Making Mare of Easttown’s Supportive, Subtle Sound

HBO's character-driven crime drama Mare of Easttown is a rich tapestry of subtle details that captures the essence of a small town community. For sound, this meant supporting the story in low-key ways. Here, supervising sound editor Brad North talks about building Easttown's soundscapes, addressing the Delco accent, and more!

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Interview by Jennifer Walden, photos courtesy of HBO/WarnerMedia

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With shows like Stranger Things, American Gods, Love, Death, & Robots , and Watchmen to his sound credit, 4x-Emmy winning supervising sound editor Brad North knows how to build big, bold, full-on feature-like sound design for the small screen.

But on HBO’s limited series Mare of Easttown , he also proved his talent for crafting low-key soundscapes that convey a sense of place and community.

Easttown is a quintessential, working-class small town in Pennsylvania. The challenge, North points out, was defining what that sounds like exactly, because this location has such a strong influence on who these characters are. Adding to that challenge is the fact that showrunner Brad Ingelsby grew up in the real-life version of Easttown. So the pressure was on to get it ‘right.’

And as any sound pro will tell you, ‘subtle’ is the most difficult to get ‘right.’

Here, North talks about his process of crafting Easttown’s sound from different perspectives in and around the town, using sound to support the story’s emotion, adding lines of dialogue to ‘home video’ footage, dealing with the tricky Delco accent, and more.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bm7RmpzCeyk

Mare of Easttown: Official Trailer | HBO

COVID has had a huge impact on the post sound process. Did that affect your work on Mare of Easttown? Or were the studios getting back to ‘normal’ when you started on the show?

Brad North, supervising sound editor

Brad North (BN): For Mare of Easttown, at that point, a lot of the COVID workflow solutions had been worked out. For the most part, we were doing remote playbacks and everyone had figured out the best way of doing that. Sure, it’s not the most ideal way of doing playbacks — doing it remotely and then having a Zoom call about notes — but by that point, everyone was fairly comfortable with it. It wasn’t earth-shattering to do that.

It was nice because I was able to go to the stage and be there with the re-recording mixers as they’re mixing. I was there for several of the playbacks, so I wasn’t doing remote fixes and fixing stuff on the stage.

Then, by the end, it was very nice to have Craig Zobel (director) and Amy Dubbleston (picture editor) there with us. That was so nice. That was the first time we had seen any of the filmmakers — had them actually come in and do playbacks. So that was nice.

It’s always good to meet people in person…

BN: I knew Amy from American Gods; she and I had spent a lot of time together on that. So it was just nice to see an old friend and colleague. But yes, it was really nice to see Craig. I had never met him before Mare so it was nice to meet him in person and have that personal connection. That’s what this business is all about.
 

The series creator, Brad Ingelsby, was he also involved with post sound on the show?

BN: He was the writer and a showrunner, along with director Craig Zobel. They were the lead creatives on the show. So basically everything went through them.

Brad had not been a showrunner before. He’s written several films (like The Way Back starring Ben Affleck) but he never ran a show. Craig Zobel, who directed every episode, was also an executive producer on it and he was able to help out with some of the minutiae of putting a show together, like post sound, because Craig is very experienced in that. Both of them were involved in post sound though.
 

Brad Inglesby was born and raised in Chester County, which is the setting of the show. And that setting is a big part of who these characters are — the way they are and how they dress and their sense of community. How are you able to capture this place in terms of sound?

BN: I had early discussions with Craig [Zobel] about how the setting and location play such a huge role in the show. The location is almost a character in the show.

I had early discussions with Craig [Zobel] about how the setting and location play such a huge role in the show. The location is almost a character in the show.

We talked about how we can change different locations, but still have it sound like it’s in the same world. We talked about the forest where they find the girl. We talked about freeways and trains. This was way early on, before they actually started production, and after all the COVID protocols were all figured out.

