Forecasting the Oscars ® since 2003

"It's not about who we want to win,

It's about who will"

TRANSFORMING SOUND INTO EMOTION:
OUR EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW WITH SOUND MIXER GREG P. RUSSELL

Sound Mixer Greg P. Russell (Transformers) has 11 Oscar nods under his belt but no wins yet, Is this his year?

FEATURES

By Tom Houseman

Jack Nicholson; Meryl Streep; Katherine Hepburn; Greg P. Russell. That last name might not be one that you recognize, but he belongs on the same list as those first three for one simple reason: he’s been nominated for more than ten Oscars. Russell has actually been nominated for eleven Oscars, more than Academy frequent fliers like Peter O’Toole, Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, and Kate Winslet. So why isn’t Russell a household name like the other film celebrities mentioned above? Well, he’s a sound mixer, not exactly a profession that earns you a lot of press in Hollywood. Still, even though most people haven’t heard of him, just about everyone in America has heard his work; he has worked on some of the biggest Hollywood blockbusters in history, films like The Mask of Zorro, Armageddon, Pearl Harbor, and all three Spiderman movies.

But Greg P. Russell has gotten a lot more press than most sound mixers, even if it’s not for the best of reasons. Although Russell has been nominated for eleven Oscars, he has yet to take home the gold. This year he has two shots at the gold with the third Spiderman film and Transformers. I got a chance to talk to Russell about how he got into the field of sound mixing, his working relationship with Kevin O’Connell, and how musicals have become the bane of his existence.

Greg Russell was practically born a sound mixer. He started in the field of music recording as a teenager, and would do live P.A. mixing for his friends who were in bands. “My father was a professional musician,” Russell said, and from his childhood he would accompany his father to studio recording sessions. He was intrigued by the sound engineers who sat in the back, and decided to make his recording hobby into a career. After taking a private recording class Russell was offered a job at TTG recording studios. “I did all of the gophering stuff,” Russell explained. “I was eighteen years old and I was just out of high school.”

Despite his young age, Russell proved his skill at music recording during his four years working at TTG. It was there that he was first exposed to using music for television and film; Russell spent much of his time at TTG mixing scores for television and commercial jingles. After four years, Russell felt that he needed to take a step up in his career. “The owner [of TTG] had promised me to get into the union the entire four years I was there, but never did. It was time to get paid for what I was actually doing for a living.” Russell got a union paying job at Evergreen Studios, another music recording company.

But although he spent two years at Evergreen, it was his next job that would mark a major turning point in his career. Russell left Evergreen for B&B Sound Studios, a small post production facility. “I was still nurturing a music recording career,” said Russell, but was intrigued by working in another medium. “The possibility of working in re-recording as a dubbing mixer was appealing to me. It looked fun.” There he met Jeff Haboush, his first sound mixing partner, and the two worked together dubbing various T.V. shows and many cartoons. “The irony is that we worked on the cartoon series of ‘Transformers’.”

Russell worked with Haboush from 1983 to 1988, and also got a chance to work on fifty-five low-budget films, including a number of B-movie slasher films and John Waters original Hairspray. Russell had developed a name for himself as a sound mixer, and when he got a chance to take a huge leap forward in his career, he took it, signing a contract to work as a mixer for Warner Bros. “I started to work on movies that, looking up at the screen, there were name actors, which was kind of unique and exciting.” Russell’s first project, Tequila Sunrise, plunged him among a group of Oscar winners. The film was written and directed by Robert Towne (Best Original Screenplay for Chinatown), shot by legend Conrad L. Hall (Best Cinematography for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid) and edited by Claire Simpson (Best Editing for Platoon). Russell says that “it was truly an honor.”

It wasn’t long before Russell got his first Academy Award nomination. The next year he worked on Black Rain for Ridley Scott, the first of eleven films to earn him a Sound Mixing Oscar nod. “It was a mindblower,” said Russell of finding out that he had been nominated. “My phone rang at 5:45 in the morning only to have one of the other mixers screaming into the phone ‘We’re in! We’re in!’” Black Rain lost the Oscar to Glory, which began an unfortunate trend for Russell of being always the bridesmaid, and never the bride.

After seven years at Warner Bros. and no more Oscar nominations to his name, Russell took another giant step forward in his career. He left Warner and started working for Sony studios, partnering up with Kevin O’Connell, who worked with Russell on Black Rain and had already been nominated for eight Oscars (and no wins). This pairing was a match made in heaven, as the two spent the next twelve years working on the biggest Hollywood blockbusters and ringing up a mind-boggling number of Academy Award nominations. From 1996 to 1998, the two were nominated four times, including twice in 1997. Over the dozen years they’ve worked together, only twice has a sound mixing category not had their name in it, but they’ve never taken the next step: walking up to the stage to pick up their Oscars.

Russell spoke fondly of his time working with O’Connell. “We had a great run together, we had a lot of fun together.” The two would work as many as fifteen hour days for weeks in a row: “when you’re spending those kind of hours, you spend more time with your sound mixing partner than you do with your wife.” However, Russell felt this year that he needed a change. “I basically said I can’t do this any longer in here,” Russell explained, and decided to end his professional relationship with O’Connell with Spiderman 3 and Transformers.

