On James Mangold’s Searchlight drama A Complete Unknown, the sound team faced a monumental task: bringing the vibrant, raw atmosphere of Bob Dylan’s early years to life.
With Timothée Chalamet stepping into Dylan’s shoes, performing live throughout the film, each of his dozens of musical numbers needed to feel as raw, authentic and spontaneous as possible. After working out innovative techniques to capture Chalamet’s voice and instrumental performances, which included hiding microphones in guitars and the actor’s hair, the team had to go about meticulously reconstructing the sounds of Dylan’s world. This, of course, included the acoustics of a range of musical venues, from the raw energy of Greenwich Village’s folk scene to the infamous Newport ’65, when Dylan went electric.
The result? A soundscape that transports the audience straight into the heart of Dylan’s musical revolution.
In today’s edition of The Process, Mangold appears to interview the creatives responsible for bringing it to life, most of whom have been working with him for many years. This includes supervising sound editor Don Sylvester, supervising music editor Ted Caplan, re-recording mixers Paul Massey and David Giammarco, and production audio mixer Tod Maitland, a first-time collaborator of Mangold’s, who explains that for him, “”his movie was like no other…sound-wise….We pretty much went by the seat of our pants every day.”
For his part, Caplan explains, there were a number of major elements to “juggle and sort through,” in bringing the sound of A Complete Unknown to completion. “The first big lift,” he says, was working with Maitland’s production recordings of live musical performances, “weaving the narrative with the lyrics and the performances.” The second was making a “creative use” of Dylan’s own songs to score the film between musical numbers, deconstructing tracks and seeing where they might be able to work in support of the narrative.
“Then, of course, there’s source music throughout, all the diegetic music. So much street music,” Caplan explains. “The very first scene, we arrive in MacDougal Street and there’s got to be 10 tracks going in and out and feathering, just to get the feel of a real New York scene.”
During scenes involving musical performance, “music bleed-through” was a challenging issue with which to contend, as the microphone intended to capture any one element (like Chalamet’s voice) picked up many others (including live instruments and the sound of the crowd in the room). Crowds at concerts, ranging from hundreds to thousands in number, were another to figure out. Sound libraries of course played a role in honing the sound of Newport ’65, given that there were only ever maybe a couple hundred extras on set, and the actual number of attendees was around 15,000.
The hope, Mangold says, in tackling crowd scenes, was to avoid sensory overload and what he terms “gray sound,” which adds noise to the track without contributing anything to the storytelling. “In working with Paul and David all these years, I feel like I keep learning, even in the sense of a full atmos mix, sometimes less is more,” the filmmaker reflects. “Because there’s only so much you can perceive at once. And it’s really important that we understand, what do we want [the audience] to hear right now? Because ‘everything’ is kind of not a good answer.”
Mangold commends his collaborators on the sound team for their craft and “the specificity of [their] worldbuilding,” emphasizing how much the work they did contributed in bringing “an indescribable feeling of reality” to the film.
Released on Christmas Day, A Complete Unknown is up for eight Academy Awards this year – among them, Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Sound. For our full conversation on the film, click above. Check out clips from A Complete Unknown — including one from the Newport section — below.