How ‘A Complete Unknown’ Tells Bob Dylan’s Story Through Sound
When director James Mangold assembled his sound department for “A Complete Unknown,” it was largely made up of artists with whom he had worked before — re-recording mixers David Giammarco and Paul Massey, supervising sound editor Donald Sylvester, supervising music editor Ted Caplan — but production sound mixer Tod Maitland was new to the team. And while Maitland has plenty of complex musicals on his resume, including “The Greatest Showman” and Steven Spielberg’s “West Side Story,” he quickly realized that “A Complete Unknown” was going to be his most challenging music-oriented film yet.
Initially, Maitland and Mangold discussed the possibility of shooting the musical performances in “A Complete Unknown” in the traditional manner, to playback with the actors lip-syncing to pre-recorded tracks. “There was the idea that we might use playback for some scenes, depending on how Timmy [Chalamet] was doing,” Maitland told IndieWire. “We didn’t want to waste time with earwigs and timing mechanisms. Then when it came down to our first live performance piece, Timmy came over 10 or 15 minutes before we started shooting and said, ‘I’m going live and I’m not going back. I worked for five-and-a-half years to do this.”
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Recording all of the movie’s performance sequences live made Maitland’s job exponentially more difficult. “I’ve done 16 music-based films before, and I’ve never done one without a playback track and earwigs or without a timing mechanism, without a click track,” Maitland said. The approach meant Maitland had to be meticulous in what he recorded on set because “if you didn’t get it, it wasn’t ending up on the film. It was like the way I learned mixing back in the analog days, when it was just two-track Nagra. You had to have everything on that tape.”
The need to capture not only each singer and instrument but all of the crowd noise meant Maitland often had 40 tracks recording at once, all of them using microphones that were period correct to replicate how the performances would have sounded in the early 1960s. Maintaining that sense of authenticity was also of paramount importance to the post-production sound team, who carefully crafted specific environments for each of the many venues in which Dylan performed — and then created subtle differences even within venues when the locations would host multiple performances.
“One of the beautiful things about the movie is that each environment required a different approach,” Caplan said, “and not only was the venue important, but there was also the intention of the scene. A great example of that is ‘The Times They Are A-Changin,’ which is about the sound spreading out to the audience and them singing along and creating that kind of collective feeling. Whereas ‘It Ain’t Me, Babe’ is about Joan and Bob on stage. They’re basically the same venue and would sound the same if you were at a concert, but they sound very different because we’re trying to say something different storytelling-wise.”
A key element in telling the story through sound is the crowd noise, which is remarkably varied and subtle in its changes throughout the film until the movie climaxes at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, where Dylan polarizes the audience by going electric. “The sound effects really had to express the love-hate thing that is happening by that point in the film,” Giammarco said. “That’s reflected in the performances by the loop group and in Tod’s production tracks and in manipulated library crowds, all of which create a world of cheering and dissension and all the different things that were happening.”
Throughout the film, Giammarco’s crowd effects tell the story of Dylan’s relationship with his audience, creating a kind of aural arc. “The crowds get bigger and bigger with every show,” Giammarco said. “We went from small venues with appreciative crowds to big venues with adoring crowds, and then to what we had in 1965.” Massey similarly found a way of tracing the evolution of Dylan’s relationship with his audience through the way in which his music reverberated within its environments.
“Especially in the Newport ’65 sequence, I was trying to use the PA as a character within the scene to bolster the impact of the songs as they progressed,” Massey said. “And also to be a part of Pete Seeger’s annoyance with the fact that he couldn’t control everything that was going on by adding crazy delays and things from a soundboard perspective.” While Massey says that sometimes the sound design is not technically realistic, it’s meant to convey the actual effects the songs are having on the audience.
“You have to overhype the sound of the rooms a little bit,” he said. “Even in the early scenes with Joan singing in the club and Bob singing after her, the club PA has a slightly unrealistic sound to let the audience know we’re hearing it in that perspective, we’re hearing it in that room. So I tend to lean into those pre-delays and room reverbs and such a little more than would be reality, just so that we have something for the audience to focus on.”
The attention to detail in Dylan’s surroundings went beyond his live performances, as there was also a larger idea that Mangold wanted the sound design to express. “Jim explained that this wasn’t Bob’s journey isolated, this was Bob’s journey amongst the people that were around him,” Sylvester said. “People who influenced him, good or bad people in the street, people in parties, people in nightclubs, people in stadiums. So Jim was always reminding us that there’s life going on around Bob and influencing him.”
That meant keeping the audience aware of the world outside even in intimate scenes like the one where Dylan and Joan Baez sing “Blowin’ in the Wind” in Bob’s apartment. “The world doesn’t stop just because they’re playing,” Caplan said, with Sylvester adding, “These people are living in a shithole and making beautiful art. The environment doesn’t necessarily dictate to you what you’re creating, and they were creating it despite the fact that there was a garbage truck outside.”
That said, Giammarco did slightly modulate the ambient effects to show Bob and Joan focusing on their music while still keeping the audience aware of the world going on about its business. “Jim doesn’t like blanket sounds of traffic and that kind of thing,” Giammarco said, “so there are little things poking through the windows and going on outside of the apartment. When they finish playing and they’re looking at each other, the world comes back in a more pointed way.”
In scenes where Dylan is playing in his apartment, Maitland had to find another approach for miking actor Chalamet. “It was very difficult because the way he holds his guitar is the same way that Bob would hold his guitar, high up on his body,” Maitland said. “So the body of the guitar would cover a lavalier if I tried to wire him with a lavalier. I learned this in rehearsals watching him play and told Timmy, ‘The only way that I can do this is by putting a microphone in your hair and a microphone inside the guitar and then use ambient microphones.'”
While Maitland’s biggest challenge was capturing all the performances both small and large as performed on set, for Caplan and Massey it was the sheer volume of music that made post sound daunting. “There are over 130 cues in this movie,” Caplan said, “whether it’s a guy playing guitar on the street or a source track or score or performance…I don’t know if you go a minute in this movie without a piece of music starting. So we’re wrangling a picture that’s got 40 production tracks, a ton of source music, score, everything, and it’s rolling really quick because we had a short post schedule.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever done a film with that many setups for music,” Massey said, “and each one of those needed to be customized and set up, even if the cue only lasted five seconds. You have to put into the right environment, like after the Cuban Missile Crisis…as Joan approaches the club, there’s a speaker playing what Bob’s playing inside the club. And that’s playing outside the club. Then we’re going into the stairwell. And then we’re going into the club itself with no PA. It’s fairly dry. That took a lot of setup because it’s, three or four different tonalities that you need. Three or four different environments.”
Massey added that while each environment has to feel specific and appropriate, there’s also an overall cohesion to the soundscape that must be maintained. “The other thing is just the consistency of the mix for the audience, from the top to the bottom of the film,” he said. “We’ve touched on how it was pretty short schedule. There was a lot going on. So it was a fly by the seat of your pants, but then at the same time, try to maintain consistency and leave somewhere to go so that when we got to Newport ’65 that could be stepped up from the rest of the film. It was a lot of fun.”
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