Once we had a cut for Ep.1, we did a spotting session with Craig and Brad and everyone. We talked about different parts of town specifically. The show opens with Betty’s neighborhood, which is a bit more in the city so we wanted to play the sound of a train station that was fairly close by. You can actually hear the trains fairly clear from her neighborhood. We had more freeway sounds for her neighborhood — close-up freeway.

I always picture bigger, meaner dogs the farther you get from town…

Then for Erin McMenamin’s house, on the outskirts of town, we played distant freeway. Also, I always picture bigger, meaner dogs the farther you get from town, so you’ll hear that pretty clearly at Erin’s. It’s like there are a couple of mean dogs just down the street. Her house is also close to the woods so you hear a little bit more of the crows and some dilapidated trucks. The people that live around there probably only get new cars every once in a while so you hear old, beat-up trucks out there.

Mare’s part of town is more suburban so there are a bit more of those signature sounds of suburban areas, like the sound of the neighborhood kids playing (which we established in the first episode), and occasional neighborhood traffic-bys.

I worked closely with Jordan Wilby, our sound effects editor. We were just trying to figure out signature sounds for each location. We’re playing off of the visuals and just kind of placing ourselves in that spot. It felt like there was probably a rail station nearby and there are probably two freeways that intersect, probably a couple of miles away from that area. We’re trying to paint that picture.

The Delco accent was a bit tricky for the actors. Kate Winslet (a master of her craft) even said that it was one of the hardest for her to nail down and it made her want to throw things apparently! Did there end up being ADR just to get the accent correct?

BN: So this is probably going to surprise you. Nothing was ever flagged for accent.
The actors had worked on it and there were probably many, many discussions in pre-production and during production about the accent. So nothing was ever flagged for accent in post. That’s saying something because Brad Inglesby is from that area. So the actors did a great job.

We would do some wild tracks and change it up a little bit just in case we didn’t get it right.

Now, when we did shoot ADR, we had to be aware of the accent. And there were times when I didn’t exactly know what the twist would be — the Delco twist on a line or on a word — and the actor wouldn’t either. We would do some wild tracks and change it up a little bit just in case we didn’t get it right. We did back up a couple of lines that we thought maybe went too far with the accent, or maybe we didn’t do enough of it. But we never went to the backups. It was good to have them though, just in case.

The characters are what make this show so engrossing. There’s a lot of emotion in this story. How were you able to use sound to support the emotion and to help the audience connect with these characters?

BN: It’s important to use production sound. We wanted to use the production dialogue at any cost because the performances were all there and the acting is all there.

If there’s a scene that’s quiet but there are clunks or noise — we thought that’d be an issue on this show because they’re wearing coats and jackets — you just have to clean it up.

Tiffany Griffith, our dialogue editor, and Joe DeAngelis, our dialogue/music re-recording mixer, did a great job of cleaning that noise up because no one really wanted to loop that dialogue for noise.

The production performance connects you to the scene.

The production performance connects you to the scene. It doesn’t matter how good an actor is at matching, or how it looks or how it sounds. Sometimes it just feels disconnected. So we try to make the production work, to use the production sound at any cost.

After you’ve cleaned up production dialogue, then you fill out the track with ambience, like those we’ve discussed. We just tried to find the detail and fill out the track around the dialogue. That was a conscious decision to live with some noisy production track if that meant keeping the performance.
 

Subtle sound work is the most challenging to get ‘right.’ What was your approach to getting the subtle sound of this show to feel ‘right?’

BN: Quiet is difficult and subtlety is difficult; there’s no place to hide. You just have to do the best that you can in working on that dialogue. Joe [DeAngelis] did such a great job finding a nice place for the dialogue to live. Then we built the atmosphere around that.

We put a lot of detail in the backgrounds because that’s all you can do with a subtle track.

A lot of detail goes into it. If we’re in this neighborhood, we want to play the train very distant, or we want to play the train as right down the street, or we want to hear kids because it’s a suburb. We put a lot of detail in the backgrounds because that’s all you can do with a subtle track.
 

