Chris Thompson is Senior Producer at Penguin Random House and directed the two Judge Dredd tales – The Pit and America – as well as Halo Jones for the new series of 2000AD graphic novel adaptations. Shortly before the stories were released, he chatted with Paul Simpson.

 

Were you a 2000AD fan growing up or is this all something new to you?

I guess I was aware from a distance of 2000AD and obviously I’d heard about Dredd but I couldn’t say that I was particularly an expert in them at all.

I think what we discovered once we started production on these, going over and over the comics time and again, we fell in love with them completely. We count ourselves as fans now but it was reasonably a new experience for me, for sure.

Had you seen the Dredd movies?

No I avoided them only because I’m very aware how important faithfulness to the comics is.

I’m very aware of the reactions that there have been to those adaptations and I didn’t want to be too influenced one way or the other. It’s been quite hard. I can’t tell you the amount of people who’ve said, ‘You should watch this, you should watch that.’ Now they’re done, I will gladly go out and see them and see how the dramas stack up.

I think that anything I can come up with without having the external influence based on that source material is probably going to be my best shot at faithfulness because I won’t be too swayed by whatever other adaptations have been made out there.

Friends of mine who work within the genre won’t watch or have any dealings with anything that’s similar while they’re in production.

Yes, that’s very much been my approach, only because I want something to be my take or my vision. For us the main driving force was we wanted to be absolutely faithful to the comics themselves. It definitely felt like the safer approach to go, ‘OK, I’m going to just engage with the comics for the next five months and make my interpretation of that based on how they stack up to the real world.’

I think that’s definitely something we found as well, just how relevant they all are. America was such an interesting thing to be doing the sound design on at the same time as the Capitol was being stormed [on January 6, 2021]. It was surreal.

I suppose it’s unsurprising because of the satires and a lot of what they say will resonate but it felt particularly valid to be doing these now. I’d hope that is also audible in the approach we took. Particularly America, we tried to anchor it in reality as much as possible compared to say The Pit. That I feel like we treated a bit more in the comic book parallel universe although I read a really good line a while ago about The Pit being Mega-City’s version of The Wire, which I thought was a really neat way of summing it up – obviously all of these topics, police brutality, democracy under threat are still relevant.

I guess the big thing that came out for us, particularly because of what was happening at the time but would have done anyway, is the fact they do stand the test of time. They were written late 70s or early 80s, the majority of the ones we’ve done in this batch, and they feel relevant. They discuss or broach topics that are still, unfortunately, things that need to be talked about and addressed.

Was there a temptation to, in any way, link anything in America back to the storming of the Capitol – to add a line or even to use some of the foley from what was going on there?

There wasn’t anything literal. I was always torn between that and being faithful to the original comic but what I will say is that I took a lot of inspiration and sound design from the news clips of the protests. With America you’re dealing quite often with crowd scenes which are actually quite difficult to recreate in audio. So if I was stuck in a scene and struggling to get it to sound realistic what I was doing was going to the news clips that were happening, just at that particular time, and picking up the soundscape.

It’s not good enough just to have the sound of thousands of people because the way we perceive crowd scenes, be it in the news or as individuals when we’re on the marches, is you’ve got a close soundscape of people around you and then in the background, general clamour.

I think something that’s served us really well generally in terms of the design is the beauty of the comics, their detail, the intricate worlds. The level of detail that goes into the design, visually but also in terms of the writing, is phenomenal. The only way we could approach the dramas was with that same level of details in the forensics.

Halo Jones is a really good example of it, where so much of it is not directly crucial to the plot but is constantly giving you clues as to what’s going on around you. The more you go through that script, the more you realise all of this is relevant. It’s presented as throwaway and background stuff – for example, Swifty Frisko’s news broadcasts basically permeate the story and every single detail that she gives becomes relevant at some point.

There’s a really nice parallel there between sound design and the visual: for me the biggest struggle philosophically with sound design is that you don’t want it to feel like the action is happening in a vacuum. You somehow need to create the impression that everything is happening at the same time and that there are other things happening around you, so that the scene breathes a lot more, it comes to life.

