In writer-director James Vanderbilt’s “Nuremberg,” Russell Crowe plays Nazi Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring in the days following World War II, when he was arrested by Allied forces and forced to stand trial for his war crimes. The greatness of Crowe’s performance — and of Vanderbilt’s finely tuned script — lies in its ability to humanize Göring without compromising the film‘s depiction of him as a force of pure evil.
The film’s secret weapon in this regard is the sound design, which strips down the sound design in Göring’s cell to give every line, breath, and silence emotional power. When he came on board the movie, supervising sound editor and re-recording mixer Michael Babcock saw creating a complex characterization of Göring as one of the biggest challenges looming before him and his collaborators.
“The first deep conversation I had with James Vanderbilt was actually about the acting,” Babcock told IndieWire. “It was one of those projects where we talked less about sound than what was going to inform the sound, because I was really enthralled with how they were going to balance making Göring human without making him sympathetic. James is really comfortable with having deep conversations like that right away, so that was an inspiration.”
Babcock began work on the film with a deep dive into historical research, figuring out what trains and backgrounds would have sounded like in 1940s Germany, but was guided throughout the process through the performances. “ I was thinking about it a lot as I was working on it, and I don’t think I stopped when I went home,” Babcock said. “All the characters have strong agendas, but they never think they’re manipulating each other. So the sound can’t manipulate either — everything is so exposed.”
The key for Babcock became finding ways to support the storytelling through subtle sound work that increased the tension without overshadowing the performances, as in a key scene between Göring’s lawyer (Rami Malek) and the Supreme Court Justice (Michael Shannon) tasked with prosecuting the Nuremberg trials. “There’s a lot of gray area there,” Babcock said, noting that his job was to build mood through layers of atmosphere that might register with the viewer only on a subliminal level, or after the fact. “James wanted to add to the dialogue all the time. He’s not a paint-by-numbers guy.”
For the many scenes between Göring and his lawyer, Babcock found himself relying on modern technology to create a period sound. “I spent a lot of time on those scenes because I was so enthralled by what they were doing as actors,” Babcock said, noting that making the sound unnoticeable required an insane amount of work. “The cell had to sound like it was made of German cement, but the set itself does not sound like that. I think I had to use every trick I’ve learned in my career to preserve the performances.”
Babcock relied on technology that he said has come out in the last two or three years — “not AI,” he is quick to note — to take superfluous noise out, recreate the space as it would have sounded in the 1940s, and then “put it all back in to make it seem like nothing happened to the sound.” Babcock wanted the sound in the cell to convey a sense of claustrophobia and of no escape from the serious topics under discussion. “There’s nothing but them, just the two of them — and you can’t hide from that.”
Aside from the prison cell, “Nuremberg” features another key environment in which a great deal of the movie takes place: the courtroom where Göring’s fate, and the fates of his collaborators. In real life, the courtroom had been built in a bombed-out building, and Babcock wanted to get across what that meant psychologically. “There are creaks where it’s almost like it’s breathing,” he said, adding that he used reverb to give a sense of gravitas to the setting and went on eBay to buy a period-authentic stenograph machine for the location.
Given the darkness of the subject matter, “Nuremberg” was a heavy project to take on, but it did provide pleasures in the form of finding period sounds for trains, cars, and other vehicles and props. “The fun part is that I feel like I get to be an actor when I work on a period film,” Babcock said. “You want to take any chance find sounds for anything you see in the background, whether it’s planes or vehicles or car horns or flashbulbs.”
Throughout the process, authenticity was the guiding principle. “There were a lot of gut checks where we would ask, ‘Does that sound too Hollywood?’” Babcock said, noting that a hanging scene in the movie was particularly challenging. “It has to sound authentic, but it also has to be shocking and visceral. It’s all about embracing how immersive you can make something.”