Sound. So often an underestimated and underutilized storytelling tool in filmmaking, many operate under the mistaken belief that “louder is better”. That’s not the case. The key to effective use of sound in creating the aural soundscape of a film is layering and nuance; letting each sonic element serve as a sensory part of the story, all coming together in an experiential tapestry. Horror films and thrillers have long been identified as having stereotypical sound design and editing. You’ve heard one, you’ve heard them all. Thankfully, particularly over the past several years (and I believe, due in large part to the advent of Dolby Atmos), that way of thinking has changed. Nuance and silence are coming to the forefront of the soundscape in these genre films and others, and in many cases are storytelling elements as important as cinematography. Sound is, for all intents and purposes, the equivalent of cinematographic lighting.
One of the sound gurus who never ceases to dazzle us with his sonic chops is TREVOR GATES. A trained musician in piano and composition, Trevor elected to pursue a career in sound at a young age. After earning his Bachelor of Science degree in Audio Production, Trevor began his career as an engineer and producer with an R&B music producer. it didn’t take long before his work in music led him straight to film. In less than ten years, Trevor has worked on the soundscapes of more than 100 films be it as a sound editor, sound designer, sound effects mixer, or foley mixer, receiving numerous accolades, not the least of which is a Golden Reel for best sound effects and sound design for the feature film “The Liberator” in 2013. He received a second Golden Reel plus an Emmy nomination for the documentary “Sonic Sea” in 2016, and let’s not forget his participation Grammy for the gospel song “Jesus” by Le’Andria Johnson.
As part of the collective of talented artisans at Formosa Group, which includes Oscar winners Mark Mangini and Lon Bender, as well as Mark Stoeckinger (“John Wick” films), Scott Hecker, and Dolby Atmos guru Tim Hoogenaker, Trevor hasn’t been one to sit on his laurels. Continuing to raise the bar of the soundscape experience with a diverse slate of films like Jordan Peele’s “Get Out”, “Don’t Breathe”, “Ouija: Origin of Evil”, Deon Taylor’s “Supremacy”, Greg McLean’s “The Belko Experiment”, Christopher Landon’s “Happy Death Day” franchise, “The Peanut Butter Falcon”, and the upcoming “Doctor Sleep”, one of Trevor’s most noted films of 2019 is US and his work as supervising sound editor where he reteams with director Jordan Peele.
Another fascinating film from Peele, US is the story of the vacation-bound Wilson family who heads to mom Adelaide’s family beach house where she grew up as a child. But fear follows Adelaide with every step she takes as she recalls a traumatic event from her childhood that happened at this beach. Fear becomes reality when a violent gang attacks the Wilsons in their home turning the calming seaside vacation into a nightmare. But as the night grows darker and the fight for survival ever greater, the masked attackers are revealed. Each attacker is a doppelganger for each member of the Wilson family. And it doesn’t stop with the Wilsons.
With awards season in full swing, I spoke at length with TREVOR GATES about his award-worthy work as supervising sound editor on US and the considerations and challenges he faced in crafting a truly exemplary aural soundscape, as well as the importance of sound as storytelling in furthering the vision of the film. From flipping foreground and background sound to Whack-A-Moles to calibration to finding comedic beats to using sound and silence as exposition, we cover it all. . .
Trevor, I’ve been an admirer of your work particularly since “the Liberator.” It remains one of my favorite movies in large part due to the intricacy of the sound design given the different locations, the ambient temperature, the sonic temperature of each area, battle sequences, intimate quiet moments. Just an amazing, amazing job. It should have received so much more recognition and acknowledgment than it did because it’s such an important piece of world history. But technically, on every level, the production values are incredible.
Well, Thank you. That was a very special film to work on. And it was a big one in the scope of the sound work. We had a really good team that did a lot of really great work. Jay Nierenberg, the sound supervisor, is a close friend of mine now, but that was the first time that I worked with him, and it was a pleasure to have him kind of as a mentor. And a couple other people on the team like Chris Diebold, who’s gone on and is having a great sound effects career as well. That was a special one. So it’s funny for you to pick that one out of the hat because it was special to me, but a lot of people don’t know about it. I didn’t get a chance to go down to South America, but some of the sound team did. Jay Nierenberg, they spent some time in Venezuela recording things, and that was pretty cool for them. And it really made me fall in love with the countryside of South America, at some point in time I’m going to want to visit.
For me, “The Liberator” is one of the bellwethers, one of the standards for your work, Trevor. Then I see you do something like “The Belko Experiment”, which is just totally off the charts, raging violence. You’ve got incredible sound on sound, blends of screaming and knives, but not a whole lot of real ambient sound. And as you moved more into the horror realm, and even with “The Peanut Butter Falcon” which is a beautiful film, ambient sound has become more and more important, much like in “The Liberator.”
