Behind the Masterful Sound and Music Editing on ‘Maestro’ – with Richard King and Jason Ruder

Director Bradley Cooper’s Maestro – now streaming on Netflix – is a film about the life and relationships of American conductor/composer Leonard Bernstein.

Cooper, who also plays Bernstein in the film, wanted to capture the live on-set musical performances just as he’d done while directing his previous film A Star is Born. Cooper once again turned to executive music producer/supervising music editor Jason Ruder, who as supervising music editor on A Star is Born was instrumental in helping to achieve that goal. Ruder earned an Oscar nom for ‘Best Sound Mixing’ on A Star is Born and is currently in the running for a 2024 ‘Best Sound’ Oscar for his role on Maestro. This is Ruder’s second Oscar nomination.

Cooper also tapped 4X-Oscar-winning supervising sound editor/sound designer Richard King at Warner Bros. Post Production Creative Services in Burbank. In his career, King has so far earned eight Oscar nominations; two of those are for the 2024 Oscar Awards – one nomination for ‘Best Sound’ on Maestro, and another for ‘Best Sound’ on Oppenheimer.

Here, King and Ruder talk about capturing live music on set, editing the music to fit tricky scenes like Leonard Bernstein’s piano duo with Aaron Copland, how the sound effects and design were used in a musical and emotional way, how the party crowds were recorded live on set, and much more!

Maestro | Official Trailer | Netflix

Jason, as the executive music producer and the supervising music editor, when did you get involved with this film and what were some of your responsibilities early on?

Jason Ruder (JR): We started talking with Bradley five years ago on the final dub of A Star is Born. He already had some references in mind. There’s a ’73 video archive by Humphrey Burton that we all studied, looking at the Ely Cathedral performance, and we started coming up with the concept to do it all live back then.

We started talking with Bradley five years ago on the final dub of ‘A Star is Born.’

From that point, it was a matter of, “How are we going to pull this off? What studio is willing to do it?” Because it’s such a risk.

And then, it was just a long prep phase. We dove into prep and then COVID stopped us for a bit. We kept working creatively to some extent through the pause. It was a lot of script revisions, music choices, and how many performances were we going to ultimately go with. Bradley wanted more of a film about marriage, not necessarily a musical biopic. So it goes back years, really.

So you decided that you wanted to capture these orchestral performances live?

JR: Yeah. Bradley was very adamant about it. On A Star is Born, we did all the vocals live and some of the instruments and things like that. We all found that it just comes off so much more authentic if you do it that way. He was like, “Let’s just do this with full orchestra.” It was exciting to hear him really fight for that.

Is that ultimately what happened? Were all these performances captured live?

JR: Everything you see visually was recorded live. The pieces that play more as score choices were recorded at AIR Studios in London, like a regular session. But everything on camera was live.

Wow! So, I had read a story in ScreenRant about the scene with Leonard Bernstein playing the piano alongside Aaron Copland. In their story, it said that Cooper and his co-star really were playing the song, but a ‘much better version was played over the scene instead.’ Can you talk about your music editing on that scene? What did it take to get the ‘better version’ to match up with what we see?

JR: It ended up being a hybrid. We took a lot that was recorded off set and then we just tweaked it. There were some notes that we just had to recapture and crop in and bring together. But that was one of the more challenging scenes music editorially, just because you had 2 actors at the same piano. So it took a little bit of doing.

I bet! And they don’t fake the shot. You don’t see their hands, and then their faces. It’s actually captured in a single side shot, so you see all the piano keys with them playing. It must’ve been tough!

JR: Yeah, they both practiced. They both went for it, which was great to see them pull it off.

As for capturing the orchestral performances, gosh, I hope you didn’t throw all of that on production sound mixer Steven Morrow. Was there someone else there helping to capture the orchestral performances, the choirs, and other live performances on set?

JR: Yeah, definitely. So Ely Cathedral was pretty complicated. We went there and did a tech scout. We fought hard to get the London Symphony Orchestra (LSO) on the project; that’s just the choice orchestra for the piece.

It was great to find a classical engineering crew that both worked with the LSO and at Ely, specifically.

