The Adventurous Sound of ‘Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny’ – with Skywalker Sound’s Kyrsten Mate and Juan Peralta

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is the fifth feature film in this action-packed franchise that made its debut in 1981 with Raiders of the Lost Ark. Here, sound designer Kyrsten Mate and re-recording mixer Juan Peralta at Skywalker Sound talk about their experience of working with dir. James Mangold to create a new addition to an iconic film series, building the opening chase sequence for the train, the chase in the NYC subway, and the car and cart chase in Morocco, creating the glorious echo for the 'Ear of Dionysius' in Sicily, and so much more!

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Interview by Jennifer Walden, photos courtesy of Lucasfilm Ltd.

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Director James Mangold wanted non-stop action for his contribution to an iconic film franchise. In Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, hero Indy (played by Harrison Ford) aims to keep the Nazis from possessing a time-travel artifact that could alter the course of history. The adventure takes the audience from a Nazi train heist during WWII to the Siege of Syracuse in 212 BC. The sound’s team mission was to keep a driving pace for the chase sequences and capture the fun-filled caper vibe of classic 1930s serials like Flash Gordon or Buck Rogers.

Here, sound designer Kyrsten Mate and re-recording mixer Juan Peralta – at Skywalker Sound – talk about using rhythmic sounds like chugging steam engines, anti-aircraft guns, horse hooves, and airplane propellers to keep up the tempo, panning effects and music in opposite directions to create a sense of movement, using reverb and delay to describe a change in spaces (such as from the city streets down into the subway), designing the fast-paced car and cart chase through the street of Morocco, creating an organic sound for the time fissure, and so much more!

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny | Official Trailer

What were dir. James Mangold’s initial thoughts for sound on Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny? How did he want this movie to feel? Where did you start with your sound editorial work?

Kyrsten Mate (KM): I started on the film while they were still shooting, so I was cutting tracks and making sounds for the picture department as they were putting the picture together.

…they very much wanted a caper film…

Overall, they very much wanted a caper film and action sequences that were fun and driving – just go, go, go, go the whole time. It’s definitely hearkening back to the original Indiana Jones, getting back that feeling of the 1930s serials and having fun with that, with Indy going through adventures where he just does not stop.

Yes! The film opens with that non-stop sequence of Indy being chased through the train cars. What were some of your challenges in terms of editorial for that?

KM: We were very lucky in that production recordist Stuart Wilson captured sounds of the train on set. He attached a bunch of 5.1 microphones to the train where they were recording, so we got a lot of great sound for that actual train. That acted as a driving heartbeat under the whole scene just powering and chugging along. It never stops; it keeps going. It’s very repetitive so that worked as an underpinning.

…we used sound to point out the geography of where he is on the train.

Then, we used sound to point out the geography of where he is on the train. He gets on at the back of the train and makes his way up through the entire train. Each car is different and we were trying to sell each one as a different micro-environment, especially the treasure car that was bouncing along with all the treasures in it from all the different centuries.

Making a whole geography through world-building for his travel through the train cars was super fun.

And for outside the train? How were you able to keep the energy chugging along?

KM: You have to keep everything going, and have it all blend together and hand off really well so you don’t feel as though you’re in a completely different movie all of a sudden. Even though the sounds are different, everything has to continue throughout. But, you can add in the details of things going by, like all the foliage and the wind. The wind was a big element.

For the chase on the top, we had all of their foley footsteps and their sliding on the metal roof of the train.

For the chase on the top, we had all of their foley on the train roof, and their sliding on the metal roof of the train. That added a whole other textural dimension to that fight.

Then allied forces arrive with their planes, so that was a good way to make everything much more open, editorial, and sound design-wise. In the mix, Juan spread those sounds throughout the sound field, going into the overheads in the Dolby Atmos mix.

Juan Peralta (JP): That was a good place for Atmos; it really did help us with spatialization for what’s happening inside the train versus outside the train. Inside the cars, we’re going from car to car, and the kitchen car was different from the treasure car which was different than the sleeping car.

That was a good place for Atmos; it really did help us with spatialization for what’s happening inside the train versus outside the train.

For the transition to the exterior, allied planes are flying overhead and the Nazis are shooting at them from the back of the train. This helped to open up the sound field. The way James [Mangold] choreographed that whole sequence was the blueprint for us to make it all work together. There was this great scene that Kyrsten designed (that I thought was really successful) where the big gun on the train gets bombed by a plane. The train goes around a bend and this big turn on the tracks causes the gun to swivel and get stuck in one position where it’s shooting the side of the train. I really appreciate what Kyrsten did with the sound design of the gun and also the train. These are two repetitive sounds — the gun is nonstop shoot-shoot-shoot-shoot and the train is chug-chug-chug-chug — yet they’re so different. Kyrsten did a pitch bend on the sound, which she can talk about.

