Take 11 Extended Interviews

TAKE 11, POV BOX: MUSIC EDITOR (FINAL MIX OR DUB)

FULL INTERVIEW: JOE E. RAND,

In our review of film music workers, we have come to the music editor involved in the very last stage of post-production, a film’s final sound edit or mixdown, known as the final dub. During the final dub, all three parts of the soundtrack—dialogue, sound effects and music—are combined. Joe E. Rand has been working in Hollywood as a music editor for three decades with some of the American industry’s most famous composers, from James Horner to Michael Giacchino. The films Joe Rand has edited include Titanic (1997) and Captain America: The First Avenger (2011). Over the years, Rand’s combination of professionalism and humor have made him one of the most in-demand music editors in the business. One of the other industry workers interviewed for this class mentioned Rand’s habit during recording sessions of dressing up in a film-related costume. During the recording of Enemy at the Gates (2001), for example, Rand showed up “in fatigues and a marine hat with a red flag at the top of it”! Rand spoke to me from London, where he was finishing up work on Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018), a film scored by Michael Giacchino.

JH: Thanks for taking time out of a busy schedule to speak with me. Can you tell me, for starters, how got into this business?

JR: I went to school for music. I went to Yale University where I studied composition and film music. I thought that writing for film might be something that I wanted to do. When I moved to Los Angeles, I worked in a lot of different areas—copying music, orchestrating, conducting, playing piano for recording sessions. I did anything and everything that I could that was related to music or film. I didn’t know a thing about my current profession, music editing.

JH: How did you get into music editing, then?

JR: One day, somebody working on the music for a film said, “I need an assistant, would you want to learn what it is that I do if you’re not doing anything else?” And I said, “Yes, absolutely.” And that’s how I got into music editing. In retrospective, all of those skills in the other departments turned out to be very helpful. I know what a copyist has to go through, this sort of last-minute panic. I know what the orchestrator has to deal with, and what the conductor is thinking about on the podium. Since I interact with all those people, that’s helpful to know.

JH: What an interesting story!

JR: In the end, despite the stress, I always liked working with really creative people. I’ve been very lucky to work on tremendously imaginative projects, which I never get tired of. In particular, I’m endlessly fascinated by the smallest amount of change in a piece of music against a visual image, and how that makes you feel good. It’s endlessly fascinating and luckily, that’s what I get to do most days.

JH: As a music editor in the film industry, what do you do?

JR: Well, the editing part of the music editor’s job is actually a small percentage of what we actually do. In Los Angeles, there are about 250 union music editors. Half of those work on feature films, half of them on television related projects. The two don’t tend to cross too much from one to the other.

JH: And you’re one of them!

JR: Yes. I’ve been working on feature films, primarily, for thirty years.

JH: What do you do as a music editor?

JR: I work with a variety of different composers. Every composer I work with, the job is slightly different. In general, my job is to provide technical assistance to that composer, in areas where they don’t have time to handle. It’s essentially technical and logistical assistance to the composer, as well as well as to the production. I’m paid by the film companies, but my primary job on most films is providing technical support for the composer in terms of keeping track of picture changes and handling communication with the editing rooms. Once the composer has finished recording, then I handle the overseeing of the quality and flexibility of the tracks until the project is finished.

JH: Probably that finishing process has changed over your years as a music editor.

JR: Absolutely. Increasingly, the projects are still in the process of change until the last minute. Every department has been getting better at changing things until the moment the film is released. The analogy that I’ve used recently, especially on big-budget films and things with a lot of special effects—at the moment I’m working on the next Jurassic World movie—is that film music is like a piece of clothing or tapestry made to fit around a constantly changing film. Nowadays, in a film’s final sound edit, all of these different departments come running together with their finished products, the soundtrack is slapped together, and we say, “Oh, that’s what the movie was!” We get surprised by what finished visual effects look like, by last-minute picture changes, by changes in file recordings to clarify story points. The whole nature of film has become much more fluid nowadays. Communication between different departments is more complicated than it used to be. The job of the composer is to create a tapestry that makes sense on its own. But that tapestry constantly needs to be wrapped around something that’s a different shape.

JH: It sounds like your job is as much administrative as it is technical.

JR: My job is as a bridge between different departments. I get along with different departments. My primary allegiance is to the artistic integrity and quality of the composer’s work. But ultimately, we’re all working for the director and the filmmakers.

JH: As a general rule, at what point in the post-production process do you come in as music editor?

JR: There are two different ways in which I get hired, although sometimes I get hired for both. One is to assemble just the temp score. If the filmmakers know the composer and the composer brings in his own music editor, then I won’t continue beyond the temp score. The other thing that I do is work exclusively with the composer on a project, from the time he starts looking seriously at the movie. My work usually starts with the spotting session. The spotting session is both an organizational and communicational key moment. The composer and director generally discuss every moment of music, where it should start, what it should be doing, what the general style of it should be. But the spotting session is also a key organizational moment. How large of an orchestra do we need? How do we number the musical cues? Because the job of composing a score is a huge logistical problem also.

JH: It certainly sounds that way!

