CineConcerts is committed to enhancing and expanding everyone’s understanding of every facet of filmmaking, particularly when it comes to sound. We were lucky enough to talk to a 50-year veteran of the film industry, Gary Bourgeois, who has worked as a sound mixer and engineer on some of our favorite films. A musician himself, Gary has special appreciation for composers, and all the work that goes into creating the sound of the movies.

CineConcerts (CC): We wanted to get a little bit about your background, how did you initially get started in the film industry?

Gary Bourgeois (GB): Well, first of all this is my 50th year!

CC: Wow! Congratulations!

GB: I started in 1969 and I started in Canada, in Ottawa, which of course isn’t known anywhere as a film mecca. I started out doing production sound at Crawley Films, I had been hired because I was kind of a well-known drummer in Ottawa. Crawley was a film company that specialized in documentaries and industrials, (corporate video records), I started working there and they taught me a great deal. The owner liked to dabble in feature films, so one of the first things I worked on was a film called Janis, about Janis Joplin. The head of the sound department was more into Frank Sinatra, and he said to me,

“You know that rock n’ roll stuff, you can do this.”

I didn’t really know what I was doing, but I knew music, so I started mixing Janis’ stuff when I was 19, or 20 years old. Then another project came along, Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Review. I ended up going down to New York the next week to SIR rehearsal studios and meeting Bob and the first thing I said to Bob was,

“I’m not a big fan.”

And he just sort of stopped and, now I was 24 years old and Bob was 34 and a mega star, and I just told him I don’t like his music. I told him I had read his poetry and writings, but I was a jazz fusion drummer, so I am not into the music. He said to me,

“Can you be honest?”

“I wear my heart on my sleeve. I am completely transparent,” I said.

“Can you give me cold? Can you give me blue?” he asked.

I am from Canada, I know what that means! So he looked at me and said,

“You’re it. You’re on.”

And after the tour all the tape had to be mixed down and the movie had to be edited, so my introduction to California was actually living at Bob Dylan’s house and driving onto the Warner Bros. lot everyday in a limo.

I got into the film industry really as a kid, and was immediately drawn to the musical side of things, because I was a musician but also because of the way I look at things. Most people don’t realize that filmmaking is all about rhythm, the picture, editing, movement, everything.

CC: So your education really came from your time at Crawley Films?

GB: Other than USC Film School in LA, and New York Film school, there was no real opportunity for a formal education in film. IT was all about mentorship, and I had a great mentor, I was called ‘the kid’ and beaten up regularly, but it was a great education.

CC: Do you find that the skills you developed when you worked on the Janis and Bob Dylan films have transferred over into the more traditional film and TV work that you do now?

GB: I went to my first scoring session when I was 22, 23 years old and I thought, ‘I love this, this is wonderful, the person is writing the music around the action.’ That was for a film called The Man who Skied Down Everest, which actually won the Academy Award for best documentary in 1975. At the time, I thought music was The Rolling Stones, but on that film, I was able to see how really good composers worked. They write around the salient points. The composers that really impressed me most, and made it easier for me as an engineer, write around the gunshot, the explosion, or the dialogue. You really get that sense of “what comes next” from the music.

CC: When you are working on a project, who do you collaborate with the most? Director, producer, editor? Does it vary by project?

GB: The answer is yes (laughs). Obviously it varies, it depends on what the picture is. The really big ones, everyone is involved, not just because of the money, but because of the size and the weight of the picture and also, generally those sorts of pictures have a lot of great professionals, even the producers know what they are doing.

I work with the picture editor, and sound supervisor quite a bit. The composer usually gets introduced at a certain point, and they always have a music editor, they don’t want other people to know that, but the music editor adjusts things based on picture changes, and on any mix stage, the music editor represents the composer.

I get involved with the music editor very early on, and then I usually visit the scoring stage. Not many people do this but I will visit the scoring stage and during a couple of different cues I will go stand at the conductor’s podium. Just close my eyes and listen to the score in the room. You know the LA studio musicians are fantastic. It’s a very cool moment. I just close my eyes and listen and I think this is what I have to make sure comes across. This has to translate to the audience, what I am feeling here, what I am sensing right there.

CC: Do you have a favorite project? Anything that sticks out in your mind?

GB: I did a film called Pleasantville years ago for Gary Ross and Randy Newman was the composer and his score was just so good, it just made you cry even when I was mixing it it made me cry. The film starts out black and white and various things turn color as you go, and as a vehicle for sound it was unbelievably good. I remember mixing it and the music was so beautiful and I would finish a mix and there were 3 or 4 people around just stunned, it was so beautiful. And I thought to myself this music deserves more than that, and I would go again, until I would do the fade out and I would turn around and they were just sitting there crying. That was my benchmark.

