by Tessa Swehla, Associate Editor

I’ve been fascinated with production design since I first watched the DVD extras on Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings Extended Edition as a teenager. It was the first time that I had considered movies as a craft, something that needed the skills of a lot of different people to achieve. An acquaintance of mine once said that movies are one of the greatest artforms because they rely on so many different mediums in order to function: music, sound, set building, costuming, acting, visual art, etc. When a movie is made well, these aspects blend together seamlessly, making the production seem effortless.

However, I admit that I’ve gained my information piecemeal over the years as I’ve studied different films and how different aspects of them–particularly special effects–were realized. So I was delighted to have the opportunity to interview Terence McCormack, an experienced sound utilities technician who is part of the sound team that is up for the Academy Award for Best Sound for A Complete Unknown. I learned a lot about the role of the sound team in film as well as the intricacies of recording the sound for a music film.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Have you always been into film? How did you get into film sound design?

Terence McCormack: I've always been into movies, you know, but the question of how I got into film is a particular journey for me. I'm sure it is for everybody, but my grandfather was a sound person, and my father was a sound person, and my aunts and uncles are sound people, and they all married other sound people, or other people who work in movies. My mom was wardrobe, and my aunt’s married to a grip.

It wasn't really my plan. I was really sure I was going to be a firefighter for a long time and was like a good bit of the way down that path of joining the FDNY, and then I was a production assistant for a couple years and just really liked being on set, the excitement of it. I remember just asking other crew members, these like old-timers, “Hey, what does this thing do; why do you do it like this,” and thinking it was so cool that these people would like take the time to talk to some like 18-year-old shithead about why a light has a ballast, which is like a thing that certain kinds of lights have. And then my family helped into the union, and they trained me. I shadowed them on set for a long time. I started doing sound, and it's great; I mean it's really very fun. It's a lot of work, the hours are crazy, and it's really hard to maintain a social life and partnerships, you know, but it's cool. It’s exciting to make movies.

Would you say that that's a primary way that people learn these types of crafts is by picking it up from people who are older or more experienced in the business?

TM: Yeah, I think so. I kind of hated being a production assistant, but I'm really grateful for that time that I spent there, because you see what sort of every craft does. On one day, you might be assigned to be lock-up, where you're stopping people from crossing the street or [you] might be near where the grips are, and then you might be near wardrobe on another day. So you get to know a bunch of people, and you see what they do. I didn't develop like a myopia of what filmmaking is, because you're doing all kinds of stuff. Once I started doing sound, you really learn so much from other people. I didn't go to film school, and a lot of people do, and I think you learn a lot about the vocabulary of filmmaking, and also like how stuff cuts together, and like that kind of thing. Those are really important things, but as far as craft, I don't know that going to film school would have added that much, except some more time, you know, familiarity with the equipment maybe. But as far as knowing how to boom, you can only do that by doing it. You start as the sound utility, and then there's a boom operator who's telling you what dialogue and sounds you're trying to pick up in that scene, and they might tell you, “Oh, here's this light; you need to like look out for this, and the way to avoid it is by coming with the boom, like over to the side.” They might be able to give you that little hint, and then over the years of these older people giving you hints like that, you start to develop a real sense of the pattern [of sound design].

I spent a good bunch of years doing TV, predominantly. I did the Marvel Netflix shows, and then some like other TV shows–like that show Power and a show called Smash–and some other things here and there. That's sort of where I learned a lot from the crews that I was working with then. I learned to be quick and efficient, because on a TV show, the schedules are really tight. You're making an hour of TV in like 10 or 12 days, but then on a movie, you're making maybe two hours of a movie in three or five months. I did The Irishman, and that was like six or seven months, maybe more. [It] was a really, really long shoot. You can really get into the quality of it and like the creative parts come out.

You had mentioned the sound utility, and I noticed when I was looking at your IMDB page that that is mostly what you do. Could you describe that position to me?

TM: The sound utility, I think, has gotten a lot more complicated. There's a lot more things that you end up doing as a sound utility: I'm booming most of the time, at least with the team that I've been working with full-time since 2019. But I plug all the equipment in, I hand out all the headsets and everything that all of the above the line–producers and stuff–what they listen to. I hand all those things out.

