SPECIAL AWARDS SECTION
Achievement in Sound Editing
Karen Baker and Per Halberg, MPSE
The Bourne Ultimatum
Achievement in Sound Mixing
Scott Millan, CAS; David Parker and Kirk Francis, CAS
The Bourne Ultimatum
by Michael Kunkes
 Sound editors Karen Baker Landers and Per Hallberg, MPSE. Right, Mixers Kirk Francis, left, David Parker and Scott Millan, CAS. Photo by Kevork Djansezian/AP |
Sequels don’t get easier to make in Hollywood. This was especially true for Paul Greengrass’ The Bourne Ultimatum, the third installment in the series of international action/psychological thrillers that began with The Bourne Identity in 2002 and continued with The Bourne Supremacy in 2004. Audi-ence anticipation was high, and the pressure was on to create a work that not only tied the previous two movies together, but raised the bar on pacing, action and intrigue.
Fortunately, Bourne III reunited many of the participants of the two earlier films, including re-recording mixer Scott Millan, CAS, and supervising sound editors Per Hallberg, MPSE, and Karen Baker Landers. For re-recording mixer and frequent Millan collaborator David Parker, it was his first Bourne (no pun intended). Production mixer Kirk Francis, CAS, was also part of the Oscar-winning mix team.
 Mixers Kirk Francis, left, David Parker and Scott Millan, CAS. Photo by Kevork Djansezian/AP |
The Oscar win marked a sound editing award trifecta for Landers and Hallberg, as their work on Bourne III also netted them a Golden Reel Award from the Motion Picture Sound Editors, as well as the BAFTA Sound Award from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts. For their part, Millan, Parker and Francis also shared the BAFTA Sound Award with their sound editor colleagues.
The Bourne Ultimatum is Landers’ first Oscar. “Because this was our third Bourne film, Per and I had conversations early on about how we could stay fresh and still remain true to what the audience is by now very familiar with,” she reveals. “Jason Bourne is older, wiser and more human now; he’s aged, and to an extent, so has the audience. Yes, we have to work with what we have on the screen, but we felt we could use sound effects to create an attitude in the effects track that was a little more relaxed than the crisp movements of the early Bourne, through footsteps, breathing, the way he handles a gun. It may sound like over-thinking, but it’s stuff we really do talk about. In the end, people will pick up on it, even if it’s subliminal.”
To help create that attitude, Landers spent 20 shoot days on the Foley stage. “Foley is great for customizing sync sound, which is very time-consuming to cut from a library,” she explains. “Foley also augments the meat of a sound effect—we did a lot of that on Bourne, adding metal and rock debris fly-bys, hits and skid sounds to the car chases and explosions. I even do a separate pass that I call ‘Foley effects,’ where I try and create the actual effects on the Foley stage and give them to the effects editors, depending on which scene they’re working on.”
Hallberg, who also won a 1995 Sound Effects Editing Oscar for Braveheart, has worked for nearly 20 years with Landers, though this is their first shared Oscar. “It’s a very fluid division; we work pretty closely to agree on the big picture,” he says. Because of the film’s realistic nature, we didn’t go off the wall to create something different. The film itself is hyper-real anyway, and our sound had to stay within the realm of at least a perceived reality. The flashback and dream sequences were different, but those moments were in specific contexts.”
Hallberg adds, “Because things happened so fast––between the directing and shooting and editing styles––we created our overall sound effects plan in the form of a ‘guide map,’ a way to point things out to the audience that were specific to the story at the time.” That meant amplifying certain sounds or stretching them across several cuts. Hallberg says that without that guide map, the film would have been total cognitive overload. “Cutting the sound so specifically gives at least one of your senses something to hold onto,” he explains. “Intensifying that part of the experience at the right time makes it a lot less confusing for the brain and focuses the visuals a little more cohesively.”
