Shaping the Subdued Sound of ‘Succession’ – with Nick Renbeck and Andy Kris

Having been with HBO’s Succession series from the start, 2x-Emmy winning supervising sound editor/re-recording mixer Nick Renbeck and Emmy-winning re-recording mixer Andy Kris are deeply in tune with the show’s sound. The sonic choices they make in collaboration with the showrunners – subtle choices of what to remove and what to include – sonically define how this world of privilege and power is portrayed to the audience. What you don’t hear is just as important as what you do. Clean lines and uncluttered designs are the hallmarks of luxury brands. And that’s exactly what you get with Succession – clean lines of dialogue and uncluttered background designs.

Here, Renbeck and Kris – mixing Succession on Stage C at WB Sound NY talk about those intentional choices that convey a feeling of affluence, the challenges they face in cutting fast-paced dialogue, the decision to use purely production dialogue to maintain the illusion of spontaneity, how the showrunners’ decision to not fake things on set impacts post sound, and more!

ccession (2021) | Season 3 Official Trailer | HBO

Anyone who’s been to New York City can tell you that it’s loud! But since Season 1 of Succession, I’ve noticed how quiet the city seems in this show. It’s as if the Roy family lives in such a bubble of wealth and privilege that the sounds of ‘normal’ life in NYC don’t infiltrate their little world. Was that intentional? If so, was that reasoning behind it?

Supervising sound editor/re-recording mixer Nick Renbeck

Nick Renbeck (NR): Yes. That was our marching orders from day one, from the first spotting session. They have their own three-ply glass windows; everything is nice and quiet. The only time you get a little bit of something is when you get outside on the streets, but even there we’ve pulled back on the ambience. Inside was so quiet that to make it so loud outside didn’t seem to make sense. So we had to keep this balancing line to keep the refrain. There are a couple of places where we get loud on the outside but for the most part, we kept that subdued sound going.

Andy Kris (AK): We had it that way to begin with. The pilot started with a full-on NYC sound. Inside you are hearing traffic, sirens, and horns. The showrunners heard it and said, “No. These people don’t live in that world.”

They basically live above it. They are insulated from all of that. The sound of the show is focused more on the dialogue, which is very key to what they were trying to get across. So we were told to get rid of it all very early on.

NR: I think I did try to do a step down where I still kept a little bit of the ambience, but even there they said no.

Re-recording mixer Andy Kris

AK: Often, the ambience isn’t only there to provide a soundscape for the place and time that these characters are living in but it also helps with the production tracks too, which might not be so spectacular all of the time.

On Succession, the dialogue feels a little bit improvised, but it’s not. Because of the way that the lines overlap, and everyone talks over each other and around each other, the production can get a little hairy at times. I think it’s a little unpredictable for the boom ops. Or, there are a lot of times when no boom can be put in the scene because they’re shooting with multiple cameras. So you have to rely often on lav mics.

When you’re able to construct a world around these people, you can embed the dialogue a little more into the distant backgrounds. Those are like glue. And that’s not really the case on the show, so every episode is a bit of a struggle just to make it technically sound acceptable but also try to make the showrunners happy by not acquiescing to burying the dialogue in a bunch of noise. So every episode is a challenge.

Nick, you mentioned there are a couple of times when the city does get loud. Would one of those be in Ep. 301, when Ken and his small team are leaving the Waystar/Royco building and getting into the company car? Even in the car, the sound of NYC is so loud, present, and chaotic with the press yelling questions, lots of construction sounds, and horns honking. This is when Ken had just gone against the family, and so now it’s like he’s outside of the Roy bubble of privilege and he’s exposed to the ‘real’ world!

NR: In our spotting session, series creator Jesse Armstrong suggested we break our rule and go noisy this time, to do something a little different. It was definitely intentional for that scene to be louder and to push the city sounds. When he gets into the car, you can still hear the city coming through.

It was definitely intentional for that scene to be louder and to push the city sounds.

I think you’re right in terms of reading the intention that way, that Ken is on the outs with the Roys and so the rest of the world is closing in on him.
 

Andy, you pointed out that the show is all about the dialogue, and it’s fast-paced. Often the actors are stepping on each other’s lines or it’s cut very close to that. That must be challenging! Can you talk about your approach to dialogue on the show and the challenges you face?

AK: Luckily, because of modern recording techniques you can put everyone on their own mic for the most part. That helps tremendously. When production sound does have a boom in the scene, we can get a sense of the room.

We use a plug-in called Auto-Align Post by Sound Radix, which does a fabulous job of taking all of these microphones and time-aligning them so there are no phase issues. A lot of times when something is noisy, you can choose from a couple of different microphones and therefore you need less noise reduction on the lines.