One thing I've been sort of showing people [to give] an idea what A Complete Unknown was like is this diagram of the Columbia Studios set where Bob did all the recording for the albums that he did, the ones earlier on in the beginning of his career. One of the things I end up doing a lot is designing all the routing and how everything is going to come in and out of the board and into the recorder. I find out all the mics that are going to be needed, and I figure out how we're going to run it. I develop the routing on the board, and I set it up so that the mixer can just get there and basically has everything at his fingertips. We record way more tracks than we used to. The recorders that we used to use maxed out at eight tracks, so now we have one that goes to 64, and we'll get close to that sometimes. We have the hardline microphones, and then we also have a bunch of wireless out there, and everybody's wired on top of that, at least in this example. So there's just a ton of people, a ton of mics, and so that's the kind of stuff that I've been doing. It's the kind of stuff that I think is really fun, and  a good challenge. [It’s] like a puzzle to figure out, so that when the sound mixer gets there, everything is labeled, and I maybe talk him through a little bit, like, “Okay, this is how this one works, and when you do this, this other thing might happen.” 

I also really love booming; it's a really fun, terrifying 3D puzzle that you're trying to solve, like how to get the microphone in the right place while not casting a shadow and while not being in the shot. You don't want to stand in a place where the actors are looking–it's called the eye line. You don’t want to stand where the camera is going to move, where the actors move. If you get in the way, it's going to be a problem, and, depending on the job that you're on, it can be a bigger problem. People can be sort of intense about it. When you're working on a movie that's Steven Spielberg or Martin Scorsese, I don't want to have the memory of them being mad at me. That's psychic damage I'm not interested in being dealt. There's an adrenaline rush, and it's an intellectual thing to try and figure out that's super fun. 

It almost sounds like choreography as well.

TM: It definitely can be, yeah. If the camera's stationary, that's one thing, but if it's you and the Steadicam and two or three other people walking around a room, you're moving, the camera's moving, the actors are moving, and you're trying to dance around all the lights that the electrics have hung up around you, and, yeah, it's great.

You said you find that to be a creative exercise, like a puzzle. I assume that puzzle, like you said, has gotten more complicated since there's more mics and more tracks that you're recording.

TM: There's an expectation now that didn't used to be true that we wire everybody. I got into the union in 2010, and there wasn't an expectation that we were going to wire people unless you needed it, unless the shot was too wide or if one camera was wide and another one was tight and those two sounds of the boom wouldn't match or if there was just a really bad shadow. If you're in a really loud space, sometimes having a wire on somebody means that you can avoid some of the noise that's happening around them, because the microphone's much closer to them. [Those mics] are generally not as powerful, so they don't pick up the other stuff. 

But I think what has changed is that we used to shoot film all the time. When the maximum you could do is a thousand foot magazine in a film camera, you knew that you were only going to be booming for that long.  A Complete Unknown was digital; those cameras can roll for a really long time. Some of the [digital] cameras can roll for 40 minutes. That almost never happens; it's not great for any craft when they roll for that long. At the beginning of the take [an actor’s] makeup looks great; 40 minutes from now, who knows what their makeup looks like. If you're at a dining table, and you start shooting and people are eating, 40 minutes later, it might not match if you just keep resetting without cutting and giving people a chance to reset those other things. So, hopefully, you're not rolling for that whole time, but you can end up rolling for a really long time. 

I'm imagining there's a lot of arm strength involved with the boom for rolling for a long time.

TM: You get used to it, and there's ways around it. You learn to hold the boom [a certain way] for a while, and then, if you start getting too tired, you can shift to a different set of muscles to give those ones a rest. And then you're  moving around and trying to make sure that you're not hurting yourself, so you're going to be able to make it to the end of the take. 

What's the collaboration like with other sound people and the actors?