As they do with every project, Hallberg and Landers broke down the film into multiple categories and subcategories of effects. For example, guns break down into gun type, movement, recoils, specific sounds, chambering, impacts and the like. And with so many locations, every city had to have its own unique personality and energy, with its own background tracks, sirens, cars, taxis, donkey carts, public address systems, birds, building materials, “air” and other ambient sound––to say nothing of language. Landers adds, “A good production recordist will give you background tracks no matter what the location, so you start with that basic bed, add signature sounds, walla, ADR group, library sounds and Foley. We had people out recording police sirens all over the world. It’s all about building the texture and feel of the backgrounds.”
Parker, who also won a 1996 Oscar for Best Sound for The English Patient, points out, “If you look at Bourne with the sound off, you get some idea of the challenges we faced. The camera never stops moving, the locations are always changing, and it’s rare that two people are just standing in a room and talking. Even when they are, it’s usually in a control room full of computers, monitors, and tracking devices, so the action is continuous, and needs lots and lots of sound.” That said, his favorite sequence to mix was the ten-minute Tangiers car bombing-chase-fight between Bourne and the company assassin, Desh. “It’s not just straight ahead blowout,” he says. “It weaves up and down, gets quiet during the prayer call, picks up again, and then the music and dialogue shut off at the end of the chase and I was able to ‘just do the fight.’”
For Millan (with previous Sound Oscars in 2004 for Ray, 2000 for Gladiator and 1995 for Apollo 13), the greatest challenge was the cat-and-mouse sequence in London’s crowded Waterloo Station as Bourne attempts to protect the reporter who has come to meet with him. “A lot of build-up had to happen with the crowds and the perspective cuts of material going back and forth,” he says. “It wasn’t a typical situation where a gun is pointed at someone’s head or a chase was happening. The reporter was acting out of fear because he couldn’t see what the threat was, though Bourne could. We were using sound to artificially push around people, movement and atmospheres in order to raise the tension and heighten the anxiety that the characters were feeling.”
Parker briefly described his working method with Millan. “I will mix down each scene as if I were the only person on the film, then Scott and I do a give-and-take and attack a scene in a way that allows us to emphasize one thing or the other—dialogue, music or effects. This way, we get each scene to work and not have any one thing run away with all the tracks for an entire scene or reel––and the movie isn’t pounding you all the time. That give-and-take is what Scott and I are good at.” Parker also likes the way the Bourne series weaves together entertainment and realpolitik. “Rogue agencies, tapped phones, waterboarding, assassination—that’s not just total fiction; it’s totally relevant.”
Millan and Parker worked with 450 total tracks of music, dialogue and sound effects pre-dubs per reel, recorded about 40 tracks to stems that ultimately became a six-track mix, which was mastered digitally in Dolby SRD, SDDS, DTS and an analogue Dolby SR track for protection and release in non-digital theaters. But before the mix could happen, a game of hurry-up- and-wait took place. “We started two weeks later than we thought we would,” recalls Millan. “The film was in such a fluid state that the picture department couldn’t turn enough material over to sound editorial, who in turn couldn’t give us enough to start mixing––and we had a hard release date looming.”
But experience, organizational skills and new technology saved the deadline, as Todd-AO had just installed ProTools recorders for its improved media and editorial management. “In today’s post sound, things can be put off until much later in the process, allowing for greater choice,” adds Millan.
“Previously, you couldn’t have cut, changed, conformed and turned over reels quickly enough at that late date. Today’s fully automated, 500-input consoles have helped change all that.”
Both sound teams credited picture editor Christopher Rouse as a major influence. According to Hallberg, “Chris is not only a great collaborator and highly creative person, he’s also a really good human being. No matter how complicated things got, he always had your back. If you don’t have that collaboration, it shows in the film.” Millan added, “Chris is into nuance and detail, and he stayed very close during the mixing process. He trusted us to come up with the mix we were comfortable with, while most of his focus was on the music, because he was striving to get certain emotional things to happen in certain ways.”
“Working on Bourne was both a dream and a nightmare,” summarizes Hallberg. “At first, it seemed like a nightmare, until you saw the creative opportunity presented by the audio in this picture. For all of us, it was a great challenge. We had a lot to do in a very short amount of time, but for me personally, when things get rough, that’s when I get happy.”
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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