The way we did it was we pulled all the text out of the comics first. We didn’t go from a transcript; Kate MacDonald, the production co-ordinator, pulled all the text out. Then we took them apart and built them back up again from that. I then went through the script with Kate with the comic alongside and any clue that was purely visual that we weren’t getting just from the text we brought back in, in some way, as something that needs to be translated into sound.

That was our starting point and the interesting thing after that is that we didn’t just work from the script in the mix or in the design element. I always had the comic alongside. What would happen occasionally – and this is coming back to the original point about feeling like there’s something going on in the background all the time – is that you might do a scene design based on the things you brought out from the script and then find there’s something missing, that the balance is slightly off. I’d look back at the comic and there’d be a tiny little detail that I missed in the panel and as soon as I had that, I’d drop it in and everything would make sense.

I think that’s a testament really to the writing and to the illustration in the originals: if you remove one element in those panels, the balance feels off. What we’ve tried to do in recreating them is to recreate that.

How much were you liaising with Rebellion over these? Were they seeing scripts and then basically saying ‘Go on, get on with it?’

I think we were very careful. I bring it back to this point of faithfulness. I think we had conversations when there was anything that we felt was deviating from the source material – there’s maybe four or five things that I can think of in the three dramas I worked on that needed to be done just because, for the listener’s experience, there’s no other way of doing it. We were quite hard on ourselves in that sense; I think we really didn’t compromise. If something didn’t work in audio we really went to find some way to make it work in audio rather than have what tends to happen in dramas, this sort of go-to knee jerk reaction of ‘Oh, we can just adapt it’.

By and large I think they entrusted us with the project. We’re a relatively skeleton crew – it’s me, Kate and Duncan Honeyman [Penguin Senior Commissioning Editor] who did the casting – for the three dramas I worked on and I think because of that, we’ve got quite a consistent vision in them all. They do feel like one creative gesture rather than just separate things.

We liaised with Rebellion when we felt we were in danger of being unfaithful but I don’t think we ever really felt in danger because we were so hard on ourselves in terms of not compromising.

How did you get caught up in this in the first place?

The project was brought to me by [Audio Publisher] Richard Lennon who said ‘Do you think we can do these and how? Do we have the technical knowhow?’ and I think luckily we do. Essentially it was a partnership that carries on between Penguin and Rebellion.

For context, I’m Senior Producer at Penguin so it’s a job that would come to me because it’s a flagship project and I’ve got a lot of audiobook experience. I’ve recorded something like 300 audiobooks, I’ve done bits and pieces of mixing, sound design. I started as a documentary mixer back in the day but I’ve always tried to bring in a design element to audiobooks wherever possible. Obviously you want the words to be doing all the hard work but, because I have the sound design background and I’m a sound engineer by trade as well, I’ve always looked for opportunities to include other elements.

What was the biggest challenge of working on these dramas?

I guess the biggest challenge really is being able to do justice to the amount of effort that has gone into the original design of the comics themselves. Again, I’m very aware that faithfulness is very important so I think the main thing is not to miss a detail, somehow rendering it in a way that listening to the audio you end up with a pretty good picture of what the illustrations look like and certainly what was intended with the script. The detail in the script is phenomenal. There’s just so much care that goes into it.

I’ve been asked quite a lot, ‘Did you feel the pressure?’ because these are products that people absolutely love. I guess my answer to that has always been, ‘Well, pressure can be useful or it can be a hindrance’, and I think as long as you’re using it to really throw yourself into that detail then I think it can only be a good thing. I think the small team that we’ve got, we really threw ourselves at it so we didn’t miss a trick.

In America there’s a wonderful punch-up and the first draft took me a couple of hours but I just binned it all because it just wasn’t working. That should give you a microcosm of the way we approached them: if something wasn’t working, we just started again. I think we’ve been quite tough on ourselves but it shows in the result.

Joseph Fiennes’ voice as Judge Dredd is slightly higher pitched than I would have anticipated for Dredd but five minutes in and any reservations went. He’s got that steely eye in his voice, so to speak.

One of my first conversations with Joseph was all about my take on Dredd. As a kid my contact with Dredd was “Why is Dredd on the cover of this? He sounds like a horrible character, he doesn’t sound particularly nice” and I think my way into Dredd, having really got to know him over the last five months, is that you may not like his approach but the one thing you can say about him, and this is something he repeats time and again, is that he’s got principles and he sticks to them.