“Peanut Butter Falcon” is such a special film.
That is a beautiful film. And I think it’s one of the best that Shia [LaBeouf] has ever done in his career. But there again, it’s that ambient embracing of nature and using those sounds as a storytelling tool, filling in exposition, much as you did in “The Liberator”, much as what you did in “Brightburn” as well, and what you do with US. And that’s where the great hallmarks that I see as a constant, as a thread that runs through your work. You use the sound in lieu of exposition, but you use the ambient sounds around us, not manufactured sounds, but the ambient sounds around us. And then tweak them, not to direct our emotion but to make us think about and make us as an audience go to the next emotional level.
It’s really interesting. We’re storytellers and that’s what I think of myself as a sound designer, as being an intricate part of the storytelling. And being able to immerse one in a film, I feel, is very important in the work that we grow. We have found ourselves, my team and I, down this path the last couple of years of doing all these thriller and horror films. I really enjoy the opportunity to two things; basically embrace, like you said, the nature and the surroundings, the ambiences, but also have a kind of a free rein in some places on subjectivity. And being able to think outside of the box and create something that evokes an emotion is very important. I think in the storytelling aspect, in the movies that I like to watch, they are movies that show me how to feel instead of telling me how to feel. And I think that drives me in a lot of decisions to make decisions, to evoke these emotions, and show the audience how to feel. Instead of too much exposition and telling them how to feel, before they actually feel the feeling. In the last couple of projects that we’ve done, we just finished “Doctor Sleep” with Mike Flanagan, and also doing US with Jordan Peele. Even on the series of “Atlanta” I did, which we won an Emmy for, and also “The Haunting of Hill House” on Netflix. It’s about the dynamic range. It’s about the loudness and also the quiet. This isn’t as groundbreaking because a lot of people do this, but one of the things that we really focused on is being able to hold the silence, being able to create what we think is perceived quietness, a perceived silence. And a lot of that just has to do with making articulate choices and doing something very interesting and minimalist, that allows us to have the dynamics between the loud bits and the quiet bits.
We’re really enjoying this run and being able to have all these different but similar projects that allow us to really express creativity, both in natural sounds and also in weird subjective sounds. I really like using natural sound as devices. There was one time in US when one of the crickets that was outside of the family’s house while the invasion was happening, right in the middle of the movie, and this cricket had kind of like a pulsing sound that sounded very similar to kind of a classic horror score sound design, where it’s pulsing over, and over, and over, and it was really unsettling. To be able to find natural sounds that kind of evoke some of those emotions is a really fun discovery for me.
Something that you do, and you mentioned the cricket sequence, but you also have this great ability, and it’s very noticeable in US, to calibrate the intensity. Such as at the hour 20 mark in the house. Adelaide is grabbing in the bowl with jewelry in it, and we hear the handcuff chains, then we hear the speed of the creature on the floor. And thrown in there is the scoring and that great Hitchcockian string frenzy at that moment. You calibrate each of these sounds so it kind of diverts our attention so we don’t know where to look. And I love that.
It was pretty special. I’ll tell you, in US there’s a close partnership that we have as sound supervisors and sound designers with our re-recording mixers. And on US, I had the pleasure of working with Ron Bartlett and Doug Hemphill, and as far as I’m concerned, these guys are the best of the best. You look at their resume, and then you watch the movies that these guys do, and they are something else. Not only are they extremely talented, but they’re also very humble human beings, and great guys to work with. The partnership that I had with these two gentlemen was very special because we were able to take the sounds that I put forth, and the ideas that I put forth, and then take the musical ideas that came from the composer, Michael Abels, and then taking Jordan’s vision and all of this together, and closely with Ron and Doug, being able to kind of weave this tapestry in a very special way. I feel very honored to have them as partners on this movie. And I’m really looking forward to a time when we can do it again. Hopefully, it’s soon.
Something else on this particular film, and it plays so well in the horror genre because what you guys are now doing, defies what everybody used to know as a soundscape for horror. These are not 1960’s, ’70s, ’70s horror movies where everything is loud and bombastic. There are the great differentials and as I said, calibrations. But what you are also, and I don’t know if you did this in Dolby Atmos or not, but one of the great things that I noticed with this film is we’re really able to differentiate between foreground and background sound. I find that really striking as an expository tool specifically to this film because you would think that you would hear the sounds when they’re in the house and everything is quiet, and they’re trying to figure out what to do, where the creatures are and you hear silence, but you hear external sound of nature. You would think you would hear the sounds near the house or at the front door louder than the ones further away from the house. And you change that up on us, so that we hear the background but we don’t hear what’s right outside the door.