As for the concept of the music, it really wasn’t produced like a film score, so to speak, where you go in and stripe everything and you have close mics on all the instruments. We really wanted this immersive performance feeling, like you were really sitting there. So after a lot of thought and change of plans, we leaned into the LSO. They’re based out of the Barbican. So, I got in touch with the technical people that they use because they’re super familiar with the LSO (with all the players), they’ve done some broadcast things out of the Barbican, and that sort of thing. And it turns out that two of their engineers had actually recorded at Ely Cathedral. So we enlisted them really quick. It was great to find a classical engineering crew that both worked with the LSO and at Ely, specifically. So that was great.

There were some things that we didn’t expect; they don’t use Pro Tools. They work on Pyramix and it’s a very different setup. But we came up with a really good plan.

They were new to our approach to recording for film. Bradley wanted a cable cam running through the shot, which foiled our plan a little bit for miking, but we got around it. We slung a lot of mics from the ceiling. We had a couple of mics in frame that roughly matched the ’73 archive. I was trying to keep it as authentic as we could to the references we had.

Did that create any problems in post, when you had to take it back and edit it to picture? Since you didn’t have discrete instruments to pan here and pan there, did that cause any issues in the post-process?

JR: I have to say there’s a little bit of luck and magic involved because Bradley got the oner shot, which was pretty incredible. It’s interesting, with iZotope RX you can do a lot of clean up on the set noise and things that you pick up. You can get that stuff out. There’s pretty minor comping and trickery, actually. It’s a pretty clean recording. So I think something was on our side to get through it.

There’s pretty minor comping and trickery, actually. It’s a pretty clean recording.

I would like to say that it took all this incredible Pro Tools work and all that, but it was really…. it was very challenging to mic but we did a tech scout. Everything was in the prep, trying to pull everything together. And, it worked out. We had a couple of crash-and-burns out of the gate. I think the chorus had a hard time because they wanted a rehearsal for that space in particular because they were super concerned about the reverb. But we ran out of time. We weren’t able to provide that for them. So, it took all the players and the chorus members a little bit of time to adjust, but we got it done in a day.

The opening of the film is Leonard Bernstein playing the piano in his house for a film crew. And there’s a boom op right there in frame. So was that a real boom op capturing Cooper’s performance? Why not, right?

JR: Yeah, we had mics in the piano. As for the boom mic, Steven Morrow would have to answer that question. I’m pretty sure that was used for his dialogue and everything.

Richard, when did you get started on this film and what were some of the first tasks that you had to tackle?

Richard King (RK): I started working about February. The picture had been cut together. There was a good cut for the film. So, I was invited out to Bradley’s house along with Jason, the mixers, and some other people to watch the film. I was just finishing up Oppenheimer, so I started a couple of editors on Maestro to get that going.

We had a spotting session early on with Bradley, literally going through the film in real-time, and talking about mood and feeling but not so much specific stuff. It was more about what he was going for on a grander scale. And then we set about working.

…it is a music movie so the sound design needed to act in that same vein and not call itself out or not be too obvious.

It was quite an evolutionary process in that it is a music movie so the sound design needed to act in that same vein and not call itself out or not be too obvious. For instance, all the scene transitions are very smooth. There’s no abrupt change when we go to a different location. Yet we wanted each location to have its own distinct personality – their two homes in Connecticut and in Long Island, and Tanglewood in Massachusetts, and New York City. Each of these places had to have its own vibe and personality as well as altering a bit, depending on what’s happening within the scene, using either birds or wind or the natural elements that were available to us to use in the scene.

Each of these places had to have its own vibe and personality…using either birds or wind or the natural elements that were available to us to use in the scene.

Bradley really wanted to use wind as a motif so we were very concise in our use of winds and didn’t use any kind of airs or anything like that. It was really just using sound effects like the movies of the ’30s and ’40s and ’50s. Where a sound effect happened, it had a specific purpose. It wasn’t just wallpapering the film with sound effects, but rather each sound had its own reason to be there other than visually. There was also an emotional component to that.

