together with Kirk, he started compressing the scenes faster, overlapping characters and dialogues faster with Kirk. And they start doing the Fincher thing, creating these great rhythms of character and reads and the way in which two people talk with each other, or more than two people talk with each other.

In all of that, he’s listening through this filter the whole time and it sounds like this [makes garbled talkie sounds]. We learned that a lot of the characters were very clear. However, unfortunately, Gary [Oldman] was not. I think the reason was because Gary’s character was being performed differently in such a way that didn’t lend itself to this sort of plug-and-play filter in a favorable manner. So he ended up just muffling. We couldn’t understand what he was saying.