Writer-director Ryan Coogler‘s “Sinners” is the best kind of period film, a movie that feels authentic to its time and place (the Mississippi Delta in the early 1930s) without sacrificing immediacy and impact. There’s no distance between the audience and the terror, humor, exhilaration, and poignancy that alternate throughout Coogler‘s audacious horror movie.
While there’s no denying the gorgeous textures of cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw’s large format celluloid imagery or the emotionally complex performances by Michael B. Jordan, Hailee Steinfeld, Delroy Lindo and others, the visceral impact of “Sinners” is unthinkable without the first class sound work that rumbles and pulsates throughout the film.
Working with composer Ludwig Göransson, the sound team of supervising dialogue and ADR editor David Butler, music editor Felipe Pacheco, production sound mixer Chris Welcker, re-recording mixer and sound designer Steve Boeddeker, supervising sound editor Benjamin Burtt, and re-recording mixer Brandon Proctor have created one of the most sonically expressive and powerful movies ever made.
From Göransson’s point of view, it all started with Coogler’s observation that existing recordings of the Delta blues clearly lacked the technology to accurately capture the incredible sounds musicians in the 1930s were making — so how does one compose and record that music now in a way that gives the audience the same feeling people had hearing the music live in its era? For Göransson and the sound team, one solution was to record as much of the music live on set as possible — something that required some clever problem-solving for scenes like an early set piece at a train station.
“It looks very simple and natural, but there was an incredible amount of work behind it,” Göransson said. “Ryan wrote it saying that Delta Slim [Delroy Lindo] is the best harmonica player in town. Delroy would come into the studio and practice every day, but in a few months you’re not going to become the best harmonica player. We needed to get one of the best harmonica players in the world.” Göransson’s wife Serena, the music executive producer, found blues musician Bobby Rush and got him to come to the set.
“He’s a legend in his 90s,” Göransson said. “Serena called him and asked, ‘Is there any way you can come to set tomorrow?” Rush got to the location a couple hours before shooting the scene and talked with Lindo about what the scene was attempting to say, then played live while Lindo performed the physical movements. “What you don’t see on the screen is that Bobby Rush is hidden by a circle of extras, playing the harmonica while Delroy is looking at him, mimicking his playing. Chris Welcker put a boom on Bobby Rush’s harmonica and a microphone inside of Preacher Boy’s [MIles Caton] guitar, so it’s actually Preacher Boy and Bobby Rush playing that song together.”
Göransson said he was constantly impressed by Welcker’s ingenuity in finding ways to get the best production sound. “I never met a sound guy who was such a crazy inventor,” Göransson said. “He would put microphones in the weirdest places, on cuff links, on hats. He would unscrew my instruments and put microphones inside of them.”
From Welcker’s perspective, it was important to capture as many authentic sounds as possible to give the post-production sound team a robust bed to build on, particularly in scenes like the juke joint sequences where things like the sound of the floor provided a vivid sense of atmosphere. “The wood floors were very creaky, and for quieter dialogue scenes we tried to minimize that by laying carpets out,” Welcker said. “But there were other times where we tried to capture it, and the background actors who are part of the character of the juke joint.”
To that end, Welcker often recorded wild takes and ambiences that the post team greatly appreciated. “Chris took the time to just record the background actors dancing in place without the cameras rolling, which allowed us to get a really nice bed of body movement,” Burtt said. “It’s not the most exciting sound, but it helped give the juke its own character and really helped bring the party to life.”
Another decision that helped capture the vibrancy of the juke joint was Coogler’s decision to have Pacheco on set at all times — a rare opportunity for a music editor. “It was quite an experience to be on set in New Orleans during those night shoots,” Pacheco said. “It was very hot and uncomfortable. But the music in this movie was so important that you needed someone there from beginning to end who knew all the different takes of every single song, how a musician played one way in this take and another way in the next take. All those tidbits were crucial for me in post so that I could adapt the music to the picture as it was changing.”
Being on set allowed Pacheco to build out the music tracks in ways that would have been impossible in post, as when he went onto the juke set one night and re-recorded music with new ambient environments. “ I set up a speaker on the stage and had my laptop with a ProTools session that had every single stem for every single song that was played on the juke, just laid side to side,” Pacheco said. “Then I put one mic in the middle of the room, one mic in the far part of the room, and one mic in a little storage room on the side. And then just pressed record.”
The next morning, Pacheco came back and had what he described as “eight hours of world-ized sounds in case we needed them to reinforce the live performances. And we wouldn’t have been able to do this in post because the day after we did this, they tore the juke joint down because it was built on a sound stage.”
