I have been dubbing since 2006.
I did sound for a number of years, so I know the pain of the sound mixer on a set where everybody was talking.
When I write a screenplay, and when I direct, I always pull lines out.
Rewriting isn't just about dialogue; it's the order of the scenes, how you finish a scene, how you get into a scene.
In 'Expendables 2,' there was a lot of vulgar dialogue in the screenplay. For this reason, many young people wouldn't be able to watch this. But I don't play in movies like this. Due to that, I said, 'I won't be a part of that if the hardcore language is not erased.'
People recognize certain things, like 'D' means 'this dialogue stinks.' We're dealing with shows that are written here, shot in New York and posted back here. Accurate communication is a necessity.
Animated films are so precisely engineered - right down to forming lines of dialogue with words pulled from several different takes - how do you translate that spontaneity from the live-action to the digital realm?
With bad movies, I have this image in my head of the director and the editor in the editing room watching a scene that is not happening, looking at each other and saying, 'Put some music in there.'
In the editing room, 20 percent of the time you're using stuff from before the actor knew the camera was rolling or you're taking a line from somewhere else and putting it in his mouth.
Writing screenplays is not my business. I've written half a dozen, and maybe half of those were made. But it was never a satisfying experience. It was just work. You're an employee. You would be told what to do. Studio execs would cross out my dialogue and put in their dialogue.
As an editor, you're constantly dealing with the best way to convey an exchange between two people. So when I'm shooting that, I'm just aware in the back of my head what an editor might want. And also, the problems editors run into when trying to edit performances - it helps me head that off at the pass a little.
Sound design is always critical, especially when you're doing a thriller with a lot of suspense and tension.
Aame' is a new attempt. The entire film was shot using live sound technique.
I could never be the kind of writer who went to the set of the movie and fussed and fretted about, 'Oh, that dialogue's wrong,' or 'That character doesn't look like that.' That would be insufferable.
Going from 'Dexter' to 'Powerpuff,' there was a lot of dialogue, there was a lot of... you know, we did action, of course, but I was getting burned out on the words, and both shows had this big, thick black outline.
On the other track I got to talk with Jon Poll, my editor, and we go into more detail about the decisions we made in both the production and the post-production. So I hope the combination becomes something worth collecting.
I love doing film soundtracks and working with directors on how they want the scene to be portrayed on audio as opposed to visual. I like the collaborative effort of working with people.
I'm there to tailor something very precisely and something very subtly to dialogue and the actor's energy. I'm there to bring out something that isn't spoken. 'King's Speech' is the perfect film to do it.
I'm really into the way sound works in film, and I did a little bit of sound design for theater in college.
I've always been a bit of a sound freak in the movies I've done.
When we did the first 'Uncharted,' we weren't able to capture the audio with the performances. We would go back and do A.D.R. - Automated Dialogue Replacement - in which you would hear yourself and then repeat your line. Even when we were doing that, there was a slight disconnect because you were trying to recreate a performance.
I meet Susan [Saradon], and she was amazing. We sit down to go through the script [Thelma & Louise]. I swear, I think it was page one - she says, "So my first line, I don't think we need that line. Or we could put it on page two. Cut this ..." And I was just like ... My jaw was to the ground.
Coming up in the School of Aaron Sorkin Delivery of Fast-Paced Dialogue and Hyper-Articulateness prepared me well for Shondaland, where there are many of the same factors at play.
I would fix other people's lines if they asked me on occasion. The hard part of writing is the architecture of it, getting the story and structuring it. Not the tweaking of lines.
I think it's much harder to have a long dialogue scene than an action scene. An action scene is long, but it's not really hard. It's kind of boring, really. It looks good at the end, but to shoot it, it's not the most exciting thing.
