3 Body Problem shows horrifying sights. What helps sell them, of course, is the sound. The attack on Judgement Day, for example, is pure destruction and terror made all the more horrifying by the sound of confusion and pain. It’s a remarkable sequence and episode that earned re-recording mixers, March Fishman and Danielle Dupre, an Emmy Nomination for Outstanding Sound Mixing For A Comedy or Drama Series (One Hour).
Like the rest of the cast, crew, and storytellers behind 3 Body Problem, the friendly duo find the relatable in the unordinary. “It’s a very complicated show, that’s for sure,” Dupre told Immersive. “It’s incredibly ambitious from start to finish in every department. They gave us the resources that we needed to be able to do our jobs the best that we could, which is increasingly rare these days. So yes, it was incredibly ambitious and very difficult.”
But also, as Dupre notes as a fan of the books, very fulfilling.
When you read the script or saw the footage for “Judgement Day,” what was your immediate reaction for the work you wanted to achieve?
Marc: It’s very rare that I read the scripts anymore just because things change so much. I don’t want to find something that I go like, oh, I wish they would’ve put this in or done that. We had a lot of conversations with Tim Kimmel, who was the supervising sound editor, just about how big this episode was going to be.
I think the harder part was, and Danielle can speak more to this too, as so much of this came to us very, very late in the game. We had some preliminary stuff. What’s interesting from my point of view is there’s obviously a really big set piece in the middle of it, but also, the episode really pushes the story and characters. There are major perspective shifts, so that was a really interesting thing to wrap around this big effect sequence.
Danielle, how’d you want to balance all those perspective shifts among the chaos?
Danielle: Oh, totally. Well, and answer your question, not so much the script, but the books. I was a big fan of the books going into the series. Once I knew I was going to be working on the series, and I was going to be mixing sound effects in particular, I was just excited for this moment to come. It’s like, this is going to be a lot of hard work, but I’m really stoked.
I think one of the big balancing acts narratively in that scene was selling the size and the scale of not only the technology that they’re using, but the catastrophe that’s about to happen. Also, balancing that with some very emotional moments, both from our main characters and from the people on board. It’s a big question of who’s innocent and a lot of people there, it seems to be innocent.
So that was something that we had to go back and forth a lot between both Marc and I. Marc being dialogue and music, those characters comes both in the moments of silence when we cut to them, which I think Dave, Dan and Alex did a great job juxtaposing these huge moments on the ship when it’s all coming apart. Then you cut to them in the control room. So, the emotionality there of the big loud scene to the silence, and then also the emotionality of the music when we do use it, I think Marc had a lot to do with that as well.
The sound of destruction, dialogue, and music, how tricky was it balancing all those elements?
Marc: It’s interesting because usually as dialogue on any of these shows, we’re going to take the lead in terms of starting a pass through it. On this one, I just kind of told Danielle, “Give me a place to work within,” which is really rare to do with dialogue. You always try to get it up there.
I’d say Danielle and I went back four or five times where she’d go through the scene and do that, get a pass, and then I’d go through and do the voices and the screaming to do all that. We kept going back and forth. It was a really interesting reversal of the way that we normally would work together. But one of the things that Dan, David, and Alex did that was really interesting was, they didn’t rely on the music to slather through it.
And so, it was just finding the points to stay connected to the characters with the dialogues and screams and all that other stuff. But I remember one of the things for me that was really interesting was, you know, Danielle mentioned the cutbacks to Augie and them in the control room, and just finding the right amount of silence to make that work and to make it not an obvious choice.
I think Danielle found really interesting some background sounds and some computer wars and stuff. We just tried to strip back all the people in the room and stuff and make it very normal, which really helped with the juxtaposition of all the horror that was going on. It was really fun and it was really unique. I hadn’t done anything like that in a long time.
Daniel, like Marc said, “Give me that space to work within.” What does that mean for you?
Danielle: That’s such a great question. Everything is so relative and subjective in this. As Marc was saying before, more or less, dialogue and music from our clients and from our filmmakers’ perspective, dialogue and music is king. It doesn’t matter how good the sound effects are if you can’t hear the dialogue that they’ve written, and so much of the actors’ performances are supported by the score and the music that underscores it all.
So that meant to me, okay, the whole shape of this thing is going to be kind of sound effects heavy, to really not worry if I’m plowing over dialogue or music. If I need to go big, go big. And then together we’re going to be able to find the moments where we ease music in. As Marc was saying, one of the great things that Dave, Dan and Alex did was they did leave room for a lot of silence, even at the beginning.
I think the beginning works so well because they take off that whole judgment day sequence, I think works so well because they take a really long time to ramp into the score. At the very beginning, when the guy’s washing down the deck, you barely hear it. I felt kind of like a Jaws feeling to it where the was so bare, but it was just kind of this heartbeat underneath it. I think that was also just really effective.
