How did you first get interested in sound design?

When Star Wars came out in 1977, it blew my mind. In years prior to that, I had been interested in tape recorders and recording things on my own - just messing with them in the crude way you could with the old 3M reel-to-reels back in the late ‘70s.

My brother was in the lighting program at the Children’s Theatre Company of Minneapolis. There was an opening to get into the program, but my brother said, “There’s no way I’m going to let my kid brother work with me.” So I took the booth next door which was more intimidating because it had many more knobs, dials, and faders. A “happy-accident” if there ever was one!

Tell us about the job of a sound designer on a film.

First of all, we work as secondary artists. We’re there to serve a director’s vision. It’s not about doing what we think is cool, it’s about doing what serves the moment in any given scene or film. That’s an important thing to remember. A lot of folks don’t and that’s unfortunate.

I try to get inside a director’s head and find out what is it they’re trying to say or do in a particular moment/project and make it happen sonically.

At what point do you get involved in a film?

Hopefully, we’ll get involved early on with a director - usually not until shooting has wrapped, but as soon as the picture editor is starting to assemble the film. In an ideal circumstance, we’ll feed the picture editor early sketches of key things and get their feedback to see what is going to work for them.

Sometimes that can be rather interesting. On What Dreams May Come, the director, Vincent Ward, said, “When they’re walking across the plains toward the entrance to hell, I want this to sound like a pre-Victorian battlefield.”

What do you do with a request like that?

You dig deep. You try to relate to what it is they’re asking for as best you can and come up with something appropriate to their vision and the feel of a given scene.

I took a cue from one of my favorite musicians, Branford Marsalis. He said something in an interview that I took to heart. The interviewer asked him about a particular tune he did – an old jazz classic – and asked [Marsalis] “How did you know to do it like that? That was brilliant!”

Marsalis replied, “Oh, man – that’s just bulls***. The song tells you what’s available.” That was a very profound thing he said.

If you learn the art of deep listening, which involves much more than one’s ears – if you know how to get into a scene and into the head of the director, it will come to you.

Can you give an example of that?

Sure. I’ll cite What Dreams May Come again. It’s one of the more challenging films that I’ve done sound design for in terms of the stylistic range and subtlety.

In the scene where we are down finally in hell - where Annabella Sciorra’s character, Annie, is living in a dilapidated version of their home in that inverted medieval cathedral - the director wanted to have a sense of her ever present suffering and pain.

I came up with these things that I called “sigh-bys.” Now you hear them everywhere because they were released on the Hollywood Edge’s Sound Designer’s Tool Kit CD.

My assistant at the time was a very good sound-alike for Annabella Sciorra as far as sighs and moans. I had her do a whole range of sighs, breaths, and moans. She vocalized a wonderful range of very emotive sounds.

I took the ones that had the emotional feel we were looking for and reversed them, put the right touch of reverb on them, flipped them back (so the reverb became pre-verb), put reverb on the tail, then took the whole thing and gave it a gentle Doppler.

It’s nothing that draws attention to itself – you’d have to watch it again and go, “ok – that’s it.” Frequently we have this distant sigh or moan floating through the air to give a sense of her pain. It’s very subtle. And for me, that’s the most challenging and rewarding use of sound design.

So it’s something the audience might not be conscious of, but it really affects the way they experience the images on the screen and the story they’re seeing.

Back when I got my start in the theater at a very young age, my mentor made a statement that has stuck with me to this day: “If anybody notices your work, you’ve failed.”

The conscious mind can only take in so much data at any given time. The subconscious mind, however, is taking in vast amounts of input. While the audience is being impacted (or distracted) by the visuals and the plot, good sound design goes in the back door and pulls at the strings of the subconscious. This means knowing what we as human beings growing up on the planet earth respond to in an emotionally predictable manner.

You’ve worked on many different films with many different directors. How different is the job from film to film? Do you have to start from scratch on each project?

Absolutely. Sometimes you have a director like Jim Cameron who’s very interested in hyper-reality – getting every detail just so – a “fine-brush”. Other directors are more interested in the emotional impact - a “wider-brush”. It’s really a matter of recognizing who you’re dealing with and what they want and going for it.

It seems like a sound designer does for the aural world of a film what a cinematographer does for the visual world of a film.

Yes. That’s a pretty fair analogy.

But cinematographers seem to get so much more acclaim in film.
If you’re going into sound to get credit or glory you’re in the wrong place. It’s not about that.

Sometimes you work with director like Wolfgang Petersen, who is extremely gracious and grateful for anything you can do to make their film better. I don’t think I’ve ever had to change an effect on a Wolfgang Petersen film. It seems that the lesser experienced directors have more to say, and are more demanding than the experienced ones.

But for each director, it’s their baby. To every mother who is giving birth, her baby is the most important baby in the world. Whereas those of us who deliver these “babies”, we do this all the time.

One of the trickier things is getting the directors’ confidence early on, putting them at ease and making sure that they know that they’re being heard, and presenting them with work that adheres to their vision.

What is a sound designer’s most important skill? To listen.

You’ve been doing more mixing on films these days. How did you come to move in that direction?

Mixing is where it all comes together. In a typical Hollywood film, the mixer is hearing and seeing the thing for the very first time.

But when you’re very familiar with the material and you have the mixing skills (which I would say are only about twenty percent of the job, the other eighty percent are the people skills), it just makes sense for you to handle it. You already know the project very well and you know the feeling they’re going for.

Another one of the things I like about mixing is being able to interact with people much more. When you’re making sound effects, you’re off in a dark room racking your brain. But when you’re at the mixing stage, you’re interacting with people all the time and I really dig that.

With all of the sound software and and plug-ins available, is there anything you’d like to see that isn’t out there?

What I would like to see is something that takes the spectral content of any given sound and reverses it completely.

What would that do?

It would be pretty weird. And weird can be good. That’s one of the things I like about Trash and Spectron.

Speaking of Trash, how did you come across iZotope’s products and what attracted you to them?

I found them on the web. I downloaded the demo and went, “wait a minute – these guys have something going on here.” I’ve always been a fan of band-splitting dynamics, so I find the Ozone plug-in extremely useful.

But Spectron – wow. That’s the one. With a project I have coming up this summer, I’m very much looking forward to using the morph function. Finding something that does morphing well has been something I’ve been looking for for a long time. Finding the something that does the morph thing convincingly has been one of my personal “Sonic-Holy-Grail” searches.

For more information on Peter Michael Sullivan, visit IMDB.