We use a plug-in called Auto-Align Post by Sound Radix, which does a fabulous job of taking all of these microphones and time-aligning them so there are no phase issues.

Another challenging aspect in the show is that they shoot 35mm film. So we often have to deal with camera noise, especially in these quiet interior scenes. You’ll have a camera chattering away — or a couple of cameras chattering away. It can be very challenging at times to deal with that. It’s a sound that we used to deal with all the time 15 years ago, but recently it hasn’t been a thing. That was a bit eye-opening when we got the first episodes. We were like, “What’s that noise?” Then we realized it was from the film cameras. We found out that they were shooting 35mm!

It’s these things that give Succession its own style, and its unique look and sound.
 

Do you end up doing a lot of ADR on the show?

AK: Very little. It’s such a performance-based show. We tried to do a lot more ADR in the first season, trying to make everything technically perfect, but everyone preferred the lumps inherent with the on-set performances. We try to work with whatever is there and if we need to, we can try to swap in another take for a syllable or two.

NR: Angela Organ is our ADR supervisor on the show. After cueing for what she thinks needs to be looped, a large portion of her job is spent trying not to loop it.

We tried to do a lot more ADR in the first season, trying to make everything technically perfect, but everyone preferred the lumps inherent with the on-set performances.

There’s a good deal of conversations back and forth with the producers and picture department on what we can skip in terms of looping, either by living with what is there or by finding what alternate production takes we can.

I believe Angela spots ADR with the picture AAF and the full dialogue assembles in front of her, checking and looking for alternate takes as she does her first looping list pass.

AK: I think that part of it is that there’s this documentary feel to the show, with the handheld cameras. All these things work contrary to what you think the filmmakers are trying to tell you. At its heart, though, it has to feel off-the-cuff – that it could only happen this one time in this one way. You have to preserve that and that’s the way the production has to live.

Do you typically choose the lav mics? Especially this season, there’s been a lot of wide shots with three or more people. And there are a lot of “walk and talk” shots with the actors walking toward camera, which has to be tough for the boom operator…

AK: They do a good job of using the lav mics on everybody and we rely 100% on that. Sometimes if someone’s lav doesn’t sound so great, I can use someone else’s lav because of Auto-Align Post. We can align everyone’s mics so I can get a bit of boost from someone else’s mic if they were passing through the scene. Those things can really help me out of the jam.
 

Because the show is so dialogue-driven and there’s such little ambience, the foley gets to shine. Mix-wise, are you leaning on the foley more to help stitch the dialogue together?

NR: Maybe, but I’m not sure that we approach it that much different. I think I actually tuck the foley in a bit more because it just sits there and feels louder because there’s nothing else going on.

…when Nick comes with the foley, it breathes more life and air back into everything and makes everything feel a bit more natural.

AK: After I get done with the dialogue premix pass, I always feel like the show doesn’t sound ‘good.’ It feels lifeless. There’s nothing going on with the track because we’ve eliminated all the noises. And then when Nick comes with the foley, it breathes more life and air back into everything and makes everything feel a bit more natural.

So, I wouldn’t say that we lean on it – like, look at this great foley – but it does fill in all of those missing parts that have been eliminated because of noise reduction processing. The foley helps when you put two takes together and you want it to feel seamless. Foley can help be that bridge from one take to another. It really does help to make the show feel natural.

Let’s talk about the scene in Ep. 305 at the Annual Shareholder’s Meeting. Ken gets on the podium mic to say he’s starting a foundation in the name of the sexual abuse victims of Waystar/Royco. But they cut his mic halfway through. Can you break down this sequence in terms of sound?

AK: They like to do things very natural on the show, even phones ringing. They actually call and ring the phones. So at the beginning of that episode, Ken is FaceTiming with his kids. They just did that on set. That sound coming off the phone was actually what he was acting against in that scene. So that’s the sound you hear. And it often can be really challenging to dig that out.

A lot of the speakerphone dialogue was from the phone just sitting on the table and everyone acting to the phone.

So at the Annual Shareholder’s Meeting, it’s the same thing. They have the guest speakers amplified as they’re speaking over the mic at the podium. A lot of the sound work we do is enhancing what’s recorded on set. I’ve never worked on a show where they’ve done this, especially with the phones. A lot of the rings are the actual rings that happened on set. A lot of the speakerphone dialogue was from the phone just sitting on the table and everyone acting to the phone.

So when Ken is giving his speech, I was able to mute his podium mic and lean on the far boom mic so it really feels that his mic did get cut off.
 

For Ken’s dialogue there, did you blend in a bit of his lav mic to help with intelligibility? Or was it all from the far boom?

AK: When I think back to that, I know we had a lav, and they were recording the podium mic as a separate track – which is great because it’s a different kind of mic than a lav mic so you get a bit more of the ps popping and other nuances of sound you’d hear when someone is giving a speech. And you can lean on that, so I didn’t have to artificially create that kind of sound.