TM: The standard is a three-person department, so it's the sound mixer, the boom operator, and then sound utility–or the third is what we would call it. On a music-based movie, there's usually a sound playback person, so they have the pre-recorded tracks available to play out loud. On A Complete Unknown, Timmy (Timothée Chalamet) did all of it live, so the playback guy was there just in case it was useful. There were scenes where other people who weren't Timmy maybe got some playback, or you might feed just the drummer the playback so that the tempo stays the same, just so that they have it, and they're keeping the beat. In Columbia Studios, there's a drummer who has headphones on in the movie, so why not give him something to keep the tempo. It makes it easier for them to cut later, because you know that the tempo is steady all the way through, where if there's no tempo guide when you're cutting from one shot to the next, it could have sped up or slowed down. We kept a close eye on that on A Complete Unknown. The music people would tap the tempo out to make sure that it never drifted too far. 

Timmy's pretty amazing. It was really wild. It was really, really impressive to be there. Ed Norton was so good and Monica and the guy who played Johnny Cash (Boyd Holbrook) really brought that Johnny Cash cool. A great cast, and really great, wonderful performances that were a joy to watch. Sometimes you work on something, and you just don't know if it's gonna be any good. But on this one, we knew that we were making something really cool and that we were excited for people to be able to see and see in the theaters. Because it's a movie about folk music, but it somehow still manages to be big, even before you get to the electric stuff.

How is it different working on a musical film like West Side Story–which your team was also nominated for in 2022–and A Complete Unknown versus a drama like The Fablemans or an action film? Is it just the number of people or are there differences in the way that you set up as well?

TM: There's a lot of difference. We're a lot busier on a music movie. It's also sort of a privilege, because on some movies, the sound department can end up being an afterthought. When the movie is about sound, about music, the sound department becomes a lot more important, and the work that you're doing is more important, and there's more pressure to do a better job, especially when you're doing it live, like we did on [A Complete Unknown]. It's just another order of magnitude than if you're doing a movie that's just three people talking in an office. Which isn't to say that those aren't also complicated. I worked on Billions after COVID, when the whole industry was all over the place. There's almost no music ever in Billions, but it's super complicated, because in those sets, there's a million panes of glass everywhere, and so there are reflections everywhere. It turns out that paying attention in geometry class is kind of useful, because the angle of attack is the angle of reflection, so being able to figure out where your reflection is going to be becomes part of the puzzle solving.

But especially on something on West Side Story, some of the songs were live, but a lot of them weren't. Not because those people weren't incredible performers, but because we were outside in the street, and there would be 40 dancers all going at once,  running around in the streets, just not really feasible. When you're inside, in West Side Story, when Maria and Anita are going at it, the “Stick to your own kind,” the “Very Smart Maria,” that number, I forget what it's called right now. That's live, because that's a very emotional performance, and the camera's also really close, so you would be able to see that. It's a different skill set and you're paying attention to different things. 

On this movie [A Complete Unknown], how are we going to really nail Timmy's performance, both singing and also his guitar playing? How are you going to get that? So with Timmy, when he was playing the guitar, whenever the shot allowed it, the boom operator would be above, and then I would be coming from below to focus on the guitar. But also sometimes Timmy was…if you watch Bob Dylan playing, he has sort of, like, a hunched over playing position, and being the performer that Timmy is, he was emulating that, and so the mic from above wasn't always going to get a good angle at it. Coming from below, you get the guitar and you get Timmy.

We really like working on music movies. We've been doing a lot of them. We also did Tick Tick…Boom. It's become sort of our specialty and also a great joy. I mean, what's better than being around people making music all day and being a part of recording that?

Are there certain environments that are difficult to capture sound in?

There's like a couple ways to think about doing sound. One [way] is that part of our job is to try and get the cleanest dialogue that you can, so that post can do whatever post needs to do to edit stuff together in a way that's seamless. Another [way] is that we don't just want to capture the cleanest dialogue, we also want to capture what the room sounds like. You want the audience to feel like that sound is coming from the room, because if you're just capturing a studio clean recording, they might as well re-record and do it all in ADR. So even when we're using the wires, we'll have other mics in the room to capture what the sound bouncing around the room sounds like. 