Right! This is an exercise in what I say is “isolation of sound”. We take liberty to create a foundation that holds someone’s attention without distracting them from the things that are important, like the dialogue. And it’s almost, to me, it’s composing a pace or composing the silence, or so-called silence, and finding a sound that is interesting, and maybe weird, maybe organic, and something that creates this. Especially in long uneasy scenes. I’ve taken note in some classic horrors and thrillers, some of Kubrick’s films, things like “Rosemary’s Baby.” It really depends on the filmmaker’s style in this contemporary time. And I’ll tell you, Mike Flanagan with “Doctor Sleep” and “The Haunting of Hill House”, and also Jordan Peele is a huge classic horror fan. These are guys that aren’t afraid of long stretches of dialogue and uneasy silence. I loved this style that these gentlemen have, and it allows me to do exactly what we’re talking about right now – composing this stretch of uneasiness that is perceived as quiet, but it is a specific articulation of what sounds to play when.
I’m very curious Trevor, because I know you have a musical background, played piano, compose, all of that, how beneficial is your musical background to your sound editing process?
It’s really interesting. I think about this often. I started playing piano when I was eight years old, took a couple of years of lessons, and pretty much just from there I played by ear. My family had an upright piano, and in my spare time I would just sit down at the piano, and just not read music. I would just play. And I will say humbly speaking, I am not the best musician in the town. I think maybe that has played into my decision to either go into music or go into sound design and post-production. But what came out of this exploration of music through my life is an understanding of relationships between sounds. Because I played by ear, I really understood composition and relationship of two or more sounds together. That has really played a huge role in my ability as a sound designer to understand what sounds to put together, how they interact with each other, and how they have the power to evoke the emotions, just like a piece of music might in a film. And that’s it. It’s being able to understand the relationship and I’m very thankful for that because as we’re working on these projects, and making these decisions, and understanding the relationship of sound, you understand what gives you the feelings and what doesn’t give you the feelings and that’s the motivation that allows me to make articulate decisions, how do sounds feel in relationship to each other.
This then begs the question, particularly with US, because there are comedic beats. Jordan has a very wicked sense of humor. He did this in “Get Out.” He’s done it when I’ve spoken to him before. He has a very wicked sense of humor, oftentimes it’s very wry, or dry, but there are comedic beats in this film. So I’m curious how challenging is it for you to create an aural edit that complements those comedic beats?
I think the timing is a very important thing, both in comedy and horror. Timing is everything. I think a lot of times comedy beats are really manifested in the editing room, with the picture editor and the director. There are some times where we can create an augmentation for those comedic beats. I can remember one in the home invasion and we go to the second family and there’s a moment where Zora has a golf club, and she’s on the top level of the second family’s home, and they’re being attacked by the bad twins of the other family. And she swings the golf club, hits the twin in the head and she falls over the balcony and she falls on a table down below. We made this ridiculous sound of the table breaking. It was like a pane of glass, like a “boing”, a break and a “boing”. That was a moment where we supported a comedic beat, in some respects, after something literally horrific. A lot of the time these comedy beats are about embracing the silence before. It’s the amount of space in between the setup and the joke. And from a sound perspective, we need to make sure that we support that in any way. A lot of times we don’t get in the way of the beat. A lot of times it means setting a foundation that’s very minimalistic, and as a sound designer, even if we haven’t created that comedic beat, it’s important for us to be cognitive of the moment. And be able to support that in a way that embraces that moment altogether. In horror it’s also very similar, but a lot of times we have more free rein to create that pacing through sound design for the quiet to loud, like the scare. It’s really on the sound designer to create that juxtaposition, but you’ve got to be aware, you’ve got to be part of the team. You have to know what the intentions of the filmmakers are and apply whatever knowledge you have through your craft, to make sure you support what that vision is.
You mentioned the scene with the other being whacked with the golf club and going over the balcony, breaking the table, so in comes your early experience doing foley. Do you ever have input into the kind of sound through editing? Say a foley sound has been put in there and you just think it’s not quite right, such as here. You could have gone for the option of breaking a wooden table, which has one distinct sound or breaking a glass table, which has another distinct sound. Do you get input into what you think might work better?
Being a supervising sound editor, it’s my job to create the aural experience from top to bottom which means I’m in charge of sound effects. I’m in charge of the dialogue. I’m in charge of the foley. And so while I’ll have people that I trust and live in their craft if there are things that I believe don’t line up with my vision of what I think that the film needs, or what I think Jordan wants, then we’ll absolutely change it. That’ll mean either we’ll ask the foley crew for a pickup for something different to input, or we’ll cut the sound as a sound effect, or we’ll go out record something ourselves. It’s absolutely about making decisions and not letting any decisions go unmade. We have to be aware and make choices on everything that we hear top to bottom. Even from the dialogue standpoint, there are extra sounds that are happening in the track that are unmotivated, or if we’re wanting to have more perspective on something. These are all part of those decisions, which ultimately I have to make and I’m responsible for and accountable for.