He’s pragmatism taken to extremes and you may not follow the extent to which he goes down that road but if you follow the logic of it, he makes sense and you know where he stands. I think there’s something about the moral stance there that’s quite appealing to me. I’m not for a second suggesting that tyranny is the way forward but I think in terms of understanding the character and being able to identify with him and being able to at times cheer him on, you want him to win this fight.

I was obviously aware of The Handmaid’s Tale in which Joseph Fiennes plays Fred Waterford. The commander is someone who takes pragmatism to extremes. He’s got his principles and will not shift. You may disagree with those principles and most of the time hate him for them but there are moments of humanity where you just sense he just really believes this. I think that, with the dystopian parallel as well, was an interesting way in for Joseph.

Certainly the way he played it works for me, because there’s this simmering tension. There are bits of explosions when he has the fights but there’s an element of Fiennes’ performance that anchors the dramas more in reality in a way because he’s not played him like a drill sergeant.

That felt like a controversial choice, I wouldn’t disagree, but I think it’s paid off. If our whole aim with these is to make them feel relevant and topical then I think that really gives it a tug in the direction of the real world in a lovely way.

If you had to pick one scene from the dramas to sum them up, which would they be?

I think in America the climactic scene after the hoverpod crash with Bennett Beeny crying over America’s body. There’s so many elements of that that say everything about what this project is. The music is absolutely stunning; the composer, Kate MacDonald, absolutely wowed me with her music for America. She just had a moment, a flash of inspiration with those.

There’s the sound design element: you’ve got Bennett Beeny’s voice which is at this stage being projected through a tiny speaker that’s implanted into his throat, which we had to observe in the directing as well as the performance. The voice is supposed to be generated to an extent but we need to be able to sense that he’s a broken man. Earlier on in the book he sings beautifully and here we’ve got this injured man, and Matt Morgan who plays Bennett Beeny really nailed that. He’s got these guttural screams that come out as America’s being shot.

All the elements are there. You’ve just had an action scene, the emotional arc’s coming to a close, so I think that really nicely encapsulates what those are about.

The Pit, I think there is a fantastic scene, in terms of encapsulating the challenge with these dramas. There are so many things that are happening simultaneously in The Pit: we’re talking about the Hoverporter crashing into a viaduct, motorbikes racing around, the Judges on coms and somehow we’re holding that together. There’s a scene, probably just shy of halfway through, where you’ve got everything happening at the same time and I think the real challenge was to be able to make sure everyone can follow what’s happening.

The Pit is sprawling, you’ve got so many characters and so much happening at the same time and I think the design on that was absolutely fantastic. Again, if something wasn’t working, we just binned it and started it again. And it really works; it must last about ten minutes, that whole scene. That one really blew my mind in terms of how we managed to pull it off in audio.

In Halo Jones, I think probably my favourite scene is with Toby the robot dog stalking Halo Jones and then attacking her. It’s so visual, it’s an action scene. The actors are acting out all of these things so you’ve got running, you’ve got the fight, the struggle, you’ve got being thrown by an explosion, all of this. This is alongside the script itself. And you somehow have to create this sense of a chase and space.

Visually that would be OK because you’ve got a camera – you just follow someone down a corridor – but without the visuals all you’ve got is a right and a left ear, so you’ve somehow got to create that motion for the listener. I think it’s come out really well.

Not only that, you’ve also got to create these massive explosions; fair enough in a cinema you’ve got a subwoofer but not everyone’s going to be able to do that. The big challenge there is to make them feel big. You’re looking at lower frequency, all that sort of stuff and thinking about it in terms of content – but I think the explosions really work, I think the motion in that scene really works. And again, the emotional arc really works.

I guess all three scenes were challenging but I think more importantly, the result worked, which was not always a foregone conclusion.

 

Judge Dredd: America, Judge Dredd: The Pit, The Ballad of Halo Jones, Brink Volumes 1-3, Sláine: The Horned God are published by Penguin Audio (RRP: £13.00 each) and are available to purchase from Audible, Apple Books and Google Play. Read our review of America here