Crafting the Punchy Sound of ‘Poker Face’ – with Sound Supervisor Nick Forshager

Rian Johnson's murder-mystery series Poker Face – now streaming on Peacock – follows the affable Charlie Cale on the run from a casino boss's hitman. Charlie happens to be a 'human lie detector' and ends up a solving murder in each place she visits. Since each episode takes the audience to a new location where different scenarios playout, the post sound team needed to start from each for each one. Here, award-winning sound supervisor Nick Forshager goes behind the sound of some of the most challenging episodes.

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Interview by Jennifer Walden, photos courtesy of NBCUniveral

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Director/writer/producer Rian Johnson – known for Glass Onion, Knives Out, and Star Wars: Episode VIII – The Last Jedi – takes a Columbo-esk approach to his new murder-mystery series Poker Face (now streaming on Peacock). The show follows “human lie detector” Charlie Cale who is on the run from a casino boss after uncovering the truth about the suspicious death of her friend. As Charlie travels the county, living off the radar, her deft ability to sniff out lies helps her to solve the murders that seem to follow her.

Since the show goes to a new place each week, with a new scenerio that unfolds around each murder, the post sound team was always on their toes to meet the challenges this setup posed. Emmy and MPSE Award-winning supervising sound editor Nick Forshager, owner/president of Wildtracks in Los Angeles, is known for his work on shows like Fargo, Ozark, and Breaking Bad, which all take place in one general location with a recurring cast of characters. The work on Poker Face was the complete opposite of those projects but definitely not outside of Forshager’s wheel-house, as he explains in this interview. Forshager comes from the theatrical trailer industry, where variety feeds creativity. Poker Face for him was an enjoyable call-back to those days.

Here, Forshager talks about the sound team’s approach to accomplishing the monumental task of designing detailed sound for each episode, from creative dialogue editing and processing on the theater performer-based episode “Exit Stage Death” to recording cars for the stock car laden racing episode “The Future of the Sport” to crafting low-budget sci-fi sounds to fit the film theme of “The Orpheus Syndrome” and so much more!

Poker Face | Official Trailer | Peacock Original

Poker Face offers many different opportunities for sound since each episode takes the audience to a new place as we follow the nomadic Charlie Cale (played by Natasha Lyonne). It’s very different from the other series you’re known for – Ozark and Fargo – both of which take place in one area. What was this show like for you week to week?

Nick Forshager (NF): It was kind of scary going into it because I knew that this was the concept, that she’s traveling through all these different places.

I had the scripts for Rian Johnson’s episodes, but everything else was wait-and-see. It was really refreshing because we got to take a little journey every week — one week we’re doing this and next week we’re doing that. It was a challenge in that sense, but also really fun to do it that way.

What was your timeline like? Did you get an episode a week?

NF: I got lucky in that Rian shot Ep. 1 (which was the pilot) and Ep. 9 (“Escape from Shit Mountain”) first, and then he went to do posting for Glass Onion. When that was done, he shot Ep. 2 and then finished some external pickup shots for Ep.1 in Laughlin, NV.

I had a good ramp-up on the first three or four episodes. So, for Ep. 3 “The Stall” and a couple of others, I had a lot of time. That was good because I could get a real sense and vibe of the show, but after that, the production schedule got shorter and shorter and shorter.

As things began to pile up with the post schedule, how do you divide and conquer the work for each episode? All of the episodes sounded incredibly detailed. That must have required a lot of work all at once…

NF: I had some amazing editors working on it. Dhyana Carlton-Tims was co-supervising sound editor and my dialogue supervisor. She and Jane Boegel, who’s my dialogue editor, had been able to start earlier, to get those first couple of episodes done. That got them ahead of the game.

I had to bring in a couple of extra editors on the sound effects side because we were afraid that things were going to eventually pile up.

I had to bring in a couple of extra editors on the sound effects side because we were afraid that things were going to eventually pile up. We had those early episodes, as I mentioned, and we tried to get ahead on those so we’d have more people available at the end when we really needed more hands on deck.

It worked out. Normally, I would try to do this with one crew, with one set of editors, but because I knew it was going to bunch up, we front-loaded the editorial and got it done as fast as we could.

But you’re right. With Rian, we felt like we couldn’t really cut any corners or make any compromises. So we gave ourselves as much time as possible, to really go through the episodes and flesh out all the details that we knew he wanted to do.

Where did you work on this show? Were you all at your studio Wildtracks in L.A., or were your editors working remotely?

NF: My editors are still remote. In-house, it was just me, and my assistant Jeff (Cranford). Dhyana and I would go to the stage when we would mix, but everybody else was remote. That’s the new model on the editorial side. We have a facility and we have a handful of people here, but it’s mostly remote working now.

While there aren’t recurring backgrounds, one sound that does show up in every episode is Charlie’s muscle car, the 1969 Plymouth Barracuda. Did you get to record a Barracuda for use in the show? Or, were you able to find a helpful library or two to use for Charlie’s car?

