What Randy Thom Hears

Going Deep in the Mix With an Oscar-Winning Sound Designer

It’s hard to imagine a more golden Hollywood resume than the one sported by Randy Thom. Since getting his first big breaks recording effects for Apocalypse Now and The Empire Strikes Back, the sound designer has left his aural fingerprints on knockout tracks for films as disparate as Wild at Heart, Forrest Gump, A Brief History of Time and Arlington Road. He’s been nominated for 12 Oscars, including two each this year for The Polar Express and The Incredibles, and was a winner in 1983 for The Right Stuff. We talked to him about breaking into the business, creating sound for animation, and what directors don’t know.

F&V: How did you become a sound designer?

Thom: Seeing and hearing the first Star Wars movie pushed me over the edge. It was such a paradigm shift. A huge number of people got their chromosomes rearranged by watching that film, and that’s what made me decide to push ahead doing movie sound. I finally made a very lucky call to Walter Murch. I sat all day and watched [his team] remixing American Graffiti into stereo. At the end of the day, he said, "I want you to write an essay about what you’ve seen today.’ I figured that was his MO for dealing with people like me, but I didn’t find out until about three years ago that I’m the only person he ever asked to write an essay. He liked what I wrote, and he hired me to work on Apocalypse Now. It was like going to film school, only better. I spent half my time recording sound effects and the other half sitting in the mix doing mostly menial jobs, but I got to watch Walter and Mark Berger and Richard Beggs mix the film.

F&V: What was that like?

Thom: It was an amazing experience. One of the things going for that movie is that we had time to try lots of things, many of which didn’t work but some of which worked incredibly well. The main thing wrong with short schedules is you don’t have any time to make mistakes.

F&V: What’s the biggest difference in your job when the film is animated?

Thom: Probably the most interesting thing is there are fewer differences now than there used to be. It used to be that, in a typical live-action film, even an action-adventure, you would get a significant amount of usable sound from the set. But so-called live-action films have been moving closer to animated films in recent years because of computer graphics. For those, you’re starting with a clean palette because there was no set, the images are invented inside a computer, and it’s completely up to you to invent the sonic world the action inhabits. Whenever you work on an animated film these days, one of the first things the director typically tells you is that he or she does not want it to sound like a cartoon. Cartoon is typically a bad word. You try to create ambiences, atmospheres and sounds so that if you turned the picture off, you would probably think you were listening to a live-action film.

F&V: So you’re trying to evoke the same kind of aural world?

Thom: Certainly not in every case. The last four films I worked on have all been animated films, and one of them was a Japanese anime called Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence. Mamoru Oshii really wanted a highly stylized soundtrack. He wasn’t trying to convince anybody that they were listening to real-life recordings. He gave me the latitude to stylize the sound in all kinds of ways, to focus on one particular sound in the middle of what normally would have been hundreds of sounds and treat the sound effects as if they were music— just using them to play the appropriate emotional and dramatic notes in the scenes, rather than trying to disguise what was going on as live action and real life.

F&V: What’s the biggest mistake directors make with regard to sound?

Thom: They don’t think enough about sound far enough in advance. And, in a way, it’s not their fault. The whole culture that we occupy mitigates against thinking about sound. We tend to be a lot more aware of and analytical about visual images than sound. Very often directors are affected by sound in exactly the same way that audience members are, and they tend not to be very analytical about it. In an action sequence, the impression you want to give the audience, typically, is that they’re hearing 50 things at once — people screaming, gunshots, explosions, the score, etc. But if you actually play all of those sounds at an equal volume, it turns into incoherent noise. The trick is to decide what you want the audience to focus on and use various audio tricks to allow them to focus on those sounds to the exclusion of everything else. Sometimes it’s as simple as raising the volume on the thing you want them to focus on and lowering the volume of everything else. Sometimes you change the tonal character of the principal sound and what you want to be the background sounds. If you do it artfully enough, the audience gets the impression that it’s hearing everything all the time. But if you analyze it, what you’re hearing is a carefully orchestrated changing of focus from moment to moment, from this to that. One of the biggest misconceptions that young directors have is that it’s all about playing as many sounds as possible at the same time. And the professional trade journals in sound don’t help when they constantly emphasize [that] the larger mixing console you’re using, the better. "I had 350 inputs all working at the same time!" Well, if you really had 350 sounds playing at the same time you would be listening to noise. Take some of that with a grain of salt.

F&V: What’s working with Robert Zemeckis like?

Thom: He thinks a lot about how sound is going to be used long before he starts shooting. That’s a dream director. He doesn’t wait for the final mix to decide if a scene is going to be a music scene, a sound effects scene, or a mix of the two. One of the things he is very good at is thinking about what the characters in a scene are hearing from moment to moment. I’m beginning to get more emails and phone calls from young directors and writers, saying, "What can you tell me about how to write this sequence in a way that will allow sound to participate in the storytelling?" I always tell them you need to think about what your characters are hearing. In most scenes, the only things characters seem to hear are other characters talking, and occasionally source music. In reality, everything that we hear in our environments has an emotional effect on us. Sometimes even the sound that we should be hearing, we don’t hear. If a writer ignores that, then he or she is missing an opportunity to tell the audience a lot about that character.

F&V: Were the 1970s and early 1980s a Golden Age of movie sound, or do comparable breakthroughs continue to be made?

Thom: I think there have been some examples of great sound since then — Saving Private Ryan and a few other movies occur to me — but we haven’t had as many really wonderful, life-changing, groundbreaking soundtracks since roughly the early 1980s, and I think it’s attributable to directors having more power in those days. The common story is that in the 1960s the studios were having problems getting people to go to movies and they threw up their hands and there was this new crop of directors coming out of film schools, and they said let’s let them do what they want to do within reason. You had Coppola, Lucas, Scorsese, De Palma and a few others who created masterpieces. But there were also some really bad movies made. Now you have just an enormous number of mediocre movies. And the same filters that are put up, like focus groups, to make sure that no or very few embarrassingly bad movies get made eliminate the possibility for any really great movies to get made because they don’t allow people to take creative risks. That’s my crackpot theory about why movie sound was more ambitious and experimental and broke more new ground in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

F&V: How has the recent renewed awareness of movie-style sound—spurred by the advent of 5.1 sound systems in the living room— impacted either the way you work or the way the industry expects you to work?

Thom: It’s certainly impacted both, but I think it’s mostly a diversion. It has a lot to do with selling equipment. I think people spend way too much time talking about and thinking about surrounds and subwoofers— don’t get me wrong, I like to use both of them— but when you’re a filmmaker and a sound designer, you should be thinking about the story and about using sound in the smartest possible ways to help tell the story and not be obsessed with 5.1 and 7.1 and all that. Because I would, and most people with a brain would, rather watch and listen to a great movie in mono than a thoroughly mediocre movie in 20.1 if such a thing existed. All of that stuff, being able to pan sounds around the room and having lots of subwoofer, is the icing on the cake. And first you have to get the cake, and too many movies these days don’t start with a very good cake.