You might think, after almost a dozen Oscar nominations, that the novelty of being nominated would have worn off, but Russell is still giddy about the idea of being nominated a twelve, and possibly a thirteenth time at the 2008 Oscars. Russell understands that working on big action and sci-fi movies have given him the opportunity to become a perennial Oscar nominee, and he has taken advantage of the chance. “These films are looked at because they’re high octane action films with huge special effect sequences as well as the sound that brings them to life. Unsurprisingly, films Russell has worked on have won a number of Oscars for Sound Editing and Visual Effects, but he has yet to take home the gold. However, he is hoping that changes this year with Transformers, far and away the most complex film he has ever mixed.

Mixing the sound for a film is never an easy task, but with action movies, the challenge is incredible. One action sequence could feature up to 1000 tracks of sound, and it is Russell’s job to make sure that all the sounds fit realistically into the scene. “It required an enormous amount of effort to choose wisely what elements to feature and what to eliminate,” says Russell. The visual effects, notably the giant robots transforming and battles sequences in Transformers were AMAZING. “We needed to support those visuals and bring them sonically to life.”

So why was Transformers such a challenge for Russell and O’Connell. Quite simply, it was the magnitude of the project. Russell pre-dubbed all the effects in the Kim Novack Theater. Russell explained that he had never worked on a film that required more than twenty-five different sound pre-dubs, but for Transformers there were twenty-nine. “The robots had nine groups of effects, and in those groups there can be upwards of forty tracks.” One of the most unique aspects of Transformers is 95% of the sounds in this film were created specifically for the film. All new recordings by Sound Supervisor Ethan Van Deryn and Sound Designer Erik Aadal. They did a fantastic job.

But Russell, originally a music mixer, always makes sure that the music is never lost in the complex sound mix of a scene.. “Emotion is driven with music,” explains Russell. “You obviously are playing big sound effects with big robots…but when you have the thematic thread of music you don’t want to lose that. You want to still hear that, so it’s always a give and take.” Despite working with over 800 different sounds in a scene, Russell says that he always strives for a well balanced mix with great attention to detail and definition. As well a dynamic range that doesn’t pummel an audience.

Russell feels if were lucky enough to get nominated for Transformers or Spidey and actually win this year. It would make for a great closing act for O’Connell and Russell.

“When you’ve lost that many times…” Russell trails off when broached about the subject of winning the Oscar this year. Yet despite a eleven defeats, Russell is not a sore loser. The sound mixers are a community, and Russell is friends with most of them, so he is always supportive of the other winners. “I want whoever wins to truly enjoy that moment.” But beneath his magnanimous outward appearance, Russell spends every Oscar night hungry for the award that has eluded him so many times. “I see them walking around the governor’s ball the rest of the night holding the Oscar and I want to experience that.” What would an Academy Award mean to Russell at this point in his career? He puts it pretty simply: “I would be so freaking excited and thrilled.”

But despite the pride that Russell has in Transformers (“I think that there isn’t a track out there as complicated and unique”), he is not naïve, and he knows that his road to an Oscar this year will be an uphill battle with a murderous barber standing in the way. Of Russell’s eleven losses, three of those have come at the hands of musicals, and this year Sweeney Todd is the favorite to win the award. When he saw Chicago at an Academy screening, he says that “after each song it was like an ovation, and I thought ‘oh, we don’t have a chance.’” Sure enough, Russell’s Spiderman lost out to Chicago. “When [Academy members] see a film and they are engrossed in the music… they instinctively think they love the sound of the music and therefore the sound mixing must be the best.”

But Russell is hoping to destruct the myth that musicals are the ultimate challenge in sound mixing. Sound mixing for a musical is a very different challenge than mixing for an action film. “In the action film you’re having to create a world from the ground up.

And being a sound effects mixer that’s where the work is. In a musical the pre-recorded tracks which in most cases sound pretty good are mixed more like a record than a film. Russell liked the work done by Michael Semanick and Tom Johnson, but he explains that musicals are a different challenge then battling robots destroying a city.

But if Russell couldn’t vote for his own films, what movies would he want to award for their sound mixing work? “3:10 to Yuma was a great job,” he says. He also commends action movies I Am Legend and The Bourne Ultimatum, as well as Ratatouille. Russell also gets a say in what is nominated for Best Picture, and he commented on a few of his favorites. “I liked The Kite Runner. I liked Juno a lot. No Country for Old Men was powerful.” He also mentioned the major contenders that didn’t impress him. Although he felt that There Will Be Blood was a great effort, he said that it was far too long. “I watched it in three sittings and each sitting felt like a full movie.”

But when Russell thinks about the Oscars, his focus is on his own chances at gold. Although he knows that Sweeney Todd is the frontrunner, he feels like this is his year, mostly because of his faith in his own product. Russell says that Transformers “exemplifies what sound mixing is all about,” and represents the biggest challenge, and the best work, of his career. So will Russell finally get the Oscar that has eluded him for nearly two decades? That’s up to the more than three thousand Academy members when they cast their votes as you read this. But maybe, if they know the incredible journey that Russell and O’Connell have taken to get where they are and the mind-blowing work they have done this year on two incredibly complicated films, they’ll be less likely to give their vote to other films, and might just give the award to Greg P. Russell and Kevin O’Connell, two men who couldn’t deserve it more.

Greg P. Russell is now nominated for a Cinema Audio Society Award for Outstanding Achievement in Sound Mixing

Photos by WireImage: Eric Charbonneau

Comments?
 

COMMUNITY

REVIEWS