One of the film’s most impressive scenes in terms of sound — and one of its subtlest — comes when a character simply crosses the street in town. Coogler wanted to give a sense that the street was segregated, with a white side and a black side, which required everyone both on set and in post to create layer upon layer of carefully calibrated contrasting voices. The first task for Welcker was figuring out how to get clean sound from dozens of characters and extras while minimizing the noise of the shoot’s gargantuan IMAX camera.
Welcker adopted a technique Coogler had heard about from Christopher Nolan, which was to record as many sound-only takes as possible that could later be married to the images captured by the IMAX camera. “As a production sound mixer I’m always trying to be as post-production-minded as I can,” Welcker said. “How can I capture these elements and provide them in a way that’s usable? The timing’s not going to quite be exact to what’s happening in the picture, but I try to emulate the movements of the camera as it moves from inside the store and out to the street, while also placing microphones far away from the camera so that those elements could be usable as well.”
In post, the disparity between the black side of the street and the white side was conveyed via a loop group directed personally by Coogler. “One set of actors would be at the microphone as Lisa [Helena Hu] is leaving the store, and then they back away from the microphone, waiting for the camera to come back,” Proctor said. “Then a second set of people approach with Ryan coaching them — the white people — to say, in his words, ‘racist shit.’ A lot of the time the voices you hear are actual background actors on set, but then we’re supplementing that with the loop group to make sure you have distinctive flavors on each side of the street.”
The soundscape in that scene, and elsewhere, is further enhanced by Burtt’s detailed period sounds that are layered throughout the dialogue. He began by collecting car sounds, but quickly expanded to find design elements specific to not only the era but the location. “Obviously we had some older vehicles that we had to get, but then the world we’re trying to build is that of the Mississippi Delta,” Burtt said. “We’re finding different ambiences, because you can help tell the time of day or how hot it is by the kinds of insects you hear.”
Tracking the time of day was particularly important given the 24-hour time frame in which “Sinners” largely takes place and the fact that it’s a vampire story — meaning the difference between day and night can be the same as the difference between life and death for the characters. “That was critical,” Boedekker said. “They need to be different, and you need to feel that intensity at night. We built and built on that; in the daytime it was more realistic, and at night it got more and more intense.”
In addition to the challenges of the live music and IMAX cameras, Welcker found that he had to learn how to think like an actor to find a solution for recording Jordan’s dialogue. Because Jordan was playing twins, the crew needed to film each of his scenes twice as many times so that he could perform each side — the question was how to get the timing right, since he didn’t have another actor to play off of.
“Michael wanted to dial in the timing so that it could be just the way he envisioned,” Welcker said, noting that the solution was to pre-record Jordan’s responses and trigger them using samplers. “After rehearsal he would sit with a microphone and deliver his lines in the way he had predetermined, and then in the moment I could trigger the response to play to his timing. So it was becoming an actor as well as a sound person.”
Preserving the performances was of paramount importance, and Butler and Proctor were determined to use ADR as rarely as possible — a tall order given the complexity of some scenes. “One of the trickiest parts was a baptism scene toward the end of the movie,” Butler said. “You have an IMAX camera going. There are bugs in the water. And you have Jack O’Connell wearing prosthetic teeth. Michael also had prosthetic teeth when he was playing Stack. We always preferred production, but sometimes it sounded like they had fake teeth and we would try to sneak a little ADR in.”
The dialogue recording and editing was further complicated by the fact that none of the cast were native Southern speakers, meaning that the sound team had to be closely attuned to the accuracy of their accents. “The dialect coach watched the movie and gave me a list, and we were really quite fortunate — it was only 36 words that she noticed were not in the correct accent,” Butler said. When the actors came in for ADR, they listened to a two-minute loop of period and region-accurate speech.
“They would listen to key phrases,” Butler said, “but we only need one word. So they would say the entire sentence and phrase, and we would find that moment where we could bridge it over from production to that one word. Maybe it’s a couple words and then back — it was about finding that sweet spot to edit to make sure we’re keeping the performances alive from the set.” That said, according to Butler, “There’s not a lot of ADR. A shocking amount of production dialogue — I’d say 95% — made it into the final film.”
Butler credits Coogler with creating a collaborative environment in which everyone was working together as closely as possible to find solutions for the film’s myriad technical and creative challenges. “Ryan is my favorite director I’ve ever worked with because I never felt like I was working for him, I felt like I was working with him,” Butler said. “He constantly wanted that feeling of collaboration. The cast and crew all just adore him, and there’s a reason why.”