Behind The Northman’s Gritty Sound – with James Harrison and Kevin Penney

Writer/Director Robert Eggers's new feature film The Northman is a stylistic blend of brutal Dark Ages reality and mystical experiences. Here, supervising sound editor James Harrison and Foley supervisor Kevin Penney talk about creating swirling vocal designs, recording winds, wolves, and guerilla foley, working their sounds against the score, mixing in Dolby Atmos, and so much more!

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Interview by Jennifer Walden, photos courtesy of Focus Features; Kevin Penney

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Writer/Director Robert Eggers gets medieval in his latest film The Northman. Set in 895 AD, the story follows a young Prince named Amleth, who seeks to avenge the death of his father King Aurvandill War-Raven murdered by Amleth’s uncle Fjölnir. Amleth escapes his village following Fjölnir’s takeover, and grows to manhood in the company of Vikings in Rus. Amleth poses as a slave in order to secure passage to Fjölnir’s farmstead in Iceland, where he plans to make a final stand against his uncle.

Supervising sound editor James Harrison and foley supervisor Kevin Penney – working at Twickenham Film Studios – led the creation of sound for Amleth’s savage existence. Eggers wanted the film to feel gritty, harsh, and brutally real so much of the sound design is based in organic elements like wind, wood, water, and animal sounds. Even the mystical experiences – like the spiritual ceremony in which Aurvandill prepares Amleth for kinghood – are designed using manipulated natural sounds.

The score composed by Robin Carolan and Sebastian Gainsborough also plays a prominent role and evolved in tandem with the post sound team’s work.

Here, Harrison and Penney talk about working against the film score, designing sounds using natural elements, recording wolves, wind, and screaming, capturing guerilla foley, creating swirling vocal soundscapes, building dynamic battle scenes, mixing in Dolby Atmos, and much more!

THE NORTHMAN – Official Trailer

The sound of The Northman was incredible! And the score, too. The two worked wonderfully together. Did you get to hear the score while you were editing the film?

Sound supervisor James Harrison

James Harrison (JH): Yes, we were really lucky with that. The score evolved throughout the time we were in post. The composers Robin Carolan and Sebastian Gainsborough and the music editor Neil Stemp were working in collaboration with director Robert Eggers and Louise Ford (picture editor) the whole way through. With every turnover, there would be another bit of music or it would be adapted and changed in some way. We had quite a few temp mixes as well, and during those, the score would always evolve and we’d talk about our sound work in relation to it, and how we can enhance or leave space for it. It was like that as the year progressed.

There were lots of crossovers between the audio disciplines and music, whether that be sound design, vocal treatments, or even foley. It’s ultimately working to create a soundtrack – one that shouldn’t be separated and easily distinguishable.

I have to say I thought the score was fantastic. I have rarely worked on a film where the music matches the film so well. It’s incredibly different in terms of instrumentation.

There were definitely sound themes in this film – recurring elements that were thematic, such as wind, fire, and raven/bird calls…

JH: It’s very elemental. Robert was adamant that the world should be a character in the movie. On the first temp mix, we already had the environment sounding fairly grim and harsh, but Robert pushed for loads more. We just kept adding to it, making it more distinctive and more of a character of the film.

We created all the sound design elements for these supernatural areas from real-world elements though…

In terms of themes, there are two worlds in this film in addition to locations: the real world and the supernatural world. So the real world had to be raucous, brutal, and unforgiving. There was a lot of mud – tons of mud! Just the daily struggle of walking somewhere had to feel laborious, and that was something we tried to get across.

The supernatural world of sorcerers and witches and hallucinogens was entirely different and really had to create an ambiguity as to whether it was really happening or not. We created all the sound design elements for these supernatural areas from real-world elements though, whether that was fire, animal noises, wood creaks and groans; we just wanted everything to have a grounding in the real, to have it come from the world.

Did you go out and capture any custom winds, fire, or bird calls?

JH: Yes, as much as possible. However, as we were in the middle of a pandemic, location recording and just travel outside was limited, so it meant that I was searching online a bit more for new sources of audio.

I came across some great wind recordings from Iceland by an effects recordist named Thomas Rex Beverly. There are some amazing people around the world who are extremely passionate about sound, and the internet means that contact and resources are a lot more accessible than ever before.

I came across some great wind recordings from Iceland by an effects recordist named Thomas Rex Beverly.

Wind is a difficult thing to record because it only makes a sound when it interacts with something. So not only do you have to wait for it to be windy, but you have to find the right location and props. I was lucky that there was this really big storm one weekend, and I just went up into my loft and recorded all the creaks and groans of the wind through the rafters. Nature can sound very powerful!

The pandemic did mean that we had to have a different way of working – tons of zoom meetings – and the only real face-to-face contact with Robert and Lou was in the temp mixes and the final. It was definitely a change, but it worked out. We adapted.