What was your most challenging scenes for sound?

BN: There were two scenes that were very challenging for very interesting reasons.
First, probably the hardest thing was Freddie and his ransom calls to Dawn. Freddie is calling Dawn saying that he has her daughter and to bring money to this location. At that point, we’ve already met Freddie in previous episodes. But we don’t want to know that it’s Freddy making the calls; we don’t want to tip our hand.

So we had to figure out the best way to play with Freddie’s voice. We brought in the actor, Dominique Johnson, and tried a couple of different reads. We tried whispery because that would probably hide some of the characteristics of Freddie’s voice. We tried having him fake a different voice.

… I didn’t want to get too fancy with it because Freddie wouldn’t have the tools to change his voice.

We ended up doing a half-whisper thing but some of the producers were still a little nervous about the audience possibly knowing that it was Freddie. So we futzed it in a little different way. I tried to do a little bit of pitch but I didn’t want to get too fancy with it because Freddie wouldn’t have the tools to change his voice. He doesn’t have an app on an iPhone that’s going to change his voice. He’s not talking through a microphone with a bunch of plugins. He’s probably just talking on a payphone.

So we had a rough futz on it as if he’s calling from a payphone or a public phone. We did a slight pitch shift just to make sure that no one knew that it was Freddie. That was probably the most difficult spot because that was both technical and subjective.

The second challenge was the home video footage of young Kevin. Mare comes across Siobhan’s student movie project and some of it showed young Kevin in the home video footage. We added a bunch of lines for that kid and we added some from Mare as well.

For young Kevin… we ended up using my daughter Brynley, who is seven years old.

For young Kevin, that’s actually the actor who plays Kevin (actor Cody Kostro), but he’s now 20-something years old. So we tried some of our experienced female loopers. We tried to pitch them and tried a couple of different things. And that stuff worked fine, but we ended up using my daughter Brynley, who is seven years old. She’s been doing this stuff for a little bit now and she’s getting really good at it. She actually ended up in the loop group for Mare. She was in half of the episodes. And so I let her take a swing. She read the lines and she also did that one little bit that’s on screen. I was so proud of my little girl. She did such a great job. We used her stuff and I pitched her down just a little bit to make it sound like she was a little boy.

It was really cool because it fits really well. But what was really, really satisfying as a sound designer and a dad was at the end of Ep. 5, in which the clip gets featured, we hear young Kevin’s voice inside Mare’s head. It was really cool. And when my wife watched it, she actually cried.

How was creating the sound for Mare of Easttown a unique experience for you?

BN: We still had to deal with all the COVID restrictions and the weird workflows, trying to figure out the best way of just getting through the show.

But what was most unique was Kate Winslet. She’s a legend for one thing. And she was so involved.

But what was most unique was Kate Winslet. She’s a legend for one thing. And she was so involved. She was wearing so many hats on the show. Not only was she the very, very strong lead character, but she was also an executive producer. And this was not an executive producer credit that’s just for show. She was actually very involved. She had notes. And when we brought her in for ADR, we would discuss things. I asked her to try a couple of different things, like for the home video footage. We didn’t really have much there as far as Mare as a mom having fun with young Kevin. So we said, “This is what we’re going to have Kevin say, can you build some lines around it?”

And she was like, “Absolutely.”

Additionally, she wanted to jump down to some spots and redo lines for whatever reason, or add lines in here and there. That doesn’t happen that often with actors, where they say, “Hey, I’ve already gone through the footage and I know where I want to go with it and what I want to do.”

Having a legend as a strong leader and main character also be an executive producer — and wearing all those hats very well — I would say that’s pretty unique to the show.

She and Brad and Craig and the other producers obviously worked really well together because the show turned out awesome.

A big thanks to Brad North for giving us a behind-the-scenes look at the sound of Mare of Easttown and to Jennifer Walden for the interview!

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