So that was a bit of an evolutionary process to get the sounds of the real world that the characters are interacting with to sit in with the flow of the music.

For the black and white scenes, did you take a different sonic approach than you did for the scenes that were in color?

RK: No, ultimately we didn’t. We tried some things; we thought that since the visuals are different and make a very strong distinction between timeframes, maybe we should do something with sound akin to that. For instance, bring in the sound field a little bit. At one point, we were thinking about running different kinds of backgrounds for the two different looks of the film. But ultimately we found that was too much of an on-the-nose reaction to what we were seeing. We didn’t really need to do that. And in fact, it was distracting.

Interesting. You’re talking about bringing the sound in for the black and white scenes, but I was wondering if you made them more colorful – took a more colorful sonic approach? For instance, the birds in the black and white section in particular were extremely cheerful while Leonard and Felicia were having this serious conversation. The birds sound just so delighted to be there…

RK: The birds were a big discussion, a big point of experimentation, like trying different things, different varieties, different amounts, different levels, different cheerfulness. We chose to not have too many crows there. I think that’s an example of the birds being a counterpoint to what’s happening in the scene – a counterpoint or support for what’s happening in the scene. So there really wasn’t any spatial distinctions made in the black and white vs. color footage sonically or anything like that.

…when you live with a film and you see it over and over again, you start to become…realize that the film ultimately tells you what direction you should go…

We tried everything, though. We tried literally everything. So that was definitely on the table for a while. But ultimately, when you live with a film and you see it over and over again, you start to become sensitive to certain things and realize that the film ultimately tells you what direction you should go with for decisions like that.

And ultimately, it just seemed like that’s not what the movie is about. The movie is about what’s happening on screen in that moment. And we didn’t feel like we needed to resort to that kind of trickery to accentuate the differences of the timeframe.

One of the things that stood out for me with the sound editorial was the crowds – the different size crowds for the party crowds and the performance crowds. Can you talk about how you built the different crowds for the film? I loved how chaotic and energetic the party crowds were. There’s so much talking everywhere from every direction…

RK: The theater crowds were composed of crowds from my library. Basically, this was the end of the second or third post-COVID phase where you really couldn’t get crowds together or it was difficult. There weren’t a lot of crowds actually on production, except for a few scenes, and we used every bit of production sound that we had for those.

Steve Morrow miked every actor in the scene, and they were all having real conversations.

For the parties, those are all production recordings. Steve Morrow miked every actor in the scene, and they were all having real conversations. That allowed us, on the mixing stage, to dig out a certain phrase that Bradley wanted to hear or make the overall atmosphere busier.

When you did actually hear a line from a partygoer in the background, it was that actor saying something that was part of a longer conversation. It wasn’t a random loop grouper just babbling. It was much like the old Robert Altman approach to mixing groups of people in that the scene can be composed in several different ways depending on how you want to play it because all that material was discreet. I think it works so much better because the little snippets of conversation that you overhear are clearly part of a bigger, longer conversation; you really have the feeling that you’re eavesdropping as you might while walking through a party – just hearing bits and pieces of random dialogue from those actors.

I love that! Was all of that scripted or were they just given an outline of how the conversations might go?

RK: Some of it was scripted. And obviously, there’s a dramatic through line of going from Felicia to Leonard to their daughter Jamie and to his agent.

Those lines were scripted. Some of the background people’s lines were scripted, but most of them were just at a party. They literally had a party and so they engaged in conversations. It just has a great natural feel. It’d be very hard to recreate, I think, in post.

So, a lot of dialogue editing in this film…

RK: A lot of dialogue editing because sometimes you’d hear the same person from multiple microphones. So it was tricky for dialogue editing and for dialogue mixing. Tom Ozanich did a great job with composing that party scene using perspective after Tony Martinez, who was the dialogue supervisor, had carefully cleaned out overlaps of dialogue (same line for multiple microphones). It was a smallish space, so everything was picking up everything else to a certain extent.

He created a party vibe on set and I think that lends those party scenes such a vibrant, alive, fun quality.

