Sound re-recording mixer Greg P. Russell may be a name few moviegoers -- or even many Academy members -- know. But with more than 185 films to his credit and more than a dozen Oscar nominations, he has worked with some of the biggest directors in Hollywood.
Russell picked up his 15th Oscar nod this year for Michael Bay’s “Transformers: Dark of the Moon.” With a worldwide gross of more than $1.1 billion, Bay's film ranks fourth after "Avatar," "Titanic" and "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2." Russell and Bay have collaborated on eight films, with six nominations for sound mixing. But so far the director's action brand has not yet translated into an Oscar win for Russell, whose first nomination came for 1989's Ridley Scott film "Black Rain."
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TheWrap caught up with Los Angeles-based Russell during a mixing session for his latest job, the June 29 release "G.I. Joe: Retaliation," starring Channing Tatum. His big hope, he says, is to take home the statuette for his 9-year-old: “She’s hoping Dad gets to win one time.”
Michael Bay is famously hands-on and a relentless worker and taskmaster. But after seven pictures, you must have a shorthand with him?
Michael gives us tremendous creative license from a sound-design and sound-mixing standpoint, gives us a lot of leeway. But he really does sign off on and approve what we do. And we certainly know when he’s not happy with something, and we make those changes for him. When he’s happy, he’s like a 14-year-old kid who’s absolutely thrilled and excited, and it's fun to see.
Sound is incredibly manipulative -- we can manipulate an audience to look at any given portion of the screen by where we place sound and what we do with it, and that’s a big part of the storytelling process—Michael has said it’s 50 percent of the experience of his movies.
In any scene you might have muttered dialog, clanking robots, jets strafing, choppers buzzing—it’s not quite like a drawing-room drama is it?
I know today I’m a better mixer for having worked on his movies because they’re probably the most demanding and complex films a sound mixer or designer can work on.
So other than dialog, just about every sound in these modern action epics is created after shooting?
Every sound you hear other than the dialog is all prepared by the sound editing team -- none of that is recorded while shooting the movie. That means all the helicopters and jets, all the gunfire -- every bullet impact and every whiz-by. Plus, all the robot sounds -- and there are thousands of robot sounds to create the life of these beings and make them believable -- are designed and recorded by our sound team.
They prepare the entire palette of sound to be used in the film, then I take all of those sounds and there’s many food groups of them, to work with.