KM: As the gun swivels and the shots climb the side of the car, we hear the pitch change to match that movement, and the shots get closer and more distinct and more metallic as it comes towards you. But the rhythm doesn’t change so it has this ominous approaching sound.

The gun sound is huge, and there’s lots of action, and huge music. How were you able to balance that power against the dialogue intelligible?

KM: We try to get out of the way of the dialogue, frequency-wise. And we try to fit sounds between the dialogue in a way that seems natural.

JP: During the mixing, dialogue/music mixer Paul Massey and I (effects mixer) have to be working together at all times, especially in big sequences like that where you hand off. You can do a slight effects turn down to move under dialogue and a lot of people won’t really notice it; it’s amazing how much you can get away with when you do that.

You can do a slight effects turn down to move under dialogue and a lot of people won’t really notice it…

Also, the music is raging through this whole sequence so the mixing is literally finding that balance. When they’re talking, we pull back to make sure we hear those words. As soon as they’re done with that little sentence, we bring it all back in.

As Kyrsten was saying, the dialogue has a specific frequency that it lives in. And so for the gun, I can just keep the low-end going and that doesn’t get in the way too much of the dialogue because those frequencies are very far apart. But the music has all the frequencies so that requires a little dance around the dialogue as well.

Let’s look at the NYC parade – there were huge crowds, bands, and music. Can you talk about building the ever-changing backgrounds for that sequence? And what were some of your challenges for the mix here?

KM: James was very focused on the parade. It had to always sound chaotic, as if you’re in the middle of an enormous parade. The heroes just came home from the moon, so the New York City parade had to feel like a million people were there.

…we did a little bit of loop group callouts, to hear a few people popping through…to give it a feeling of reality.

For the crowds, we did a little bit of loop group callouts, to hear a few people popping through, making comments on the parade, to give it a feeling of reality.

The huge crowds were created from parade crowd recordings and outside party crowds because they have the right energy. One of the things you’re always looking for is energy with crowds; just having a large group of people doesn’t always translate to the feeling you want on-screen. You have to have the right energy for that group of people, in the right space.

JP: There is always movement in this parade sequence. I was literally panning everything as much as possible. There was the horse, the motorcycles, and the cars, too. If you pan the vehicles and the crowd in opposite directions, that helps to emphasize the feeling of movement, to make you feel like you’re going through a crowd out on the street.

If you pan the vehicles and the crowd in opposite directions, that helps to emphasize the feeling of movement…

On the crowds, I added some reverb and put it all around us to engulf us in the crowd. I picked moments where it felt natural to have a crowd-by. Panning crowds is really successful for adding movement because your ear always goes to dialogue. When you pan a bunch of crowd and dialogue, you notice it a lot more than other things that you pan. So that helped a lot.

Paul was panning the dialogue and the street music as well. For instance, when the horse went through the band, the band was panning by one way and the horse was panning the other way. That was super successful for creating the feeling of movement and it’s super fun. Panning is fun.

After the parade, Indy goes into the subway tunnel and he’s dodging subway trains while riding a horse! How were you able to have fun with the sound for this sequence?

KM: Indy is riding a horse, which is an organic being. Again, he has this driving rhythm. Maybe the horse is not going as fast in one shot or going faster in the next, but we try to keep the rhythm going through the whole time, just like the train, because you want this driving feeling that he’s never slowing down and he is never stopping.

…you want this driving feeling that he’s never slowing down and he is never stopping.

Another fun thing is the horse is going down the stairs into the subway and clattering around. It’s very unusual for a horse to go down steps, but we had the production recordings of the horse going down the staircase, so that acted as a rhythm map. It has a very unusual rhythm and it’s not something you can easily create. I cleaned up the recording and we were able to use that as a base. We added sharper sounds to make it hyper-realistic.

It’s always great when we can get the actual sound. Even if we don’t use that exact recording, it’s a way for us to model sounds to it, and then we can add some sharper or cleaner sounds that are what you’d expect to hear. Maybe they’re not how it sounds in reality; it’s a more fantasy version of what you would expect to hear. So, for the clattering feet down the stairs, we had the on-set recording and we added many different layers of hooves to that.

…we had the production recordings of the horse going down the staircase, so that acted as a rhythm map.

Also, the horse is running on different surfaces, so there are different textures for the stones and the metal. Indy jumps the horse over a gate and knocks into the gate. He clatters down the tiled subway platform. Then he jumps down into the gravel and he’s trying to go as fast and straight as he can. It was fun to do the different textures to really put him in different spaces in the subway. And we added echo for the subway space.