I saw the film in 5.1 and it sounded amazing. But you did mix in Atmos? Can you talk about the Atmos mix?

JH: Thank you! Yes, we mixed in Dolby Atmos at Goldcrest Theatre 1 in Soho. It’s an amazing theatre and the team there – headed up by Robbie Scott – is technically superb.

We all agreed that mixing in Atmos could really help and benefit the soundtrack.

Using Dolby Atmos was a discussion we had very early on in the process, and we even went to the Dolby screening room to showcase the Atmos format for Robert and Lou. We all agreed that mixing in Atmos could really help and benefit the soundtrack. We realized that the scope of the music, especially with those huge drums, would benefit from having an Atmos mix where we could separate off the instrumentation to make space for the dialogue and sound design.

Obviously, the mix takes longer to do in Atmos, and to be honest, it can be a frustrating medium to work in, especially when it comes to re-cutting for changes in the edit, but the benefits are fantastic. It was a really immersive mix.

I want to rewatch the film to experience it in Atmos! There are certain scenes, like the first hallucinogenic scene of the ceremony with King Aurvandil War-Raven and young Amleth, that must be incredible in Atmos with the swirling vocals…

JH: That’s an interesting scene. We really wanted to go a bit crazy with that. There’s this section when young Amleth is looking down on the fire as he’s seemingly floating in the air, and we really wanted to get a sense of vertigo for this shot. Atmos helped here by panning the tonal design elements up into the ceiling and swirling around you.

I find Atmos can be distracting in some films, and you have to be careful with using all the speakers just because you can, but this film really lent itself to the format.

One thing that Robert had read about this hallucinogenic drug was that it really shifts your hearing, and you can start hearing voices. So we started to play with vocal treatments and the way the voices were heard, especially tonal elements that were made from animal noises.

Foley Supervisor Kevin Penney

Actually, we did a lot of work with animal voices, like the ravens you mentioned earlier. I really wanted to create the sonic architecture from naturalistic sounds. So, some of the wind sounds were made from fox calls and wolf howls. It was a huge amount of experimentation and a bit of back and forth with Robert, and working with the music, dialogue, effects, and sound design to get to a place where everyone was happy. There’s this great meld between all disciplines.

Kevin Penney (KP): And we did a wolf recording session as well. That was cool.

JH: That was cool! You and Jimmy Boyle went out for that one. I have to veer off to say we had some great people on our team. Sound designers were Jimmy Boyle and Damian Volpe, Tom Sayers on sound effects, Jo Jackson our assistant, Becki Ponting editing ADR, Steve Little was the co-supervisor handling dialogue, Kevin [Penney] and the foley team at Twickenham with foley artists Sue Harding and Oliver Ferris and foley recordist Adam Mendez, and then our re-recording mixers Paul Cotterell and Mark Taylor.

We had a great team of people who I’ve worked with for years. The only person I hadn’t worked with before was Damian Volpe, who is based in New York. Robert wanted to get him on the team right from the outset. He was a fantastic addition, a really great guy, and I enjoyed working with him even though we had lots of miles between us.

The swirling voices in the first ceremony scene, were those from loop group or extra takes from the actors on set?

JH: Those were extra takes from the set, mainly derived from the production sound, but we did have an integration of Icelandic voices and Scandanavian language voices. For example, later on in the film Amleth encounters the Seeress (played by Bjork) in a village in Rus, and we have these underlying whispering voices because we wanted to merge his character and the Seeress, so we have female whispering under his voice almost like it’s doing a translation of what he’s saying. And we have whispering voices under Bjork’s voice (although it’s less noticeable). Those voices in that sequence are mainly from the sync sound, but we did have an underlying vocal treatment of this weird dialogue.

KP: From a foley perspective, one fun thing in that cave sequence was that we created very constrained environments in the foley theater for the artists to crawl around in, which gave us this claustrophobic acoustic. We built a tunnel and Young Amleth did have to crawl around in the tunnel, so it was quite funny to go method on that to try to get that tight, claustrophobic sound.

The foley had to sound exactly as it should and be as real as possible.

JH: Robert [Eggers] loves realism. His attention to detail is very noticeable throughout. The boats in the film are traditionally handmade. The ‘sets’ for a better word are thoroughly researched and properly built. That authenticity went all the way through to the foley. The foley had to sound exactly as it should and be as real as possible. It was a daunting and difficult task, especially for Kevin and the foley artists; they had to use as correct props as possible and make sure that everything sounded as true to reality as they could make it.

KP: It was an exciting challenge in that way. As most people know when you shoot foley, sometimes when you have the real object you might not get as much sound from it as you’d like. So that presented challenges in that regard.

