Sound design

sound effects of traffic, all of which... builds as the intimacy builds and as the angles become more acute and as you get more into their face throughout the whole of the ten-minute sequence, because it was fairly difficult to figure out a way to put a ten-minute dialogue sequence in the middle of a movie. We are now in our California garb. California, yeah. It's supposed to be California in case you can't hear it. It is. I know it is, but you gotta...

45:39 · jump to transcript →

Anyway, at the end of the previous scenes, the trucks all make kind of a sonic envelope to it, and the sound effects are processed in the same key as the music. There's an accent as one truck goes through, just as he makes kind of a warning horn sound, just as he makes it approach the telephone and picks it up and calls Leo and makes his Faustian bargain, which he doesn't realize is a Faustian bargain at the time. What's the fifth alarm? We cannot run it down.

46:35 · jump to transcript →

the sound effects of the fire extinguisher have changed now in anticipation of a cue that's incoming. A what? In anticipation of the cue that will have a reverb on the sound effects of the fire extinguisher.

1:31:54 · jump to transcript →

Bill Paxton

and the grips shook the set and the set collapsed on us and split open my scalp. So I'll always remember that line. It caught fire and the roof came in all on the same day. And it hit Jim in the head. I saw blood spurting out of his head. It was where Sigourney was supposed to be sitting, so it was good it hit Jim and not her. We'd have gotten a day off. Think they did that on purpose? No. - I'm just asking. At that point, maybe they would've. In the pipe. Five by five." My favorite line. These shots, it's just me shaking the back of the magazine of the camera. The poor camera operator had a bruise around his eye, cos sometimes I'd whack the magazine too, just to give it a sharp jolt. This is all my shake of the camera. The operator can't do it himself. It just gets into this bouncy rhythm if the operator tries to do it. It has to be imposed from the outside and then they fight it, which is the natural reflex. Such a wonderful sound design in this movie. Much of which was generated in our living room in England. At the time, people really weren't using synthesizers in England to create sound effects for films, and we had a Fairlight synthesizer in our living room. A lot of the sound effects were generated by Bob Garret, Randy Frakes and Jim in our living room near Pinewood, including the sound of the alien queen. It really was a home movie.

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Bill Paxton

This is, to me, the creepiest part of the movie. This thing running around, that sound effect he did of the facehugger. The first scenes of this movie when he did the chestbuster. The sequel, A/en - he took care of it in five minutes. That first scene. That it was a dream. - That was great. I thought it was so smart. It was just great. His storytelling. - The sound effects. That scrabbling noise. The way this whole thing was laid out in the first Aven and the second one, the whole genesis of the way it would start out in the pod and then it turned into the facehugger and then it turned into the alien.