Since it was a subway train, it didn’t have to compete rhythm-wise with the horse footsteps so we could make him the star of the rhythm part of it.

Since it was a subway train, it didn’t have to compete rhythm-wise with the horse footsteps…

For the subway train, we used more of the rushing wind sound – what you’d hear if you’re waiting for a subway train. You feel the wind and you hear the approaching sound before you see it. And we had the classic subway horns. We were trying to get that feeling of it rushing towards us all the time with the sound of the wind, which is what you feel when you’re there.

JP: Anytime we talk about that sequence I always think about the reverb. Going from the outdoors into the underground subway is when you can really have fun with reverb.

Going from the outdoors into the underground subway is when you can really have fun with reverb.

When we’re outside, I always put on a little bit of reverb, like a slap off of the big tall buildings in New York, but then when you go into the subway station and tunnels, I feel like I couldn’t get a reverb big enough. I wanted it to be a nice, big hall, like an echoey chamber down there. I wanted those horse feet that Kyrsten was talking about to shine a little more and accentuate the hooves on concrete versus hooves on dirt.

Once they jump into the dirt, I could lean into more of the low end. The clops on the concrete aren’t very high-end; they’re more flat and clappy. When they jump down into the tracks, now I can add the dirt and the weight of the low end of the earth, and then the gravel kicking up.

The reverb continues on with the subway horns, starting with a nice reverb from a distance. As it gets closer, I use a little less reverb, making it louder. It’s all the tricks of mixing. Everything comes into play in sequences like that.

Another fun location was the Hotel L’Atlantique. There’s a very chaotic fight for the Antikythera mechanism. The sound helps the audience to follow the path of the relic as it goes from one person to the next. What were some of your challenges in sound editing this scene? And the mix?

JP: In those instances, less is more. You don’t need to hear every single thing you see on-screen. You only need to hear the most important things, which were the relic and the bag, the punches, the gunshots, the whip (of course), and every once in a while, we need to hear some foley of sliding or jumping or landing. And that’s it.

In those instances, less is more. You don’t need to hear every single thing you see on-screen.

The music is the driving force of the energy of the scene, and the effects are very specific about what we’re telling and what the actors are doing there.

KM: As it goes through each character’s hands, the sound was unique to that character. For instance, Teddy leaps away at one point and he steps on the balcony railing so I made sure we heard his jumps on the metal railing. There’s another shot where he’s sliding so we have to hear his slide.

When Helena fights, she picks up the champagne bottle and smashes it, which I thought was hilarious.

As it goes through each character’s hands, the sound was unique to that character.

You have to ask, “Who’s got the relic?” or “Who’s the closest character and what is the action at that moment?” to know what sound to use. It should be a very identifiable sound for whatever they’re doing so that it immediately points to what’s happening and who’s there.

This is another good example of how the whole fight has a rhythm, and that’s something I love doing. Fight scenes that are more rhythmic are almost like a dance. They’re very choreographed, and I just push on that rhythm all the time and move all the hits so it’s all in rhythm with the music. That makes it more like a dance, which works especially well in a fun film like this. If this was a brutal film, I wouldn’t do that. But for this film, I was using the different textures as different percussion instruments of that rhythmic dance.

In Tangier, there’s a fun chase sequence with cars and tuk-tuk carts. Can you talk about your design for this sequence? Were you able to record the set cars? Or, what were some of your sound sources for these cars and carts?

KM: When I started the film, I began researching the cars and what engines they’d have. I also researched the train for the chase at the beginning. (I got completely obsessed with finding out about the big gun, which was used on these Polish trains, actually.) Once you know what engine it is, then you don’t always have to use that exact car — or that exact engine. You need to find the right vehicle that has the same engine but maybe has a better sound that’s more iconic in your mind.

We did record a vintage tuk-tuk with that same engine.

We did record a vintage tuk-tuk with that same engine. (It’s called a “tuk-tuk” because the two-stroke engine goes tuk, tuk, tuk, tuk, tuk. That’s how they got their nicknames.) I also got another two-stroke engine that was the same CC, but it was in a rougher, much smaller vehicle. So that was a good sweetener for making it more comical when needed.

It ended up being a compendium of several different engines put together, or several different vehicles that all share a common type of engine, and each had its own signature sound. With those elements, we could make sounds for the two tuk-tuks.

This was such a fun chase sequence because there were these vintage cars that sounded so big and powerful and then these tuk-tuk carts that sound squeaky, rattley, and unsafe for high speeds. I love that the tuk-tuks were keeping pace with these big, powerful cars…

KM: They’re very nimble. Juan really played off of those opposing sounds in the mix. It’s a great example of using sound to help you follow the action because you’re trading off the sounds of the tuk-tuk, the cars, the motorcycles, and the different guns.