There was a funny moment when I went on a lunch break and noticed some workers felling trees outside. The whole previous week I was wondering how I was going to do this attack on the village and the sound of them scaling the fortress walls because it’s all made out of very thick tree trunks. The next thing you know, we’re hauling this huge amount of tree trunks back to the foley theater. And it totally paid off. It’s one of those sounds that’s hard to cheat. You need the heavy bark and thick wood to get the right sound of axes cleaving into it.

Sound designer Jimmy Boyle

How serendipitous! Let’s go back to the wolf recording session. What was that like?

KP: It was scary! I won’t lie. I was led to believe the wolves would be in pens and when we arrived I saw that our sound designer Jimmy Boyle was already standing in the middle of a pack of wolves with the Rycote-covered microphone. At that point, I realized that we were going to be in there with them. But they were lovely, although some were kept in pens because they were permanently angry

We wanted to get the wolves howling and so we took two from the main pack and led them off on a ten-minute walk away from the others. We were told to leave some mics back with the pack, in a set-it-and-forget-it way, so we could get them howling.

…I was totally astonished as to how loud these wolves sounded.

One of the most interesting things about this was, with all of our knowledge and understanding about recording and proximity and volume levels, I was totally astonished as to how loud these wolves sounded. We walked for ten minutes and got a fair distance away and yet it sounded like the wolves were so much closer than they actually were. I didn’t know that a pack of wolves all howling at the same time would create such a huge amount of volume. It was phenomenal to hear. I was completely convinced that we’d get back and the recordings would be distorted but I was pleasantly surprised; they must have been slightly off-mic and that saved us.

We took a few mics with us. I had a Sanken CMS 7 and Jimmy brought James’s Sanken CO-100k. We knew that ultimately a lot of these recordings would be used for more than the howling sounds and we’d need to do some extreme pitching to create other sounds, like winds and so forth. So that came in handy.

I was completely convinced that we’d get back and the recordings would be distorted…

We captured the pack, but we also captured solos from the two wolves we took for a walk. Those two wolves would howl when prompted.

Some of the wolves were bred with Huskies to make them easier to train. And they were huge. One did lick my face, and I looked terrified.

JH: The wolf recordings were useful for the bonfire scene in Rus, and also for when Amleth was with the fox in Iceland, howling at the moon before the dog attack. So the wolf recordings were morphed with Amleth’s voice there.

For the bonfire scene, we had some of the actors come in and record some howling. Amleth’s (played by Alexander Skarsgård) performance in that scene was phenomenal. We definitely morphed the other crowd voices there with the wolves and also bears; that was something we really wanted to do so it felt ambiguous for the audience. Was this real? Were they actually turning into animals or were they not? There’s a question mark over everything as to exactly what is happening.

The Northman: Foley team performing the berzerker dance in the mud

At the end of the bonfire scene in Rus, Amleth does this super scream. He really goes for it. Was that captured on the set? Was that production?

JH: Yes, that was production. He just let himself go completely on that and I think that was one of the first scenes that Robert shot with him, like, lets get this out of the way, and then everything else will be easy by comparison. He just really went for it on set and you can tell. It’s an extremely powerful scene.

And the recording was great. The production sound team did a phenomenal job in what must have been extremely difficult circumstances.

Going back to the first ceremony scene with King Aurvandil War-Raven and young Amleth, at one point Amleth reaches his hand inside Aurvandil’s body and connects with the family tree. And this tree comes up later in the film as well. Can you talk about the sound for this more spiritual realm?

JH: It comes back to that elemental theme running through the film. It’s the place of visions/tree of life – the blood of your ancestors coursing through your veins. Water, blood, and earth.

We started by manipulating sounds of blood rushing through your veins, with heavily treated heartbeat sounds…

We started by manipulating sounds of blood rushing through your veins, with heavily treated heartbeat sounds, and also the use of the sea and waves to convey an elemental force behind it all. It was also heavily music-driven, which really helped to blend it into the ethereal.

Plugin-wise, we all have the usual weapons, and we experiment and use a lot, but I also like granular synthesis and I use a lot of outboard Eurorack modules. They’re very good for putting sounds into unusual and different spaces. They’re good for mangling sounds and mixing up the processing. There are some fantastic musical-type modules and effect modules, and you can mess around with those. You can spend days coming up with unusual sounds and they can yield some very unexpected results. I’ve used them on quite a few films recently, on sounds that you really wouldn’t think that they’d be able to help with. Be warned though; they are an expensive hobby to get into!

They’re analog modules, so do you write down your settings for particular sounds?

JH: No, I didn’t. Anyone that knows me knows that I’m the type of guy that likes to live life on the edge – a high-adrenaline, super risk-taker. Please don’t fact-check that statement though.

For the battle and fight sounds, they featured a lot of heavy metal and thick wood. And there were some really cool arrow whooshes and spear-bys, especially when Amleth and his group were invading that village in Rus. Can you talk about your sound work on those battle scenes?

