Tom Fleischman has mixed sound for many of the Martin Scorsese movies that are full of gunshots, punches and profanities – but like his director, Fleischman tried a change of pace last year with "Hugo." The Best Picture nominee's sound palette leans toward the ticking of clocks, the bustle of a Parisian train station and the occasional roar of a locomotive, much of it set to the strains of small-combo jazz from the early decades of the 20th Century.
Fleischman is a five-time Oscar nominee; his earlier nods came for "Reds," "The Silence of the Lambs," "Gangs of New York" and "The Aviator." A veteran who's mixed more than 200 films and television shows in a career of more than 30 years, he kicks off TheWrap's series of conversations with this year's Oscar-nominated sound mixers.
What were the specific challenges in "Hugo" for you?
I guess the nightmare train scene, where the train crashes into the station, was the biggest challenge. Mainly because there were lots of sound effects and lots of music, and whatever dialogue there was had to come through that. And when I first heard Howard Shore's score, I thought, "How are we going to get all of this in there and have it make any sense?" You start piling a lot of stuff in, and eventually it just turns to mush and you don't really hear anything.
Also read: The complete list of Oscar nominees
But when we added the music, it really played, and you could hear it all. Howard really did a great job on that cue. It's tough to have a driving cue like that, which is big and loud and orchestrated, and have it not blot out everything else.
Most of the action takes place inside the huge train station, where you've got sound coming from all directions: train noise, music from the cafe and the stores, people everywhere…
Balancing that stuff out is difficult, and it takes a lot of care. And the set was very noisy. Besides all the extras, with lots of movement and footsteps, there was steam all over the train station. And steam generators make noise, which we had to justify with the steam we see in the picture.
But the biggest challenge in the train station, I think, was to get the right quality in some of the music. When the station inspector meets the flower lady, there's music playing that is supposed to be coming from somewhere in the station, perhaps the cafe. That was a challenge to get the right sound for that source cue, to make it seem believable and still have the emotional quality that Marty was looking for.
The film makes wonderful use of 3D to create the space in which the action takes place, and obviously sound is a large part of creating that immersive environment.
