Ralph Fiennes’ Coriolanus Blog: Exclusive Interview with Oscar Winner Ray Beckett

Share on Facebook posted 08-15-10 by Andreas Wiseman

While on set I caught up with Oscar winning sound mixer Ray Beckett. Ray has worked on over 30 feature films, including The Hurt Locker and Palme d’Or winner The Wind That Shakes The Barley as well as notable TV hits such as HBO’s The Special Relationship. I started off by asking what, for him, the differences were between working on Coriolanus and The Hurt Locker, a film with which Coriolanus has been compared.

RAY BECKETT: The main difference for me is that I’m using a surround sound microphone that records a format called 5.1. This is what you find in the cinema, where you have left, centre and right positioned speakers behind the screen, two surround channels behind you in the auditorium and a subwoofer to enhance all the explosions. Here, I’ve got a mic on set which can originate 5.1 channels from the location, so when they do the big set pieces I’m able to almost perfectly capture the sound as it happens in the space of the scene.

Andreas Wiseman: So this is the first time you’ve used this system?

RB: We had stereo on Hurt Locker but not the 5.1. We’ve now got 360 degree capability. The surround sound microphone captures the sound of the context and the set. For example, in the scene when Coriolanus is made a consul in the Serbian parliament we had the surround mic above the crowd. I hope that the output from this will be so realistic that there won’t be a huge amount to add in post.

AW: What is the most challenging part of your job?

RB: On The Hurt Locker, the locations made life difficult. It was often about keeping dust out of the equipment. But that was more of a problem for Barry [Ackroyd - DOP] than for me.

With multiple characters it’s hard because you have multiple cameras rolling simultaneously: one for the tight lens, doing singles, and one for the wide-angle shots. The boom becomes difficult. The boom can only go to the periphery of the wide camera’s shot.

On Coriolanus and Hurt Locker each actor has an individual radio mic, which gives the sound editor the option of the boom’s sound or both.

There was one scene with Ralph when he confronts demonstrators at the silos. He wanted his voice to be sonorous, so I had one mic attached to his chest [lavalier mic] and a boom over the top. The distance between his mouth and both mics had to be equal, otherwise you get something called comb filtering — a muffled sound which is similar to the sound you get when you put a book in front of your mouth while speaking. If the distance between the mics is stable, the Lavalier mic picks up the breathing and the boom mic picks up the clarity. That creates the clarity needed for Shakespeare!

AW: I hear that you’ve been getting out and about with your equipment. Can you tell us about that?

RB: My job is to get the dialogue cleanly, but also to capture the environment and the context. There is a whole Rome out there that is much wider than the context of our film. I want to get sounds that the designer can use to create a sense of that wider Rome. I’m fascinated by this Rome because it’s now and it’s not now. It’s like London but it’s not. It’s slightly disorienting in a fascinating way. You see these great buildings but you’re not sure where you are. I wanted to capture that sonically. The traffic in London is much different to here. The streets are wider here, there’s less reflection off buildings, giving a cleaner, more spatial sound.

The editor has access to all the sounds from libraries, but nothing compares to the sounds you get from set. On The Hurt Locker, for example, we went out into the desert to get the sound of one particular insect that was only found in that habitat. I wanted to give them a backwash, something specific.

Here, on the first weekend, I was walking along a cycle path under a big road bridge, and became entranced by the sound. I went back to the hotel and got my little recording rig that consists of a couple of mics attached to the corners of my glasses and a pocket flash recorder that records sound up to the quality of the stuff I’ve got on set. Because the mics are so close to my ears I know that when the sound is good to my ears it will also be good on the recording.

I sat there for 30 minutes without moving, getting some strange looks from people! It was like a John Cage piece – it would be quiet and then you’d get a hurtling truck hit the expansion joint and there’d be a huge boom and these pipes under the bridge would vibrate. It was the basis of something. It might be suitable or it might not but it’s the basis of something if they want it.

Another example was the final scene. We were at a flat plain just beyond the city. It was very windswept. Ricky [Eyres – production designer] had created a Volscian checkpoint out of half-inch tubular steel. Each end was exposed. Susanna [Script supervisor, Susanna Lenton] said: “Oh listen to that sound”. As the wind hit these tubes, they sounded like a deep Aeolian harp and I stopped everything and we got the surround sound mic and did 5 minutes recording that. Then there was a flag cracking in the breeze. It sounded like a fire. Sometimes you’re not sure what the sound is initially and then you realize. But if it goes through shot I want to make sure we’ve got it on record. It was another texture they could use. I’ve never got enough. I always want more.

AW: Can you train yourself? How do you keep your ears trained?

RB: I’m working and listening all the time. What’s hard, when you start, is hearing behind things. For example: we’re talking here, there’s traffic in the distance, voices over there, but our brains are so good at filtering things that we think we’re hearing at full quality. Our brains do the decoding for us. If you put a mic here it would faithfully record all this stuff without discriminating. My job is to do the decoding for the audience’s brain. I want each word to be clear but also to create a background. The core mission is the dialogue.

AW: How did you get into sound mixing?

RB: I’ve been doing it for 40 years. I was lucky. I had a visionary teacher, Malcolm Laycock, who started an internal radio station at my school. It broadcast over the school intercom one day a week. Between that and building my own radios, I got the bug. I had this mental ping and I thought this is what I want to do.

Malcolm wrote me a testimonial for a studio in Wardour St, London (Alan King Associated). It was a documentary servicing company [Oscar winning sound mixer Ivan Sharrock also worked through them]. That’s where I really started to learn about sound in post-production. Tons of tapes would arrive on my desk and I copied them all. Nowadays it’s digital of course, so all the tapes and files don’t change from here to the dubbing mix. Back then you had to copy across various tapes again and again, and the trick was in retaining as much sound quality between copies as possible. But that really taught me about the importance of sound perspective and maintaining sound quality. It taught me how to listen properly.

When the mixers came back to the studio I plagued them with questions, always wondering how they got the perspective on this or that shot. I never saw the film. I just got the sound. I was an un-credited preliminary transfer engineer on Get Carter, for example, and I had a whole vision that was totally different to the final film!

Then I went freelance, into documentaries. Barry [Ackroyd] came into the industry at about that time. He was doing camera assisting. I did stuff with Barry’s cameraman and then when Barry started shooting we did a lot of stuff together. Over the years he has helped me with recommendations – Kathryn Bigelow, Ken Loach and others. I think we’re a very good team, with similar philosophies. I’m prepared to hide mics and booms, and Barry, within limits, helps me.

Ray’s insight and passion for capturing sound reminded me of one of my very favorite films, Coppola’s The Conversation.

Next up is another fascinating professional, legendary voice and dialect coach Joan Washington. Like Ray, Joan is able to turn something we take for granted into something magical.