Midge Costin’s documentary Making Waves opens in British cinemas on November 1. It’s a fascinating trawl through the history of sound in cinema, with multiple clips demonstrating the aural history of the movies, with contributions from many key players in Hollywood. Oscar-nominated for her work in sound design, Costin is now the Kay Rose Chair in the Art of Sound Editing, endowed by George Lucas and Steven Spielberg at the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts. During her recent trip to the UK, Paul Simpson had the chance to speak with her…

 You have a fascinating array of talent talking to you about sound – engineers and the producers, directors. Was there anyone who didn’t say yes?

There were a couple of people – Kathryn Bigelow said yes but discovered she couldn’t do it; Martin Scorsese, which kind of surprised me because it’s cinema history. A couple of other people. Terence Malik I would have loved but he doesn’t do interviews, it seems.

It ended up being very heavily California-based but it was really nice that we got Peter Weir and Christopher Nolan. We were very lucky – we got most of the people we wanted.

When you approached the film makers, how did you present the project to them?

It was always through their sound people and the truth is, they love sound. I know Steven Spielberg and George Lucas – they’re on the board at USC. David Lynch was the first director I got – Mary Sweeney is a colleague of mine and she was his editor and collaborator for years, so David did it. Spielberg and Lucas had said they’d definitely do it. Spielberg I almost didn’t get – he’s doing back to back films, and finally we were about to finish the movie. We had [the clip of him] at the podium, and we were ready to go without him, and then he said, “No I really want to do it”.

I knew all the directors said yes because they were already interested in sound. It was fun to hear Steven Spielberg to say he literally fell off his chair when he first heard the T Rex for Jurassic Park.

Did you ask them to talk generally about their movies or did you have a set of questions?

Oh gosh, I had a load of specific questions. I did a ton of research, looked up most of their films that I knew were important for sound. I looked at everybody’s body of work, looked at all the interviews I could find online and articles written, then I had very specific questions. The directors would say 30 minutes – but I must have had George Lucas for two hours if not three for our interview! The sound designers were three or four hours – the main people: Walter Murch, Ben Burtt, Gary Rydstrom. They were very generous with their time. A lot of the directors stayed longer than they said they would. That was great.

One of my favourite ones was Barbra Streisand. I came to the door, with my producing partners, and she knew our names. Often we’d send our questions to their handlers, to make sure they were appropriate. So, Barbara Streisand comes to the door and says, “Who’s Midge and who’s [writer/producer] Bobette [Buster]? I said I was Midge, and she took this thing like a script, and fanned it close to my face, and said, “27 pages.” I said, “27 pages?” She said, “Answers to your questions!” That was incredible. She did her homework.

What was the most surprising thing you learned from the interviewees that you hadn’t expected to hear?

One of the really surprising things, I didn’t even think about it: Walter Murch had only worked on mono films until Apocalypse Now and when Francis Ford Coppola heard the quad music coming from four speakers, he said he wanted his movie to sound like that. I knew that was the first movie that made surround popular, Apocalypse Now, but I had no idea they had only worked on mono films, not even stereo.

Barbara Streisand didn’t know she had played a role in cinema history. I was talking to Ioan Allen who was the one of the top engineers for Ray Dolby, and he’d said to Ray, “What if we get into movies, not just music?” Ray said, “You can check it out” but he didn’t really care too much. Ioan goes around the studios and they all say, “No, it sounds good but I don’t think we need it”, because they didn’t want to spend the money transferring over from mono to stereo. So Barbra Streisand was doing A Star is Born and a year later, Gary Kurtz and George Lucas were doing Star Wars. Barbara, thinking it was a system that was already in place, said, “Yes, we definitely want that” and she was so powerful and such a big money-maker that [the studios] switched it over [to Dolby Stereo]. She didn’t know that – she doesn’t do many interviews – and she was thrilled she was being recognised as changing the history of sound in cinema. That was really fun to discover.

It’s fascinating learning about the number of things we take so much for granted now – such as the Wookiee roar. Going back to how they made the original Kong sound, it seems as if things haven’t changed much in nearly 100 years.

It’s amazing. That whole thing with King Kong: we’re doing the same thing with the animals, slowing them down, reversing.

Right up to The Godfather it was all mono, and you don’t think about that. We don’t hear mono. Of course, they’ve all been upgraded now so we’re not hearing how they were originally.

I did 90 interviews and I got everybody I thought was really important to get. We could not find very much in that first generation of filmmakers. There just happened to be that Murray Spivack interview [about King Kong] – that was really lucky we could find that. We could barely even find photos… but we’re used to that. Working in sound, you feel invisible, and you know you’re low on the totem pole, the lowest rung on the ladder. People don’t think about it.

Even when I started teaching at USC, and they care more about sound than most places, the way they described classes was “visual storytelling”. We put the word “aural” in there too. It’s funny because we’re in what’s perceived as a visual medium so how does sound fit in?

On a normal production, about 1 percent of the budget is how much they spend on post production sound. Working even on those big action movies that cared about sound – Jerry Bruckheimer and Michael Bay – it was 2 or 3 percent and all these directors say, “Fifty percent of my movie is sound”. As I tell my students, that’s really good bang for your buck! Think of the production value that you get.

There’s a story we didn’t put in, that’s hysterical: Gary Rydstrom was working on Terminator 2, and was wondering what’s the sound for when the T-1000 liquefies. One night late, when he’s feeding his dog at midnight, he tips up a can of dog food and the dog food falls out… He said, “For all those special effects, think how much it cost… and the sound cost 39 cents!”

Sometimes the old ways are the best. One thing I was quite surprised that there was nothing on 007?

There are so many things we had to leave out. This film took nine years and a lot of it was the editing. It was shot between 2013 and 2016 – then how are you going to take all of film history and make a 90-minute film? That’s what I kept thinking. It was so difficult, killing your babies. Our editor was brilliant, and I brought in a supervising editor who was really helpful, she really helped us shape it in the final two years.

There is an enormous amount of clips – the rights issues must have been a nightmare!

I’ve tried to read books on sound, and they don’t make sense even to me, so I knew we had to use a lot of clips. That’s why the credits are so long – they always ask me at film festivals if I want to stop the credits, and I say, play them all because it’s educational to see all the credits for the clips we used. That was a lot of work.

We learned what Fair Use was. When we started, it was 2010 and that’s the year that you were allowed to rip from DVDs and then Blu-rays. We started, of course, with Blu-rays.

I started working on the film in 2002, and when I found out what it took to get clips, I stopped. It was 2010 when Bobbi, my producing partner, talked to Gary Rydstrom – she knew him, and knew Fair Use had come about. Gary said if she got in touch with me, then he would be involved.

We learned about Fair Us because I didn’t want lawyers getting involved. We had Michael C. Donaldson involved, who argued the [Fair Use] case at the Supreme Court level. We had a spreadsheet and we had to pay for archival images.

What’s your favourite moment in sound in cinema history?

It’s so hard to choose one. I remember Eraserhead just for the backgrounds – they’re kind of crazy and over the top now when I listen to them. I do remember Star Wars and Apocalypse Now. Sometimes it’s the quiet moments.

 

Making Waves: The Art Of Cinematic Sound is in UK cinemas from 1 November 2019

Thanks to Debbie Murray for assistance in arranging this interview