Was it something to do with his character struggling with alcoholism, which brings along a different speech pattern and not so clear diction?
I think it had a lot to do with that. He’s drunk half the time. So he’s got this drunken sound to his voice. And all of that wonderful Gary Oldman-ism through a filter, created frustration to people who were listening to the movie, friends, and family of David’s, when he first started showing the movie. “Hey, this is great, but what’s he saying?” And so that created a little bit of a panic. And David said, “People aren’t understanding the dialogue, what are we going to do?” And so we then took the soundtrack in a direction for a period of time where we didn’t have this patina effect at all. And the reason why we did that was to demonstrate to friends and family, to the people, the producers, the trusted allies of David’s sphere of filmmaking comrades, whom he trusts and wants to get feedback from: this is as good as the sound can be. It’s going to sound old fashioned, but for right then, we wanted to make sure people can understand everything that was being said. So we did a complete passive, non-patina, and that was great for us because it enabled David to kind of go, “Okay, I don’t need to panic about having to worry about re-looping characters when I thought I did initially.” A sigh of relief. But then later, of course, we had to really get this right. And to what you said a moment ago, it set us off on a series of explorations and versions. And I think I got up to version 26 or 27 of the patina.

And it was interesting because we were, mixing the film non-patina, and then I’d run upstairs to my room and then do some patina work and go, “How’s this? And he’d go, “Keep going.” Then we’d mix. It was like doing two things at once. And then he got frustrated at one point. He was like, “Why can’t we just do the patina right now?” And I said, “Well, the reason why we can’t is that it’s a full process that goes on top of the final soundtrack.” And he got very frustrated, but he respected the choice to do it non-patina once I gave him an analogy. “Look, think of it David, it’s not like you’re shooting this on an old fashioned 16-millimeter camera. You’re shooting it at the highest resolution possible, looking at everything that you’ve got, and then degrading the picture to taste. But you need to have the highest resolution to then get it.” And he goes, “I understand, I get it. I just want to hear it finished now.” And I go, “Yeah, it will be. We’ll do the patina pass afterward.” And that created a whole additional two or three weeks of time, I think because we had to actually allocate more time to finish the mix because of this additional process.