JR: A lot of music is recorded and produced on a budget and on a very tight schedule. Which is one of the reasons why there isn’t a lot of turnover for composers, or a lot of inexperienced people working on large-budget films. It’s a very daunting logistical task. It’s not just that there’s resistance to new voices, in terms of film music—I think there’s great openness to new voices—but the complications of changing the music and taking notes and re-writing music, and of adapting to the changes in the film, that part alone is very complicated. It requires a lot of assistance and technical support for it, from the music copyist to the technical support all along the chain.

JH: Once the spotting is done, the recording of the score takes place. When you are working at that point, what computer program do you use? I assume there’s no pen and ink involved!

JR: Right. We use a lot of computer programs. There are database programs, and music editing software. In terms of music editing, Pro Tools is the standard.

JH: What about the Avid software? Several people have mentioned that.

JR: Avid is the company that makes the picture editing software. There are times that I have to interface with them so that the picture editors and the assistant editors and I are all looking at the same thing. But, mostly, as the final mix editor, I don’t use Avid software. I do sometimes use the composing software that the composer I’m working with uses, so that I can look at the same thing that they’re looking at in terms of their MIDI files.

JH: OK. Once the score is recorded, you begin editing the final score?

JR: Yes. Although, don’t forget, during the recording of a score, a lot of changes take place. The director or producers might say, “we just got this final shot in, can you make the adjustments?” If we can, then we try to scramble and get things to match exactly what’s on the screen. In the current trends in film, the film changes quite a bit after music has been scored.

JH: Things must get complicated.

JR: Yes, they do! If I can’t make something work at the scoring session, I will look at the pieces afterwards that we’ve recorded and see if we need to re-record a cue for this or that. But, yes, I am often involved in changing, refining and sometimes bastardizing the music after the fact. All of which I try to do with as much input from the composer as possible. I try to keep all the artistic conversations going between the composer and the director, although most of the composer’s work is done after the recording sessions. On some projects, the composer might want to come to do the final job and want to be involved in later decisions. But many composers do not. They say, “I did what I did, good luck.”

JH: OK, so you’re aiming for the final mix at this point. What happens next?

JR: So, the final mix takes place usually over a couple of weeks of working sessions in a theater-sized room where all the different sound people are present. There are the sound effects people, the folks who’ve been working on sound effects for the same amount of time or longer that we have been working on the music. There are the people that have been editing dialogue, which includes background dialogue. And then there’s the music people, myself as the final mix editor. We all show up in the theater, often with some involvement of the director, in order to help us have all of these sound elements to best tell the story.

JH: That sounds like a situation with lots of potential conflict!

JR: Right. Often, the departments—including music—show up with more in their bags than what we can fit in the final soundtrack. There are compromises and priorities that have to be worked out, assuming they haven’t been ahead of time in the final draft of the soundtrack. What happens is that, I sit in a back room making adjustments, coordinating with the mixers, usually two of them who are at the control boards, to make all of the adjustments and create the final soundtrack.

JH: To repeat, the composer is usually not present for the final mix?

JR: That’s correct. The idea is that composers expect me as the final mix editor to decide about how loud the music is, whether we choose to use certain pieces of music or not, and so on. Sometimes composers will write things into the cues, like, “we really don’t need this, but if you want to have it in your back pocket, I’ve got it.” Most of the time, they don’t care, frankly. Certainly, the composers I work with have a clear artistic viewpoint, and they hope that that will be represented when it’s all said and done. The analogy I often use, is that we’re going in and painting somebody else’s house. The director is the one who’s going to have to live there. I’m an advocate of having the director be the lead artistic voice, simply because there are so many minute decisions that are artistically related. The process doesn’t work any other way than having one person who’s the final arbiter, and that’s the director.

JH: Let’s talk time table. On Cars 3 (2017), for example, how long did you have for the final mix? A week? Two weeks?

JR: Actually, we had a decent amount of time for Cars 3. I think we had about three weeks to do the final mix. Which is fine for a movie like that, because the dialogue isn’t going to need a whole lot of work. One of the things you do in the final mix is spend a lot of time cleaning up the dialogue. Maybe airplanes are flying by in the background, an ambulance or whatever; you have to clean all that up. But in animated features like Cars 3, you start with perfect dialogue tracks. From that standpoint, an animated film like Cars 3 is easier.

JH: I see.

JR: Even so, there were a lot of things that needed to be done on that film to bring the world on screen to life, in terms of background sound effects, background vocals and the liveliness of the music. With animation, you can have a very complicated music track. One that comes to mind is Coco (2017), which I worked on after Cars 3. That was complicated. Other sounds went in and out of songs. Coco took longer.

JH: On the topic of songs, how does that work with the music supervisor? Is the music supervisor present at the final mix?

JR: In the case of Cars 3, the music supervisor was also the head of music for Pixar animation. Often, though, somebody who’s not affiliated with the company is brought in as the sound supervisor, a freelance supervisor. The role of the sound supervisor is debated among song supervisors, what they should be handling or not handling, but generally the ones that I work with are not very involved in film scoring. They will find the artists that are affordable, and the publishers will help accommodate the film budget. And they can also be in contact with the release of the soundtrack album, which is not as important as it used to be, but also related publicity videos and tours and things like that. But the music supervisor is usually not present at the final mix, unless it’s an in-house music executive.