NF: We were lucky in that we got to go out and record about a day and a half with the actual car when they were shooting in Laughlin. It was one of the last things we ended up cutting because we knew we were going to get the actual library of that.

… what you hear in the show are the actual recordings that we did of the Barracuda.

We sent recordist Charlie Campagna out to record it, and he had about a day and a half to get everything that we needed. We had a whole long laundry list because by then we had seen more episodes. We were able to get pretty much everything we needed.

We augmented a little bit here and there, but for the most part, what you hear in the show are the actual recordings that we did of the Barracuda.

That’s a great luxury to have. I probably did more recording on this series than any other series I’ve ever worked on. The Barracuda was definitely a big catch because we knew it was such an important part of the show.

What else did you get to record?

NF: We recorded all the stock cars in Ep. 7 “The Future of the Sport.” We got a heads-up that they were going to start shooting this in upstate New York in September; we had already been in pre-editing with the early episodes. They said, “Hey, we’re getting ready to shoot this show with these stock cars. Do you have anybody that can go out and do some recording on this?”

…Coll Anderson…went out there and spent a day recording all of the cars.

I contacted a friend of mine, Coll Anderson, in New York and he went out there and spent a day recording all of the cars. They were doing this mock racing, and he got to record all of it. He got to meet all the drivers and go through the things we needed for that episode, like all of the gear shifts and steering wheels, on top of all of the racing sounds. We had to augment some of that obviously with some beefier effects to get it to be a little more exciting. But a lot of it is really authentic.

Then, for Ep. 9 “Escape from Shit Mountain,” we got to go out and record the Lamborghini Urus, which was really fun. Charlie [Campagna] handled the recording. I actually got to drive the car, which I never get to do.

In the episode “Escape from Shit Mountain,” Charlie’s life goes from fairy-tale-like happiness to the absolute worst experience of her journey to that point. How were you able to accentuate that through your sound work?

NF: That episode was the biggest challenge we had because it was so isolated and we wanted the environments to really help tell the story. The biggest challenge was trying to create tension and mood throughout and take us along this journey. We had winds and the winter storm outside. Then, we tried to mimic that tension on the inside without getting in the way of dialogue and the feeling of isolation in the cabin. That was definitely the biggest challenge of that episode. I really enjoyed working on that episode.

In Ep. 8 “The Orpheus Syndrome,” Laura has a psychological break at the LAM event, and as she’s in the auditorium, she walks through a hallway of Arthur’s creations and they seem to come to life. Can you talk about your sound work here?

NF: What’s great about that too is that Phil Tippett actually did the stop-motion animation for that. He had done all the stop-motion animation for Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope and Star Wars: Episode V – The Empire Strikes Back. He did all of that. So just to be able to work with his animation was really cool.

For the vocalizations, I performed a couple of them for the melting guy.

It was neat that it had an ’80s vibe and a low-budget vibe. We added sound effects to create things that really mimicked what the animation was doing. Then, letting that fall into that Psycho feel in Laura’s brain was really fun to do.

For the vocalizations, I performed a couple of them for the melting guy. And then I looked for sounds in the library that I could manipulate to match the look of the one-eyed spaceman. I tried to find cool, synthy sound effects that I could lay on that. So they all had these characters that fit what was going on but also play into the whole cacophony of sounds that were going through her head as well.

Then, we have this great score from composers Nathan Johnson and Judson Crane that filled up on top of it. We had to find those little details around each of those images to make it work succinctly. It was one of the last things we did — that episode and that sequence. It was neat to be able to work against the music and create it from there.

…we have this great score from composers Nathan Johnson and Judson Crane…

The score for this series was completely genius. When we had our early meetings, they said that the score is going to be simplistic and it’s going to be banjo-based. I thought, “What? Banjo-based?” And then Nathan scored it, and it was like, “Wow, this is like nothing I’ve ever heard!”

I remember we were in our first playback and I said to him, “Man, this is the coolest thing I have ever heard.” There are times when the banjo feels like a sitar and it’s doing all these weird things. It’s amazing.

When they cut the “Orpheus” episode, they used the Vertigo soundtrack as temp. It was designed around this kind of opus. Of course, they couldn’t get the rights to that, so Nathan and Judson recorded their score based on the Veritgo soundtrack, incorporating the Poker Face theme throughout it. It’s amazing because it was a full score, the full orchestra was rewritten. It was really incredible to see that come together because the whole episode lived in the score.

Ep. 6 “Exit Stage Death” is a great episode for dialogue work. It has a lot of ‘live’ performances — singing in the knock-off Hamilton musical called Franklin and theater performances. There is that great intercom sound in the kitchen during the tech rehearsal. (I loved the processing on that!) And for the sound of the performances on stage as heard from the audience’s POV, was there a mic set up in the back of the room to capture the sound in that space or was that something you recreated in post? It was perfect!

NF: We did it all in post. Dhyana and Jane did a great job on that episode. They double-cut all the lav mics and booms for all the performances and then as we were mixing it, we could really pick the perspectives we wanted to do.