It’s like a buffet table; you can pick and choose what you want to use depending on what the scene calls for.

We often get a lot of mic choices from production because sound recordist Ken Ishii, who does such a great job. It’s like a buffet table; you can pick and choose what you want to use depending on what the scene calls for. So you can put him in the back of the room, or you can be right up there at the podium with him. We don’t have to rely so much on effects and reverbs; we can do that by just choosing different mics.

Looking at Ep. 306, the Roys attend a gathering to pick the next President; they’re in this crowded hotel bar/event space. What were your challenges for sound here? There’s so much chatter going on. Was that all bespoke loop group? Library crowd ambience?

NR: It’s a mixture of three things going on there. We have loop group, what was recorded on set, and additional crowd and walla effects that I added.

They don’t do a lot of fakery on the show, like telling background actors to just mouth things. They’re actually talking.

AK: They generally like scenes to be real, as I was saying. I don’t remember how much of the crowd was on their mics, but the crowd was speaking. It’s that cinéma vérité style. They want to insert these characters into the real world. They don’t do a lot of fakery on the show, like telling background actors to just mouth things. They’re actually talking. And a bit of that does come through. We definitely did add loop group there for specific things and Nick added some crowd tracks.

Can you talk about putting the sound of the crowd in the space? How did you use the surrounds? And were you creating different layers with various degrees of reverb to create a feeling of depth?

NR: On the sound effects side, I’m trying to choose recordings that have the sound that I’m looking for and then I’m being selective about where I’m panning them. So I’ll have a track that sounds a bit more reverby and I’ll put that in the surrounds a bit more to give a feeling of space and then pan the dry sounds more upfront. It’s less about throwing reverb on those elements. It’s more about the selection of the sounds.

It’s less about throwing reverb on those elements. It’s more about the selection of the sounds.

In terms of the foley and putting that in the space, I try to use a two-reverb approach. I’ll use Audio Ease’s Altiverb to spread the sound a bit wider and then I’ll use Avid’s ReVibe to get a shorter reverb and keep that one close to the center. Then I’ll just play between the two of them.

In terms of sound, what’s been your biggest challenge on Season 3 so far?

AK: It’s the same challenges we’ve had on the other two seasons.

You brought up a bit about the surrounds and I’d like to say that we generally don’t use a lot of the surrounds in the show. A lot of that is just a style thing; the producers have no patience for things that are happening outside of the screen, outside of these characters’ world. We don’t do a lot with the surrounds.

It reminds me of how Woody Allen mixed his films. Even when 5.1 became a popular sound format, Woody still mixed his films in mono. He didn’t have sound coming out of anything but the center channel. So though it was delivered in 5.1, there would only be sound coming from the center. Part of that was his taste; he’s a fan of how movies used to sound so that is how he wanted his films to sound. And his films are very dialogue-driven, too, much in the same way that Succession is. So we don’t stray too far from the story that we’re telling about these people. That’s what is most important.

The score comes to me in stereo (L-R), and it stays in stereo (L-R). We don’t do any panning with that, which is a rarity for me.

That goes for the music, too. The score comes to me in stereo (L-R), and it stays in stereo (L-R). We don’t do any panning with that, which is a rarity for me. For every show I’ve ever done, if the score comes in stereo then I usually upmix it to 5.1 (or 7.1, or Atmos), and maybe add some subwoofer to it. But not on this show.

I will say that in Ep. 307 we heavily use the surrounds for the source music. Ken throws himself an epic birthday party that takes place in many different sized rooms, so to help put the characters in the spaces, we used the surrounds to add the appropriate amount of depth to each scene. I think that’s always the challenge for us, to keep the soundtrack small and insular. But when it needs to get big, we have the ability to do that.

NR: It’s interesting because we’re keeping the music L-R and that’s our composer’s request – that he wants it coming out just L-R.

So if the music is only in the front (L-R) on this show, and you start putting too many sound effects in the surrounds, it feels weird.

So then it’s a question of how much of the sound effects and background sounds do we put in the surrounds? It gets to be this weird thing like the old Beatles’ albums (before Sgt. Pepper) where you have the drums and the bass on one side and the lead guitar and the piano on the other. It’s split. So if the music is only in the front (L-R) on this show, and you start putting too many sound effects in the surrounds, it feels weird.

So there are spots that we used the surrounds, like in Ep. 301 and 302 where we have the jets flying over the hotel in Serbia. And so we’re playing a bit with it there. But more often than not, we steer away from that. And when there’s music going on, it’s even less so.

A big thanks to Nick Renbeck and Andy Kris for giving us a behind-the-scenes look at the sound of Succession and to Jennifer Walden for the interview!

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