How long was it altogether?
I think we allocated our normal four weeks and then we added an additional three weeks for the patina. And we came up with a process where I had to ask David: “Look, we need to mix this non-patina’d and make all of our creative choices, non-patina’d, how loud the music is, how loud the sound effect is. Should we pitch this voice up? Should I pitch it down? Is she loud? Is she too quiet? That footstep, that wind, that dog, that car, all those levels, let’s decide that non-patina so that when we do the patina, we’re focusing on the patina.” That frustrated David again. But he’s, “Okay, fine.” So we mixed the whole film non-patina. And we distilled them down into nine tracks.
So we still had individual control of nine things: jazz music, orchestral music, dialogue, Gary’s voices, wind, backgrounds, footsteps, props, ambiance, and whatever one I’m forgetting. So that when we were doing the patina, we could go, “Now I want a little bit more music.” We could still do that. But we made it such that we wouldn’t change what the music was. That was done on the non-patina pass. Because when we’re mixing a film, we will often slide some music earlier or later. Or David might want to do an edit to change the feeling of something. And similarly, with dialogue, he might want to change out a word from this take to that take if it feels it’s less emotional or more impactful for that moment. And so we’re always changing things as we go. It was more of a matter of, “At what point do we stop changing the film? And at what point do we begin the patina?” And so that was what created the additional time.
Were there any scenes that were especially challenging or complicated? Two scenes particularly stood out to me. One was, when Louis B. Mayer was in an auditorium at the MGM, addressing employees about a pay cut. All the echoes in that scene… And the other one was the Upton Sinclair rally with all the megaphones.
Yeah, the Upton Sinclair one, we mixed many times. Both of those scenes, we’ve mixed and mixed and mixed. The Upton Sinclair sequence was really difficult because David wanted the film to have a feeling of distortion. And then with Upton, he wanted a whole sonic staging of that sequence to unfold. He wanted Mank to come out of the hotel, oblivious to what was going on, but then all of a sudden realize he’s hearing something that then gets his attention, which is Upton Sinclair’s soapbox speech. Then getting closer to Upton. And then the world that’s around Upton, he wanted to have babies crying and people coughing and the sound of the depression and vehicles driving by. And he wanted it to sound like Upton was on the cheapest sound system possible, against the wall of a building and having it just sound like no production value.
But at the same time, he wanted to do these sonic rack focuses between that and then his conversation with Shelly. And then at the very end, he wanted them to focus back out such that we’re then playing the music in front of the hotel again. So there’s this music coming out, that’s playing from the hotel that dissipates into the Upton speech. Then we get into these extreme closeups of the Upton speech. And that was really difficult because he wanted it to be distorted. But the problem was, the more we distorted the dialogue, the harder it was to understand what Upton, Bill Nye, was saying. You’re seeing him from the side. You’re not really even seeing his mouth. And oftentimes when you see someone’s mouth, it’s a lot easier to understand what they’re saying, but in that particular scene, you don’t see anybody’s mouths.
You don’t even see Richmond Arquette’s mouth, who’s the guy that yells, “You’re a Godless, faithless commie!” All that stuff, all the insults. And so that scene was really, really difficult. We didn’t get that for a long time. And similarly, the other one you mentioned, the pay cut speech by LB Mayer. That was tricky. And even leading up to that, the long walk and talk where LB’s being introduced to Mank’s brother, and he’s getting the whole sales pitch about what MGM stands for. David wanted to have all of these sounds. He wanted the Trent [Reznor] and Atticus [Ross] music to be playing with this rhythm. He wanted to hear the sounds of the sets and the bells. He wanted to have this whole sonic spectrum and that was also difficult for us because Trent and Atticus had scored this piece of music.
It’s so gorgeous, by the way.
It’s amazing. And because I’m mixing the music, sometimes it’s like, “Okay, let’s just play the music, David.” And he’s like, “No, we got to fill in with all these other sounds.” And then they heard it and they’re like, “What’s all that other stuff happening?” Which is fine, it is filmmaking. And with David, as you know, because you know his films, his films often do require multiple viewings. They’re very dense. Even when Charlie Lederer holds that telegram up, there’s not enough time to read it practically. That’s the tempo that David is operating by. So yeah, that sequence with LB asking everyone to take a pay cut, that was difficult. And David wanted to create this sort of sense of perspective there when we’re close to LB, you feel him being intimate, but when we’re far away, he’s echo-y, but we still need to understand him. And that was very challenging.
I read somewhere that you used vintage telephones as part of your sound process.
We used telephones in two ways. The first obviously was as the sound that the phone itself makes by ringing. But more importantly, what we wanted to do is use the sound as a playback device for the dialogue. When Mank gets on the phone, talking to the various people to whom he speaks throughout the film. And so, we do tests: here is this vintage telephone number one, here’s number two, here’s a digital telephone filter, number three, here’s an analog… And of course, David goes, “I like number one, but I like the distortion of number three.” Okay. So we have to find what that phone sounds like. What’s great about David is, he’s always thinking: “What if Mank’s phone is a lousier phone because he’s in the country at Victorville, but the phones in Hollywood are the expensive phones and they sound better?” So he wanted to create that. And I’m like, “That sounds awesome. Let’s experiment with that.” So we had a room where we had a microphone, the telephone, a speaker, and we would run all the dialogues through the phone, play it out of the phone, record it with a microphone and then put that in the movie. And it was nice to do that because it felt it was authentic. We have a lot of modern technology now available with software that can emulate these things and they sound great. But using the real thing, I think in some way you feel it, I can’t explain it. You do get a sense that it’s a real phone.

You’ve done some of this work during COVID. That must have been challenging.
Yeah, that was hard. Particularly for our sound crew. What normally happens is, we’re all together in a room as a team. It was like Thanksgiving without your family. It’s no fun. You feel detached, you feel lonely, you feel ignored. And so that was very important that we maintain the feeling of camaraderie and a feeling of inclusion, despite the fact that everybody couldn’t be in the room. I won’t lie to you, there were times when it was upsetting for some of the people on our team. It’s like, why can’t we be in the room? We tried to work out a way that we can rotate people. Because we only could have in total number four people in the room. And so we always tried to keep that in mind. And that’s a complicated emotion to have on top of the stress of just creating a soundtrack. But even though it was a huge disappointment not to be able to be together, I think it shows what people are made out of in the end. Your own humanity on top of the creative experience. It’s really psychological. I think what we’re going to look back on these times is, how we communicated to one another and how we treated each other as people during COVID.
You’ve been working with David Fincher for a while now. How did your process together evolve over time?
We’re really good friends. So many people are intimidated by him and he is an intimidating person and he’s always been. What I love about him is, he’s the kind of person that could go head to head with someone like Donald Trump in a tête-à-tête argument because David has this way of being a good Ninja and he can take any argument and flip it around and put you in a headlock. He’s so skilled at just conversation and logic. And I think people find that intimidating. I find it really fun. And I also like how mean he can be, but I enjoy it because I know that he’s not really being mean. He wants to get something done in a particular way. And so I feel lucky in that I’m beyond the level of intimidation or fear or being nervous. The familiarity is really nice. And I think that he likes it too, because he doesn’t have to worry about my feelings. I don’t care. Like he’ll just say, “That sounds terrible.” And I’m like, “Okay. Fine.” And I don’t mind the work being criticized.
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