Company 3 Senior Re-Recording Mixer Christian Cooke has contributed to feature film soundtracks for over 20 years. Still, being part of Francis Ford Coppola’s long-awaited, controversial feature, Megalopolis can be counted among his career highs. The director (along with Walter Murch, credited with coining the term “sound designer”) has famously been an essential force in the creative use of sound for films since the 1970s. The Conversation focuses specifically on psychoacoustics in a way no film has before. Apocalypse Now was groundbreaking in terms of its use of surround sound in addition to the slew of then-new recording and mixing techniques.

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“When I first saw Apocalypse Now,” Cooke recalls, “I was kind of speechless. I think I just sat in the theater after it was over for about ten minutes, processing everything I saw and heard. I was I was totally blown away by that movie!” So, when asked to mix dialogue on Megalopoilis (primarily a result of his prior work with the film’s editor, Cam McLaughlin, on evocative Guillermo del Toro-directed projects Nightmare Alley and The Shape of Water, for which Cooke shared an Oscar nomination), he knew this would be a dream assignment.

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The process began as Sound Dogs, a frequent collaborator with Company 3’s Toronto sound operation, delivered an enormous number of SFX tracks. These use an extensive range of sounds to allow the mixers and the director to experiment with multiple approaches to what would become Megalopolis’ otherworldly soundscape. Focusing on dialogue, Cooke created a pre-mix at his usual studio in Toronto to hit the ground running during the final mixing process.

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He then relocated to Coppola’s custom-built filmmaking facility, Peachtree City, in Atlanta. The space, once been a motel complex, now contains a top-tier mixing stage, other production and post facilities for the filmmaker’s work, and a block of restored and beautifully maintained hotel rooms. Cooke, in addition to the SFX and music mixer Brad Zoern, sound editors Nelson Ferreira and Nathan Robitaille from Sound Dogs, and the director spent six weeks in Peachtree City collaborating on the mix. Of Coppola, Cooke says, “He’s a master. He’s incredible to work with. We did a lot of very unusual things: speeding up sounds and slowing them down and creating very unusual soundscapes.” The mixers, sharing the mixing desk, were generally involved in each iteration. “Everything I do as a dialogue mixer can affect the music and effects and vice versa. We’re working in tandem towards the same goal.”

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Coppola, he recalls, “really liked a lot of percussive sounding effects to come up during scenes,” he adds, “and then we’d take those sounds and put them in spots that you wouldn’t normally put them. In some scenes, there are sounds and bits of music from stringed instruments where it isn’t obvious what you’re hearing. Some of it is supposed to feel a bit like you’re experiencing a memory or imagining something. For a lot of the dialogue, we added different kinds of reverb effects and delays to help create this unique kind of feel.”

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For those who experience the audio in Dolby Atmos, with its array of speakers surrounding and above the audience, this unusual approach to the sound will be even more pronounced and, therefore, bring viewers even further into the film’s unique world. “We weren’t shy at all about using all those speakers,” Cooke notes.

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While it’s essentially received wisdom that dialogue in surround sound audio is generally pegged to the center channel with only rare exceptions, Cooke notes that there were no such strictures for this mix. “There’s a part where Adam Driver’s character is pretty intoxicated inside a carnival-like environment, and there’s sound coming from all over the theater,” he explains, noting that he and his colleagues would make use of techniques rarely used together — sounds changing pitch, speeding up and slowing down, emanating from unexpected speakers — to deliver Coppola’s vision. Driver’s character “might be onscreen talking, but the sound would come out of speakers you wouldn’t expect because we’re essentially hearing the world from inside his mind.”

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The director’s primary dictate to the mixers, says Cooke, was “‘Go crazy!’ We knew we could always change the result if he didn’t like the result, but that really got our creative juices going!”

Once the director was happy and the mix signed off on, Cooke returned to his mixing theater at Company 3 Toronto and worked with the same mixers to create additional passes for various release formats, including IMAX, which uses different technology from Dolby for its proprietary surround format.

The work, Cooke reports months after delivery, was intense and required mixers to come up with ideas they’d typically not be asked to execute. Mixing for Coppola, whose work had such an effect on Cooke’s appreciation for film sound, was, the mixer sums up, “just an unbelievable experience!”

Megalopolis, released through Lionsgate in the US, opens theatrically this Friday, September 27.