It’s a great example of using sound to help you follow the action….

JP: That was very challenging. James’s biggest concern was that he wanted the tuk-tuk to sound like it was keeping pace with these other vehicles. Even though the tuk-tuk is a two-stroke engine that sounds small, he still wanted it to feel as if it was really moving. But when they just sound whiny and small, it doesn’t feel like they’re going fast so I needed to make them feel like they’re going fast.

At the same time, James also wanted them to seem as if they were about to fall apart. He wanted to hear every rattle and every shake. So, I had layers of engine for each tuk-tuk, and layers of rattling for each tuk-tuk.

…I played a lot with EQ, keeping the low end for the motorcycles versus not for the tuk-tuks.

There were also two motorcycles, and two big cars (one of them is an old Jaguar, which is a beautiful car. I don’t even know how Kyrsten found that car and recorded it, but she did). I wanted the two cars to sound different from each other — and they did already sound different — but I also needed the tuk-tuks and the motorcycles to sound different and those have very similar engines, so I played a lot with EQ, keeping the low end for the motorcycles versus not for the tuk-tuks.

That was super challenging. But it’s a fun sequence because they’re turning corners, and going into alleys. Helena jumps onto the car and the glass breaks. We had a lot of other sounds that could come in and accent the sequence. We have the crash into the fruit stands, and the guy jumping on top of the tuk-tuk. There was a crash into a bamboo cart – all of that helps with the sequence.

And then, of course, there’s the one part where they’re having a conversation with each other between the two tuk-tuks as they’re driving through traffic. To make that work, James let the tuk-tuks take a back seat, so the dialogue takes over with the music. But then, as the other vehicles pass by, that’s what we focus on. So this little motorcycle put-puts by, and then they pass a van, and we push those in the mix. So we were able to mix it up a little bit to keep it interesting. But that was very difficult.

In Sicily, for the ‘Ear of Dionysius’ – that was such awesome processing for the echo! What went into that?

JP: That was done by Paul Massey, the dialogue/music re-recording mixer. He did that during the dialogue pre-dub and then fine-tuned it in the final. That was one scene where the dialogue has its moment to shine. He did a really cool design with the reverbs and a lot of cool delay that builds up to where the longest echo should be in the scene.

The Nazis take a plane to fly into the time fissure. What was your approach to sound on flying through the time fissure? How did you want to represent that sonically?

KM: It wasn’t really apparent what that was going to look like until very late in the game. We could see that they were flying into this storm so we ended up making the storm the heart of the sound. The storm itself gets stronger, so we have the sounds of wind and thunder. The plane is being hit and buffeted so much that it’s shaking apart as they’re going through, and so we play on those sounds. It’s as though the storm is what was ripping open time. That was something you could feel and was palpable because it was affecting the physical things around the characters.

Those peaks of sound definitely sell ideas much better than a whole bunch of sounds trying to sell one idea.

The storm reaches a crescendo, and to really sell that they crossed over when they pop out the other side, the plane loses all power because it’s an electromagnetic pulse that happens at the end. They get hit with it and all the systems die, the engines die. To really sell it, you can push everything really hot right before that moment they pop through and then just cut everything except for one thing, which in this case was their propellers slowly spinning in a free fall.

Those peaks of sound definitely sell ideas much better than a whole bunch of sounds trying to sell one idea. For the propeller sweeteners for the big Heinkel plane they’re flying, I recorded a giant fan in an industrial shop. I hit it with compressed air and it made a super cool sound. I rigged up this setup where I could blow compressed air across these fan blades. I had on a rheostat so I could dial down the prop speed as it’s being recorded.

What are you most proud of in terms of your sound work on Dial of Destiny?

JP: For me, it’s nostalgia – just working on an Indiana Jones movie. I grew up watching these movies. So, the overall experience of working on it with Kyrsten, with Gary Rydstrom, and the whole crew down in LA, and working with James Mangold, as well. It felt like we were doing this really cool project that has a lot of nostalgia for me.

KM: I saw the very first cut of the first 20 minutes with Indy in Nazi Germany on the train. There was still a blue screen and still fans and prop guys running around in the back of the shots and I literally teared up and said, “Oh my goodness, it’s OG Indy.” I’m really proud that I was able to work on all those sequences, especially the opening one, to make it as fun-sounding as I felt it to be the moment I saw it.

A big thanks to Kyrsten Mate and Juan Peralta for giving us a behind-the-scenes look at the sound of Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny and to Jennifer Walden for the interview!

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