Because you bounce between feature film and television series, do you approach each one differently? Because the one, a feature, it’s finite, it’s done, it’s over. A series, quite often you’ll come on for the whole series, and be able to over the course of 10, 12 hours develop a contiguous and continuous soundscape. So I’m curious if your approach is different?
Every project is unique in its own way. And what I’ll do is I start with a vision of the end result. What do I want this to sound like? That’s the milestone. And one of the greatest challenges through any project is the amount of time that you have to reach your milestone. I’m very proud of my craft and it’s like my fingerprint, it’s part of my identity. So I take very special care in the work that I do and that my team does, and I have very high expectations for the work that we do. So each individual project is different. And broadcasts functions a little bit differently than features do. But different features function differently from one to the other. “Peanut Butter Falcon” was not a high budget film and had a minimal amount of financial resources that we could allocate to that versus something like US, that had much more to offer for us so that we can continue to develop these ideas through the process over six months. My job and my commitment to myself is for me to figure out how I can put forth a track that sounds like the vision no matter what the challenges are ahead. And that means sacrifices sometimes, and sometimes that means that we have to get creative with who’s working on what and maybe we’ve got to spend a little extra time within the acceptable limits. But everything is different. Sometimes when you’re working on a broadcast film, there are multiple things happening at one time. I do have the fortunate background to work for a smaller company before I worked for Formosa, to help me learn some jobs and give me a lot of experience. One of the things that happens at the smaller places is that we work on multiple projects at once. So I do have a responsibility to multitask and be able to see several things at once and understand moving parts. I think that gives me the toolset to be able to adapt to small indies, over to working on broadcast, and then going on to some of the bigger projects as well.
How collaborative and how involved was Jordan with you in the actual sound editing process? Did he give you free rein and then when you had a pass then it would go off to him? Or was he in there similarly to how he is in there with the video editing? I’m curious how that works with the two of you, especially since you’ve now done a couple of films together.
Jordan wasn’t in my room as much as he was in the editing room, but we did have a close communication with what his expectations were, and there was an evolution of the film. They did a lot of temporary sound work in the edit, which gave us a pretty clear path of what the expectations were. But it is my job as a sound designer and sound supervisor, to continue to develop those ideas beyond what comes over and in the edit, and understand when things need to stay the same as they’ve come over in the edit, but also to investigate, to develop ideas that we put forth to the director. So we would come up with some stuff and then we would show Jordan, and a lot of this process happens through the temp dubs and also through the final mix as well. The film was going through some changes even when we were final mixing. And so sometimes at the very end, the experimentation was the collaboration between Ron and Doug, and I. We probably mixed the opening of US five different ways and showed it to Jordan, and ultimately found the way that Jordan felt happiest about it. Jordan is a very busy guy, he’s got a lot of things going on, he’s really excited for him in his career, and I love working with him, he’s a really fantastic human. It has always been my job to make sure to communicate these ideas in a proactive way. And that’s the way that we do it. Even when people are busy, we make sure that we put forth our ideas and get feedback, and have reviews, and make sure that we can go through this investigation, discovery together.
One last question for you, Trevor. Do you have a favorite moment in US that you are most proud of, from a sonic viewpoint?
That’s a really interesting question. I am proud of the movie as a whole first because I think that we worked very hard, we did some really cool work. My favorite parts of the movie are the opening because of how organic, and how easy it feels. And the entirety of the invasion. I think it was so much fun to work on. It’s such a unique movie. It’s so cool and so weird. But all the way up from when the Red family comes in until the end of the second family’s house is one of my favorite parts of the movie, just because it’s so rich in all of these textures, with silence and also with the specific foley moments. I really enjoyed working on the boat. I’ve got a little nugget for you, for the sound design of the boat. The boat had a problem in that it would break down all the time, it would stop running. We needed to create sound that conveyed that in a realistic but very interesting way. And we created the sound for this boat. When we were on the dub stage, Doug and I decided that we wanted to put the sound of the Whack-A-Mole, you know the Whack-A-Mole at the very beginning? We put the sound that we created for the Whack-A-Mole into the boat breaking down.
Necessity is the mother of invention!
So again, it was such a pleasure working with Jordan. I love working with Jordan. I think that he is a fantastic filmmaker and he’s just a joy to be around. He’s a very patient, a very intelligent man. And I also really enjoyed hanging out with Ron and Doug because of their patience, how intelligent they are, and also just the ideas that these guys come up with. They have the best ideas. They’ve got a lot of experience, and it was quite the pleasure to have that learning experience with them.
by debbie elias, exclusive interview 10/03/2019