1:47:16 · jump to transcript →

Bill Paxton

A Iot of the shots of it scuttling along the floor were done on our miniature stage. That shot where it just scuttled by was done right next to the twelfth-scale cargo lock. At the base of the twelfth-scale cargo lock there was a little set there. So Jim would have five or six or seven little setups poked in between our miniatures. We'd fog up the stage and get ready to shoot, but he needed to shoot with no fog, so we'd clear the stage, he'd shoot his thing and then we would continue on. So it was like one giant filmmaking unit but we were doing two or three miniature shots simultaneously and he was doing four or five live-action inserts. A concentrated dose of Aliens filming. It's very hard to see Paul Reiser as such an evil guy, after so many years of his TV series. He used to hate to ride to work with me. I used ride to work with him. And he didn't like it? - Hated it. I was like a real primitive. He's a sophisticated comic. - What were you doing? I was always grunting and groaning. Smoking, burping. - He hated everything about me. What a boring ride that was. You've been carrying this baggage a while. This is a good forum. - Let it rip, baby. It was because of the character he was playing. He's such a prissy, corporate guy in this. It's tough in these kind of movies. Especially when you're young, if you're playing a good guy, you're always hanging with the good guys. You don't trust yourself as an actor to be friendly with the bad guys. "One of the bad guys might wreck my big scene." We were too serious as actors to be able to hang with Paul. He was reading the paper the whole time. It was like I was interrupting if I talked to him. You didn't wanna ride to work with me? I was in a different area. You were right round the corner. You didn't want me with you. - Bullshit. We're yanking these facehuggers around. I called them rubber-chicken facehuggers cos they were these floppy ones. The crawling one had a mechanism inside it. That was shot backwards. We pulled the tail off and shot it backwards. There was a pretty good mechanism built into the ones that are really articulated, but a lot of the time we were just yanking them around on fishing line and doing it in cuts. People probably wonder why I had him shoot the window before he jumped through it. The idea was it's tempered glass. You have to get the crystal structure of the glass to shatter before you can go through it. So this is a bunch of grown people fighting a rubber chicken, basically. But, of course, it's the actors that make the effects real in our minds. Great sequence. I love the red light that he uses in this too. The warning light. That happens in the other sequence too when the aliens are coming through the roof. Look. This is another scene that James Cameron sets up as the family scene. There's just the three of us there as a family, ready for Aven 3. David Fincher did a really good job photographically and so on. I think it's really a well-made film, visually. It's just kind of a slap in the face of the fans who invested in Newt and Hicks and all of those character relationships. I understand the instinct, of course, which is you have to make it your own. I just don't think you should make it your own at the expense of what people like, personally. But everybody's gonna make their own decisions. But I had to change some things and make it my own on my film. And I know that Ridley probably watched it and wasn't pleased with a lot of things. He probably wasn't pleased with the fact that he hadn't made it. But I think it's tough. It's tough to see somebody continue on something that you've started. But then you learn to just get over it because that's the nature of this business. I think the trick to this type of film is you just take it utterly seriously. You don't step outside yourself and try to have fun with it and wink at the audience. You take it absolutely seriously and you don't give the audience a chance to question it. And if the actors can sell it, then it works. This is a distinction. I never got the sense in the first film that the alien had an intelligence that allowed it to manipulate their technology, but I didn't see that necessarily as a barrier here because certainly these creatures have been around longer. The alien in the first film had only been alive for 24 hours. It was still an infant, even though it had grown full size. These aliens have had weeks or months to figure things out. There's no reason why they couldn't figure out the electrical system. Not that they're technological, but the rudimentary stuff. The implication is that they're pretty clever. It's clear by the end of the film that the alien queen knows how to operate an elevator. It's amazing how such a low-tech little device that Jim sets up early on really builds the tension. You don't have to see them. You just see that locator and you realize they're getting closer with a little sound effect. This is one of the first films we worked on that we worked with a video to look at our effects. Prior to that you would shoot a shot and go by your perception at the moment as to whether it worked or not and looking at dailies the next day. You didn't see an instant replay. But on this film we used a video tap and offside video camera on some of the shots to analyze what worked and what didn't. It was fairly expensive to have a video tap camera. In most effects stuff, the cameras used were... These old Mitchell cameras were great but they didn't have video tap. It was an expense a lot of times you couldn't afford. More welding. - Just don't look at it. Look away or you'll be blinded. Weld it but don't look at it. Put your hand there. Don't look at it. Is this where you bite it? - Yeah. Well, pretty soon. I'm gonna keep talking, even if I'm dead.

1:48:04 · jump to transcript →

And the catacombs are more interesting. The big kind of cesspit, whatever this is, a giant pool. Also, kudos to whoever in the sound design decided to put nunchuck sounds for the tendrils coming down. That's totally nunchuck sounds. I love that. We had fun with this. Oh, Craig Stearns did an amazing job with all those. Yeah. Sluices and whatever. It was a big complicated set in a warehouse by Magic Mountain, California. And it held four feet of water.

1:03:42 · jump to transcript →

This is my fave. When it comes out of the... Yeah, because the way that it's designed, we're going, yeah, of course, it's the meteorite. And Jesus Christ. Yeah. This was a close encounter. Goddamn Reagan. Yeah. And the sound is so great. How long did you have for the sound design, knowing that, like, obviously you guys didn't have a... I remember having fun with the sound design, but I was in kind of a crazy state of mind at that point. It was like, tick-tock, we got to get this movie out.

1:04:35 · jump to transcript →

But like what Mark was saying before, the sound design on the blob itself, it's an integral part of the character. Absolutely. Doing sound design for this and the mask were the two most challenging. But when you got it right, the whole thing jumps off the screen. You don't even have to debate. Suddenly the right sound is there. You're inventive and it pops. It's remarkable. That's what you think. It's not going to work. He has such a good, ambitious attitude.