When you're outside, it can be complicated, because maybe there's construction across the street. But my uncle and my grandfather always used to say that if you see it in the movie, it's okay if you hear it. If in the movie, the audience sees that there's construction, it makes sense for there to be construction [noise] over the dialogue. But if you never see it, then it becomes a real problem, because there's a sound that people are hearing in the theater that doesn't make any sense. They don't know why it sounds so loud in this quiet park, because there's construction across the street, so sometimes what we end up doing is like, “Hey, can we have a shot that shows the construction or can they mention the construction somehow?” Then the audience will think, “Oh okay, I know why it sounds like that, it makes sense for it to sound like that, of course it would sound like that.”

It’s more immersive for the audience to have those sounds.

TM: It definitely puts you in a space. If you're in a concert hall, we put microphones out deep, like all the way in the back, and then we'll have some midway, and then, we get the microphones as close as we possibly can. Then in post, they're able to choose between the different shots. There might be one camera that's really far back. Like a really wide lens shot of a concert hall tells the audience that they're in a concert hall and it sounds echoey, which is what a concert hall sounds like. 

I'm thinking of one of the earlier scenes when Bob is singing in a concert hall, and it starts further out, and it gets closer and closer, the Steadicam gets really, really close. We're coming in with the boom, and it changes the echoes you hear as the camera's changing the perspective. Then in post, they're using all the bits and pieces that we're giving them to change the perspective of the sound that immerses you in it, which they're able to do now with surround sound and Dolby Atmos. So we try to give them as many pieces of these things as we can: we give them the mic that he's singing into, and we give him the mic that we've put on his person, and then we give the boom, and then we have these other microphones that are really far away. Maybe they put those microphones that are really far away in the speakers behind you, because that's where they would be, so you're getting the echo coming from behind you, and that's the real echo that's coming back and washing over you, and it'll travel across the speakers in the theater.

That’s incredible; I’ve never thought about how they could layer the sound that way. It really puts you in a specific time and space.

TM: I think putting the audience in the room is a big part of what we do. Some of the microphones that we used in that movie are from that era. They're 60-year-old microphones going through tube amps, and that's how we recorded the scene. We didn't use the newest clinical microphones so that you could have the most pristine sound. We were using microphones from that era, because that's what it sounded like.

There are so many people on a film set, and they are all trying to help the director and the writer and the actors tell the story with the tools that they have, like the wardrobe ager who's taking a brand new garment and making it look like they've been wearing that thing for 15 years. We're also trying to tell the story of what that space sounds like. We all have different roles to play, and we all have different colors and paintbrushes to put on this piece of art that we're making together. The director is the person who's making the film, but we're just part of that tapestry that ends up being put together. 

Is there a lot of collaboration between the different production design departments and the sound team?

TM: Yeah, for that Columbia Studios [set], we worked with the set dressers really closely to be able to decide where we were going to put the microphones, how we were going to hide all those cables. I mean, there was like hundreds of feet of cable going into that room. Luckily it was studio, so a lot of it was okay, but you have to avoid some of it. You don't want [the audience] to see all of that cable, like newer pieces of equipment. We're working really closely with the wardrobe department, because they're helping you [hide] the microphones on people, and you're always working really close with camera. You're asking the camera operator where you're going to put stuff. 

So the collaborative aspect of it all is also a joy. You spend 12 hours, 12 plus hours a day together. On A Complete Unknown, I think we did two 17-hour days. You're seeing these people more than you see your family, so you end up getting really close. Sometimes, like family, you get frustrated with people, but you also really get to know them. You get to see them at their best and at their worst and have really funny moments and then see people succeed and find out how to help them when you see that they're struggling. It can be a real pain in the ass when it's raining or you're crawling around in some disgusting basement or like in the kitchen of some gross restaurant, where you know that there are like rats, and you're trying to run a cable through it but it's also super fun. 

One thing that I'm really grateful for is the unions. I'm really grateful for IATSE (International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees), which is the union I'm in, specifically Local 52, which is the New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania area. They're the reason why we get paid; they're the reason why it’s a generally pretty safe environment and why the hours aren't even longer. I'm just grateful for the work that all my union brothers, sisters, and kin have put in before, before me, and the people who are doing that work now.

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