So yeah, I took it to mean, okay, the general shape here is going to be led by the horrific sound effects to really sell what’s happening. And then from there, we’re going to chip away at it.
Danielle, being a fan of the books, how’d they inspire some of your choices? Any helpful descirptions for sound on the pages?
Danielle: Absolutely. When I was reading the books, hoping to work on the film, one of the things I underlined in this sequence was the “sound of God’s fingernails.” They described it as the sound of God’s fingernails on the chalkboard. It was one of the biggest things for me, like, okay, well, this is a great prompt before even going into a spotting session with the clients. We kind of already know what the author was going for there.
And then of course, I met Marc, Kimmel, our supervising sound editor, and Paula Fairfield, our sound designer, who came up with a lot of the kind of metal breaking and the screeching. They straight up were just like, “Yeah, that’s exactly what they want. They used the exact same phrase.”
Let’s talk about the dialogue on the show. A lot of scientific jargon and exposition. How delicate was it getting the clarity, there?
Marc: Danielle’s a really great dialogue mixer on her own. It’s making sure we’re getting out of the way of things or we’re supporting things or doing all that. I think it’s a bigger thing that gets overlooked. A lot of people talk about dialogue intelligibility, and a bigger part of that, too, is not necessarily about how the dialogue is mixed, but what’s not mixed around it and giving it the space. And so again, Danielle’s got a lot of experience mixing dialogue too, so it’s really easy. A lot easier to deal with somebody or to get that clarity out when you have a partner that’s in tune with that stuff.
Danielle, how about handling the dialogue at the bar in Panama?
Danielle: I think those are always really fun scenes to mix. You really want to feel like you’re there at the beginning of the scene. One of the things I rely on the most is the movement of the camera lens to guide what we’re hearing and when. At the beginning of that scene, we start with maybe a medium shot of them at the bar. It’s obvious that they’re deep in the jungle. It’s humid and all get out. You really want to hear those thick crickets and insects, and you really want to hear the really thick foliage. You want to hear the dinky little motor of the fan above them trying to cool ’em off.
But then as the camera lens zooms in on them and then they kind of rack focus and, visually, the ambiance and the backgrounds go away, then that’s my cue to take those down as well. Now we’ve gone from this environment that we’ve established to this conversation. It’s much more about the characters, being in their head and being in their conversation, than it is about feeling space around them.
Going back to the books, was there a helpful description for the sound of a computer covering planet Earth?
Danielle: I have to say that I think our instincts, my instincts reading the book and the instincts of the filmmakers, were pretty aligned on that. When I read that in the books, it was one of those things that’s so funny. When you think of or read the term like supercomputer, the only thing that I can grasp is the computers of the 1950s that take up the whole room. You think it’s going to be all metal and machinery and clicks and clacks and motors and fans and all that. When you take it out of that context to this new context that I had never thought of before of it covering the entire world, to me, that’s all the emotionality of being in that moment as a person and not knowing what’s going on.
If I were there, the last thing on my mind would be, what are the mechanics of this thing? [Laughs] It’s more of like, oh my God, will we die? And I think that the filmmakers kind of went in that direction too. So that moment is this incredible score by Ramin, and that’s really all it is. You hear some few reactions of our key characters, and then you just hear the music, the emotionality of it. I think that’s very accurate. I think if we tried to go the other way, it would take you out of the emotionality of it.
What were some instances where you really wanted the sound to let the imagination run wild?
Marc: There are a lot. To me, one of the most effective scenes, and it was the first thing Danielle and I mixed, was the very, very beginning of episode one. It was this really unfamiliar thing of this big outdoor spectacle. It was a lot of fun because it’s not an experience, obviously Danielle and I, or most people in their lives, don’t have with that kind of civil unrest and stuff.
One of the great things about that was just the amount of detail we were able to do, just really do so much. It is one of those things where that was all created with sound that was created with group wallow, it was created with sound effects, crowds and all that other stuff. So, I think from the start, that was kind of the start of being kind of crazy and indoctrinating everybody into what this show was going to be about.
Danielle: That was a really, wonderful complicated scene to mix. As far as leaving it up to the imagination with the audience, I was going to say what Marc established as far as the vocal treatment for the Sophon talking to Mike Evans on the Judgment Day, I thought it was splendid.
There’s a little bit of something about when he’s speaking to him through the speaker, there’s a little something unsettling and a little something different. There’s something not human about the voice, but it’s very, very subtle and very light-handed. I thought that the decision making there was really good. It’s unsettling, but it’s not telling you what to think. You’re just kind of left alone in your own thoughts.
3 Body Problem is available to stream on Netflix.