But with really careful dialogue editing – Tony did an amazing job on that – Tom could do almost musical mixing of wanting to hear a bit of this phrase and then hear a little bit of that phrase and then building up the volume of everybody so you don’t really hear anybody but instead hear everybody talking at once. I asked Bradley if he had modulated any of the background voices while either Leonard or Felicia were talking and he said, “No. They’re just at a party.” He created a party vibe on set and I think that lends those party scenes such a vibrant, alive, fun quality.

If you had to pick one scene from the film that best represents your sound work, what scene would that be? And why?

RK: Gee, I don’t know. There are several moments. The goal was to make it very seamless and unobtrusive.

I love the scenes in their Connecticut house because there’s so much life in the backgrounds with the wind and the birds and the vibrancy of that. I think those scenes sound really alive to me. There’s just a cheery vibe, I think, that we were able to come up with eventually with the combination of all the sounds.

Whereas the Long Island house was much more subdued, with more blue jays and crows, the Connecticut house (where they had their happiest times) was a bit more cheerful, with those huge trees they have in the yard where the wind was always blowing. I love that.

…he wanted each sound to have a purpose to be there, not just to be there for its own sake or be there to fill a void.

I love the backgrounds. I love the way the background finally ended up, which was a matter of really refining and taking out a lot – a lot of weeding just to come up with the bare bones without plastering the walls with sound. Every sound had an impact or had a point for it.

The first time I saw the film and heard Bradley talk about it, I had the realization that he wanted each sound to have a purpose to be there, not just to be there for its own sake or be there to fill a void. It was about having every sound make a point and have a reason to be in the film.

JR: I got to say, these guys composed it. If the winds were strings, so to speak, and the birds were piano, to me, it was that sophisticated. You guys dove in that deep.

RK: We tried to get in the spirit of the music and wanted to honor it and fill in the places between musical pieces with sounds that didn’t pull you out of that musical mood that you were in.

Jason, if you had to pick one scene from the film that best represents your sound work, what would that scene be and why?

JR: I would have to say Ely Cathedral just because of the amount of work and insanity that went along with it. It was amazing to be a part of it. It was amazing to watch on the day when we shot it. I’d never experienced anything like that between the players and Bradley and camera and the soloist. It was just unbelievable.

The hairs on my arms stood up while watching that scene. I can’t imagine what it must have been like to be in that space, hearing it happening live…

JR: Yeah, even Bradley turned around and just said, “This is the most amazing day I’ve ever had in my life as an actor.” The energy in the room was just great.

Was there anything else that you guys wanted to talk about that I didn’t cover?

RK: I wanted to ask Jason at question….

In Ely Cathedral, was every mic recorded to a discrete track?

JR: Yeah, we took everything down to a discrete track in Pyramix. Then Classic Sound (the guys that the LSO use) did a little bit of a live board mix, and then we did a split off of that into Pro Tools. So, we had two systems running so that if we had to do any editing or play anything back, we could do some quick comping in Pro Tools. But, yeah, it was 60-something discrete tracks.

RK: Did those discrete tracks eventually wind up in Pro Tools?

JR: Yeah, we transferred them over. We didn’t get into too much editing on set. We just checked a lot of takes back and made sure we had things for noise. We did some real quick RXing and things on the spot to make sure we had it. There are a couple of camera moves so we wanted to make sure we could get that out, or would we have to do it again? That kind of thing. So, we transferred all the takes over to Pro Tools and then just brought it back home.

That’s an amazing scene. Probably my favorite scene in the film. And Bradley’s so good. That’s just a really moving scene.

Was Bradley actually perspiring in that scene or did they have to hose him down?

JR: I think he definitely was. That day he started his day at 2 a.m. for a 9 a.m. roll. He had a full five hours in hair and makeup to get ready to do the scene.

That takes commitment… and probably a lot of coffee!

Thank you both so much for doing this interview with me on the sound editing of Maestro.

RK: Thanks, Jennifer.

JR: Thanks, appreciate it!

A big thanks to Richard King and Jason Ruder for giving us a behind-the-scenes look at the sound editing of Maestro and to Jennifer Walden for the interview!

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