If genius is patience, as Sir Isaac Newton once attested, Total Film witnesses genius in abundance on the dub stage at the Warner Bros, lot, Burbank, California, on an uncharacteristically rainy day in January. It’s in here that the sound mix is being finessed on Christopher Nolan’s new film, Oppenheimer - the true story of a tortured genius whose impact on history is hard to overstate.
This room is where Nolan and his producing partner and wife, Emma Thomas, have mixed their films as far back as 2006’s The Prestige; even though Oppenheimer is being distributed by Universal, these facilities are often hired out between studios (Nolan’s Memento was actually mixed on the Universal lot).
Dub stage 1 boasts an enormous screen, in front of which sits a bank of desks 30ft wide, occupied by at least half a dozen people sitting at monitors (many of whom are long-term Nolan collaborators). TF slinks into the back of the room and sinks into a black sofa, as Nolan - alongside editor Jennifer Lame (Tenet) - leads the team through some painstakingly precise soundtrack tweaks over a couple of minutes’ worth of (frankly stunning-looking) footage from Oppenheimer.
The film is the story of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the American physicist considered to be the ‘father’ of the atomic bomb, and, in Nolan’s words, ‘the most important person who ever lived’. A scientific genius who oversaw the creation of the world’s most destructive weapon, Oppenheimer would later lobby against nuclear proliferation, and found his loyalty scrutinised on the public stage when he faced a security hearing for Communist Party connections.
Voices are hushed, but not whispers, and the atmosphere is relaxed, congenial, as the sound mix is finely tuned. The footage includes a blackand-white trial scene in which Robert Downey Jr.’s Lewis Strauss asks questions about an FBI file on Oppenheimer. We then cut to a scene featuring a young Oppie (as he was known to his friends) at Berkeley. Cillian Murphy - a frequent and valuable supporting player for Nolan - steps up to the lead role here.
‘Roll a little off the top in the last one second,’ suggests Nolan, as the team fine-tooth-comb their way through the sound mix, getting the level of Ludwig Göransson’s sublime-sounding score just right. The process has its own language (‘The tail is good, maybe we just soften the attack?’), as the minutes of footage play over and over, and the mix is chiselled to is laid bare. The timehopping narrative. Murphy’s decadesspanning performance. An expansive supporting cast, including a formidable Downey Jr. An impressive glimpse at some practical special effects that represent the whirring, whizzing microscopic components of the science Oppenheimer pioneers. The rumbling sound design playing under some of these trippy visuals shakes the room.