And there are a number of composers, like James Newton Howard, who will actually come to the scoring stage and be extremely objective about their work. He would even suggest,

“Why don’t we take that cue out? It’s not really doing anything.”

That’s a rare event, for a composer to offer that. I remember a film called Dave, I have done about a dozen films with James Newton Howard but that one, Dave, the score is so good, and it was used as a temp score for many films after, because the few notes that mattered, were right there when you needed them.

CC: Is there any project that you remember as being the most challenging?

GB: I have done a number of projects with Betty Thomas, who is a great director and wonderful person. And there was a film that was not particularly successful that was called I Spy with Owen Wilson and Eddie Murphy. Unfortunately there were problems with production and the recording wasn’t great. On top of that Eddie Murphy talks so quickly and Owen Wilson just sort of whispers, so with that dynamic, it added up to a really difficult mix.

Those are the sort of elements that most people don’t think about, but when you listen to a whole film, and you leave, you have no idea why you are irked or bothered or something doesn't feel right, maybe for the whole 90 minutes you just didn’t understand a word and you are pissed off. So whether you are successful working on a good project or a bad project you have to think of it in terms of it’s an hour and a half experience, how are people going to leave? How are they going to feel how they leave? So for me, success is people talking about the plot or the wonderful acting, they weren’t disturbed by what I did. You know, sound is called the silent art, the silent craft. No one is supposed to know we are there. A full score is supposed to have an emotional reaction, but people shouldn’t necessarily be whistling the score when they leave.

When I go to see a film and I’m leaving the theater I listen to people’s comments on the way out. I go and stand by the exit, I don’t want to hear them say, “oh the sound is good'' or “oh the sound was bad”. You want them to feel the film, and that is how you know you succeeded as a team. The composer thinks it’s all about the music, the cinematographer thinks it’s all about the picture but it’s completely a team effort. It has to be. If it’s not a team effort you can tell where the weakness is.

CC: It’s such an interesting job, mixing movies, and it’s not something people think about a lot, but it’s such a big part of what movies actually are.

GB: People outside of the business, they have no idea. When a director comes onto a mix stage when it’s all being put together they are looking at the picture, color timing, they are hearing the music in all it’s glory they will tell you that in the filmmaking process, with all the things they have to go through, that is one of the top moments in making a movie. For them it’s a big moment, but other people say,

“A mix stage? What’s that?”

Which is fine! As long as they keep going to movies!

CC: Has your work changed at all with the current situation? Are you set up to work right now, and are there projects going on?

GB: Well the isolation thing is not difficult for me, because when we aren’t working we are at home doing other things you know? The studio I work for is open, but there is not much work. We have gotten calls and we have gone in on a couple days when someone needs to finish something, but we don’t bring clients with us. We just go in by ourselves, mix, and we send it to the client. They listen to it at home, it may not be the best situation to listen to the material on, but the bottom line is they can at least tell the margins, that is how much the music is encroaching on the dialogue. So on a basic level they are able to judge and give notes and we go back and make tweaks so that’s how we have been doing it.

The amount of work has dropped off dramatically because there is no one shooting and to tell you the truth, most people don’t think about this, but when production comes back, say it’s another month from now, post production is always six months behind that.

On top of that everyone is unsure of how the workflow is going to end up changing. Studios may realize how much can be done at home by the editors, they may decide that that’s a good idea to actually decrease the size of their facilities. But the facilities themselves still have to do the final mixing or the color timing, has to be done in a real room, so that won’t change.

I think the big tentpole pictures will still be done on the lot, partially because of the budget and the scale and the scope of the projects, and to a great extent it’s also because the executives are on the lot and they want to be able to wrangle or sit tight on a project. But things will change dramatically.

CC: Have you ever been to a film concert?

GB: At USC they give out a chair or two every few years, and Steven Speilberg was sponsoring a chair, and John Williams was also sponsoring one. The two people they were sponsoring were Kay Rose who is a sound supervisor and Ken Hall who is a music editor, he was actually John Williams’ music editor for decades. At the ceremony, both Kay and Ken were able to invite a guest, and I was lucky enough to be there. A concert for only about 100 people, and John Williams conducted the USC Marching Band doing Star Wars. I looked to the other guest and thought, “What are we doing here?!” It was such an honor, but that was also a pretty specific concert!

CC: Is there any movie you would want to see in concert?

GB: It’s probably for me, less about the movie, and more about the composer. John Powell or John Debney, I just love their scores, I don’t care what movie it’s from I just love it. I probably mixed it! But John Debney’s stuff, I just open up the faders and listen to what I have to work with, because I’m given all these various elements all broken down, the strings and the piano and percussion, I have all these different elements that I control, so I just open up the faders and I take a listen to what I have to work with and there are certain composers where I just think damn this is beautiful. I better not touch this, you don’t want to try to save something that is perfect.

Mixing the Greats: A Dream Job for Sound Engineer Gary Bourgeois