1:05:02 · jump to transcript →

Get your father's good looks. OK, profiles, profiles. They have the same nose. And that was kind of a gift in the casting process. We didn't cast based on the nose, but it was a plus. Little sound effect coming up here. Not believable, but got a laugh. I remember I didn't like that sound effect.

5:34 · jump to transcript →

And this, of course, was sort of a... It was a total homage to Little House on the Prairie. No, no, no, Walton. I mean the Waltons, yeah. And then there's somebody at the end farts or... I belch. You belch. Supposedly. And I know you wanted to put in some sound effects after all the lights were out. Do you remember? No, I don't remember. Oh, I wanted to...

22:27 · jump to transcript →

And here we have a whole compendium of the trick shots. Look, the up without looking, and pretty soon we're gonna have the famous shooting behind you, right? There we go, boom! Now, I remember in the mix, we went on and on with this, and you were speaking about Basil's music before, and I remember saying, you know, you should just turn the music up here, because the music is so nice, or something like that, and I remember being quite pleased that I came back in, and a lot of the sound effects were down, and it just, the music went.

1:05:00 · jump to transcript →

Speaking of sound effects, this picture won an Academy Award for Steve Flick and John Pospisil, who did the sound effects. Yeah. And for example, there's a lot of what you would call normal sound effects, but to get, let's say, interesting sound effects for RoboCop took a long time, especially the steps. You would expect to do something like a piece of metal on the ground, but that never worked. Ultimately, we used kind of like a track...

1:05:30 · jump to transcript →

André Jacquemin has been putting on really good sound effects, great deep bass rumble that we could never do then. The technology wasn't there, but it eventually caught up with the scale of this kind of filmmaking. Originally, this film was supposed to be in the main film, and what happened was we started cutting it, leaving it in the position of where

10:23 · jump to transcript →

Tim Lucas

which in Cronenberg's imagination would have been more pointedly phallic with an actual foreskin nozzle, that he chopped it off, with the hand grenade then growing out of the stump of the handgun. The hand grenade appliance was designed by Baker and executed in foam latex by Kevin Brennan. Rick was very concerned that people wouldn't recognize the chewed-up result as a hand grenade, so a ticking sound effect was added in post. Frank Carere engineered the explosion.

1:17:29 · jump to transcript →

The sound people in New York that did the sound design for this experimented endlessly in trying to find the right sound for the scraping claws, and what they finally used was a steak knife on the underside of a metal folding chair. They said they wanted to find a sound that would just make everybody's teeth set on edge, and they finally found it that way. How is it you did all the posts in New York? That's where New Line Cinema at that time was located, and Bob Shaye wanted to be there for

1:18:26 · jump to transcript →

There was an argument between Rob Reiner and me over when Moke's hammering to try to get the pod open, and we were at the sound mix, and Rob wanted the hammering louder, and I was always the stickler for absurd reality, saying, how are we hearing that? It's a rock and roll band playing very loud, and a guy's hammering. How would we be hearing it any louder than the instruments? And Rob went around the room and asked everybody who was there, all the assistant editors and stuff,

38:03 · jump to transcript →

But also when I was doing the sound mix for that, these scenes, my mother had died. I just woke up one morning to discover she was living in the same house as me. And I had to go to the sound mix and do all these sounds. Oh my God, that's horrendous. Yeah. Oh, that's dreadful. So your experience of completing

1:19:48 · jump to transcript →

Oliver Stone

I'm trying to be a hero today. I don't know why. Maybe because of what happened in the village. Sometimes you become a hero, you don't know why. You give enough, you know, you just get sick of it. Good sound effects here. Good thuds, good concussions. This is sort of the pre-The Terminator era, so we were still working with a lot of more primitive sound effect system.

1:05:47 · jump to transcript →

One of the sexiest women around. This was taken right from the Farewell My Lovely. Exactly. With the one with... And it was Robert Mitchum playing the Priscilla Presley part. And who could forget that? A lot of people don't know that. Yeah, it's the old off-camera sound effect joke. Rarely works, but it did this time.

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