JH: Can you comment on how synth mock-ups have changed your job?

JR: Sure. That is one of the things that has changed in the last twenty years. It’s become essential for composers to do mock-up scores, what are often called demos in the music side of the industry. Almost every composer nowadays does demos as a way to keep the director and the film company in the loop as to the direction of the music. That’s something that I’m involved in also. I don’t create the demos, but the scores I help create are passed on to somebody who creates them, not the composer usually.

JH: What are some of the changes that you observed since your days of doing the Titanic and even before that?

JR: Well, it’s funny, I’m working with a lot of the same people over here in London that I worked with on Titanic in the late 1990s, because many from the Lucasfilm crew have come over. So, many things are still the same for music editors, and generally for the music side of the industry. We largely handle the same departments, we have to pay attention to the same politics, we have the same artistic goals which is to make things exciting and real or dramatic.

JH: So, what has changed?

JR: When I started in the late 1980s, film music was a fifty-year old technology based on sprocket driven magnetic film. It was an expensive and quirky technology, but it was very reliable and very robust, and resulted in a really pretty sound. When we switched to digital about ten years later, it turned into a technology that people could learn, that they could even do at home on their laptops to a large extent. It used to be something that had to be taught, where you were mentored by one person who showed you what to do. There really weren’t many books back then. Now, the technology and the skills of music editing, at least for the software end of things, is taught in every music school and every film school. I certainly need to pay attention to keeping up with software and new software development.

JH: Others that I’ve interviewed have mentioned that the amount of time to do the work has shrunk. Is this one of the things that’s changed over the last few decades for you?

JR: Absolutely. The digital technology has allowed every department to change things much more quickly and at the last minute. There was a brief moment years ago when they decided to release movies in 3D, but they had to be locked earlier, because the 3D process took up a month. But even that got to be more flexible and it’s no longer an impediment to changing things while we’re on the dub stage and after that.

JH: Something that other of my interviewees have mentioned are more last-minute changes in recent years.

JR: Yes, that has been a big change. One of the reasons for that is that good filmmakers are always looking for what options they might have to make the story better. And it’s hard to take the film from their hands. At the same time, film companies want to be able to see what options they have if they don’t think to film is working. And often, decisions will be made, by the director or film company, at the last minute.

JH: Speaking of changes, can you talk a bit about Hollywood and the Chinese market? Is China’s involvement in American film production also been a recent change in the last decade?

JR: Certainly, although only certain films are accepted by China for distribution. Right now, I’m working on Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018). The first film, Jurassic World (2015), was a big hit in China. But the last Star Wars movie (The Last Jedi, 2017) was not a big hit in China. So, sometimes that market can be fickle. Hollywood studios are very keen to try to take advantage of it if they can.

JH: Why is that?

JR: Because the Asian market is one of the few places with an expanding number of screened films. They still get a lot of theaters being built. At the same time, the Chinese government has limited the number of American films, because they don’t want to make it look like their own homegrown film industry is not capable of doing the same magic. So, they have specific windows, carefully guarded windows, for the number of films we can export to China. An American film can’t be released at the same time as a major Hong Kong film.

JH: So, timing is important for the Chinese market.

JR: Right, but also the film. Like I said, the last Star Wars movie didn’t resonate with them at all, and they pulled it from theaters after two weeks. We don’t think that’s going to happen with Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, since the last Jurassic movie was popular, but you never know. I was brought onto Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom to help the music editor who was handling it already, to make sure that the logistics could get taken care of. I have no particular Chinese expertise, there’s nothing different that we’re going to do for the Chinese market other than try to send them as close to the finished movie, but we’re going to send it a little earlier than we’re going to do it for the rest of the world version.

JH: Are the two versions, the Chinese and the English-language version, different films, then?

JR: Barely. But here’s what might happen in the future. We have not yet seen film films been changed after they’ve been released, while they’re still in the theatres. But I expect to see that in the industry. So, for example, if jokes don’t play well on the Friday night, by Sunday you might have a different version that hopefully plays better. Because, technically, we could do that. And I think that that’ll change the industry a lot. For a long time, the final deadline required for printing and shipping the film to the theater, that was it. But if there are other options, some filmmaker is going to burst that open, and say, “Why stop now, we can make it even better!”

JH: That makes sense now that you mention it.

JR: So, to get back to China, in that scenario you could certainly remove anything that was offensive to China, and maximize your investment there, and even do things for regions or the United States, or whatever you wanted to. That’s not something that I look forward to, but I expect to see that happen.

JH: Finally, what do you feel has remained the same in the business for you?

JR: One thing never changes, and that’s people. The main thing that has contributed to my career has been paying attention to the people in the room, communicating with them and helping out throughout the whole process. It’s people that we’re working for, it’s people that we’re making the films for, and it’s people who hire us. You can’t get too involved in the software without thinking about who’s hired you.

JH: Thank you for taking the time to do this interview, Joe, I really appreciate it.

JR: You’re welcome.