SPECIAL AWARDS SECTION: MPEG WINNERS GALLERY
Sounds from 'Iwo Jima' Capture Academy Awards for Asman, Murray
by Michael Kunkes
 Allan Robert Murray, left, and Bub Asman. Photo by Kevork Djansezian/AP |
Although supervising sound editors Bub Asman and Alan Robert Murray have worked together on 37 movies––including a long association with director Clint Eastwood that began with Escape from Alcatraz in 1979––the director’s Letters from Iwo Jima is the first Oscar win for both. The pair were previously nominated for Space Cowboys and Eraser, with Murray also nominated for Lethal Weapon 2 and Ladyhawke.
Letters, the companion film to Eastwood’s Flags of Our Fathers (which was released first and for which the sound editors were also nominated for an Oscar), tells the story of the February 1945 invasion through the eyes of the average Japanese soldier. The two films were mixed back-to-back on the new Warner Bros. Stage 10 in Burbank, with Asman and/or Murray working from April 15 until November 5 of 2006, a seven-month campaign longer than any that took place in the Pacific theater of WWII. The two films, however, took a vastly different approach to sound effects.
“Where Flags was immense in its depiction of the invasion, Letters was more in your face, with a much more threatening, claustrophobic feel,” says Murray. “On Flags, we buried mics and recorders in the impact zones in the sand to really get the sounds of the explosive charges. On Letters, the battle sounds were mostly off stage, so we ended up combining those sounds with earthquake tremors from the library along with rock explosions to give the whole thing a closed-in, confined sound.”
“The idea was to never show the Japanese getting comfortable,” adds Asman. “They were always in danger and knew they were going to die, which was the whole point of the movie. There are so many scenes in caves where soldiers are sitting around talking or trying to sleep. Part of our job was to establish how much war was still going on outside. We established a palette of material and then picked a pace for off-stage explosions. Usually there was a ten-second lull, then two-to-three shell bursts in a row. It was a random placement but sounded just about right.”
For both men, realism was the key, but Murray had a personal stake in the success of both films. His father was a Marine on Iwo Jima who lost his best buddy to a kamikaze attack on the way to the landings. “Because my dad had been a tanker, we were promised anything we needed,” Murray explains. That included putting Murray square in the middle of the impact zone of the artillery range to record howitzer fire, often at dangerously close range. “Sometimes the explosions were so big I got knocked on my ass from the concussion of the moving air.”
Almost no shooting took place on Iwo Jima, which is considered a sacred site where bodies are still being found on a regular basis, making mass detonations and explosives an impossibility. As a close match, Murray chose Burros Canyon, a shooting range in LA’s San Gabriel Hills––where the natural acoustics closely matched Iwo Jima––and recorded all the guns and the sounds of an F4U Corsair and P51 Mustang fighter planes.
Realism extended to the guns as well, according to Murray. “We were able to obtain Japanese Type 92 and Type 99 machine guns, and used actual WWII ammo, which was really scary, because on a couple of occurrences, it exploded in the chamber.”
But Murray got what he wanted, recording 12 tracks per gun with multi-track mics to get full shadings on every shot. To obtain the most dynamic sounds, Murray recorded all his material at 96k, later down-converted to 48k for the dubbing stages.
For Murray and Asman, the biggest challenge was keeping the kind of detail they wanted and avoiding any muddiness from creeping into the tracks. “We wanted to be able to hear the bullets and specific guns firing off-stage,” says Murray. “All that came into play, plus there was a lot of picking and choosing so we could get those dynamics.”
Asman commented on his working routine with Murray. “Alan’s primary job is to find the effects and pull the show. Once he’s cued the backgrounds and effects for a few reels, the other editors and I will start cutting. We’ll work on things together, but he also likes to be hands-on and very personally involved. I feel that a big part of my job is to try to buffer a lot of the distractions so Alan can focus on pulling the show.”
Michael Kunkes is a freelance editor and writer specializing in animation, production and post-production. He can be reached at writermk@sbcglobal.net.
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