Re-recording mixer Larry Benjamin is a master at perspectives and futz. He was really able to set the distances he wanted for each layer, whether we were on the stage or we were in the first row of the audience, or we were in the back of the audience. Double-cutting all the dialogue gave us the flexibility to do that.

Dhyana and Jane…double-cut all the lav mics and booms for all the performances…

We had so many different perspectives, like being up in the rafters, looking down; we were below the set, and we were backstage. Being able to create all of those different environments and getting it to sit in the mix where you are still focused on the action that’s in front of you, but you have an idea of what’s going on behind you the whole time, was really the challenge in that episode.

The sound of the intercom couldn’t be distorted in such a way that the audience would lose focus on what it is.

As with all the other episodes, we’re telling a story and then we’re telling the same story from a different perspective. So, as you mentioned, there’s the kitchen and the intercoms. That’s one of those scenes where we want the audience to know that they’ve already seen this, and then they’re seeing it again from Charlie’s POV. The sound of the intercom couldn’t be distorted in such a way that the audience would lose focus on what it is. It was a challenge to get that sounding right so that it fit in the environment and we’re still able to tell the story around this other action that’s going on at the same time. The whole dialogue team did a great job to make that episode work.

Another big challenge is that much of the action happens around the monologue that the girl gives on the stage. What was scripted wasn’t long enough to fill the time needed for all the action of that sequence to unfold. So Dhyana had to go back and re-record additional lines for the girl to extend through the scene so that it seemed like she was still giving this monologue while all these other actions were happening. It had to fit seamlessly with what was originally recorded. That was definitely a challenge and it worked in the end — you couldn’t tell that it was manufactured to fit underneath the edit of that sequence.

This episode is another perfect example of how unique, sound-wise, this show is. It’s so different from all the other episodes and that just kept us on our toes. Every week I’d sit down and think, “How are we going to do this episode??”

What was the most challenging scene for sound in the series? What were your challenges?

NF: Being able to create the tension of “Escape from Shit Mountain” was really challenging. That was one of Rian’s episodes and it was one of the first things that we had done. Just being able to get that isolation, and get that feeling that they’re trapped in this cabin and there’s really no way out, took us so long to do. It was such an in-depth episode and it was almost an hour long, but 35 minutes of that were just in the cabin. Keeping up that energy was definitely a big challenge.

The stock car episode was also really challenging just because there was so much going on between the stock cars and the pit areas, the go-karts, and the arcade. A lot of those elements came in so late. They weren’t really finished until close to the end, so we didn’t have a lot of time to get that working. It was really a big challenge. Both turned out really great though.

Did you have a favorite single sound that you created for the show so far? (Just a one-off sound that you were really pleased with how it turned out?)

NF: I would say the MAGA dog in Ep. 3 “The Stall.” Animals are always difficult to cut. They wanted the dog to be annoying, but it couldn’t be so annoying that you lost focus because of it.

The dog in the show barks a lot, so how do we make it sound like it’s repetitive but not too repetitive?

It’s funny because I had cut something on my first pass and I was really happy with it, but then spent probably a week listening to dogs, just searching for the right character. They wanted it to be mean, but not too mean. They wanted the dog barks to be funny but not too funny. So I went looking through my effects and must have listened to a million dogs. The dog in the show barks a lot, so how do we make it sound like it’s repetitive but not too repetitive? I would cut barks and add little growls underneath it, so it didn’t seem exactly the same all the way through. Ultimately, I went back to what I had started with. It was doing exactly what I think they really wanted it to do.

I would cut barks and add little growls underneath it, so it didn’t seem exactly the same all the way through.

Dogs and babies are two sounds that are so subjective. Everybody in the room is going to have an opinion on it. But I knew we were good because Rian started laughing like crazy when he heard the dog.

At first, I thought, “Oh my God, is he laughing at the sound of the effects or is he laughing with it?” And he was totally laughing with it. Thank goodness! It had worked out exactly the way I wanted it to. But you never know until you present it. You go into it sweating, thinking, “Oh my goodness, this is going to really come apart.” And the dog was such an important little character and I wanted to make sure it was right.

In terms of sound, how has working on Poker Face been a unique experience for you?

NF: First of all, this was probably one of the most fun jobs I’ve ever had. Not only was it one of the most challenging because, as we’ve been talking about, there are different locations and different scenarios, and different ideas. But that was just fun.

…every week you’re doing a different challenge and really pushing your creative chops to come up with new ideas at a quick pace.

It was great to be able to jump into something and then do a 180 and go in a different direction the next week. It’s funny because you get to a certain point in a show where you’ve been so deep in it and so focused on it that by the time you’re done, you’re just done. But when we were done with this show, the whole team was like, “We’re done? Wait! I want to do more episodes.”

I came from theatrical marketing and did a lot of trailers and so every week was something different. This show was a lot in that vein where every week you’re doing a different challenge and really pushing your creative chops to come up with new ideas at a quick pace. I really loved that about this show and I hope we get to do more of them.

A big thanks to Nick Forshager for giving us a behind-the-scenes look at the sound of Poker Face and to Jennifer Walden for the interview!

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