KP: The thing I liked about it was that it’s already famous for being an amazingly choreographed one-take pass; you follow Amleth all the way from the start, through the village to when he ends up on top of the guy he attacks on the horse. It’s a nice progression, following this journey in the sound; it develops from a very light start with them creeping through the grasses until the alarm is sounded when they’re spotted and then it kicks off and gets more and more chaotic. It was a nice challenge to keep it evolving sound-wise, all the way through.

As the horse goes down, its vocal is literally all around the theater in the surrounds and through the subs and into the ceiling speakers.

JH: It was mainly Jimmy Boyle that did that sequence effects-wise, and he did a superb job. One thing that Robert was keen on was that the swords should sound extremely sharp. He didn’t want to have anything ‘clangy,’ and to be honest, that made me smile because those are my sensibilities as well.

It was a loud, brutal sequence. I remember doing the sound for the horse when Amleth jumps off the parapet down onto it. As the horse goes down, its vocal is literally all around the theater in the surrounds and through the subs and into the ceiling speakers. It was a loud scene, and we definitely felt it at the end of the day when we were mixing it!

The crowd for that sequence was great at helping to create that feeling of chaos, too; there are the fighters yelling first, then the screaming of the women and children as the attackers get deeper into the village….

JH: The loop group is what brings it home and makes it feel very real – when you have the real terror in the voices.

Steve [Little] did a great job here, with melding the sync and loop group and ADR…

Steve [Little] did a great job here, with melding the sync and loop group and ADR, getting all those performances to cut through and be real. It was the stuff that nightmares are made of.

For the end of the scene, during the barn burning (when they put all the women and children into the barn), that was all from Steve. He got some friends and kids together in his garden and told them to imagine that they were burning to death and then scream.

KP: Not remotely alarming for the neighbors.

JH: No, not alarming at all, and luckily no police were called.

After the Rus village attack, Amleth meets the Seeress. We talked briefly about the voices, but what went into the other sounds for that scene?

KP: We added to its mysticism by playing with the chimes in this burnt-out shack. The Seeress was wearing so many trinkets and jewelry that it set off ideas to help make it feel more surreal, with these ambient chimes.

I had listened to a Bjork track a few days before working on that scene, and I heard what sounded like reversed Indian bells and so that sparked the idea to use reversed chimes in this scene – not every chime sound, but just the odd one here and there. That helped to give it a subtle surreality.

…that sparked the idea to use reversed chimes in this scene – not every chime sound, but just the odd one here and there.

JH: It’s basically two performances of Bjork’s vocals there. She did a spoken performance and then a whispering one, and they morph between one and the other.

The morph between spoken and whispered lines, again, gives you this feeling of ambiguity.

As Kevin said, we did a lot of experimentation. The music there was great and we also worked with treating wooden creaks and moans, slowing those down and putting those into heavy reverb to create a tonal texture in this place. It becomes a very supernatural and ethereal moment that worked well in that environment, coupled with a fantastic performance from Bjork.

…just knowing that it came from something that’s true and real to that environment was important for us.

KP: We worked with natural elements and that was pretty much the theme for the whole movie, to give a sense of the age and to root it sonically to the environment.

JH: Even though I hate the term “organic,” it’s quite fitting for this. You can get a similar sound from a completely different source but just knowing that it came from something that’s true and real to that environment was important for us. So I was happy to work with real wood sounds, and animal sounds, and vocal treatments to get that grounding in nature, but it did take a lot of work.

In Iceland, Amleth follows a fox into a cave and meets another Seer (He-Witch). I loved all the throat singing and drumming, and the incredible reverb in there. There was this creepy atmosphere with swirling voices. So much cool sound was happening in there!

JH: The actor Ingvar Sigurdsson, who played the He-Witch, did all that throat singing on set. We really didn’t have to do that much to his performance because it was so great. But we did create sounds for inside the cave that, again, came from true natural sounds. With a performance as great as Ingvar’s, we were careful not to be too forward here though, and everything was quite understated.

What went into the scene with Amleth confronting The Mound Dweller – the dead king who had the sword that Amleth was seeking?

JH: That scene, cut-wise, didn’t change too much from the early versions we saw. We knew that this was a big moment and spent quite a bit of time on it right from the outset. We wanted to explore the sound down there and explore the vocal treatment and the heaviness of this undead warrior – the way he’s breathing and his crackly, dry leather skin. All those elements were really interesting to explore.

This was definitely the driest decapitation in the entire movie. The challenge was keeping it dry and still conveying the horror.

KP: This was definitely the driest decapitation in the entire movie. The challenge was keeping it dry and still conveying the horror.

JH: And then there was the sound of the sword itself; Robert was keen to have an individual, distinct, and unique sound for that – not necessarily a type of Kill Bill Hanzō sword ring. It needed to be something a bit different that can stick in your mind as a signature sound.

And for the sword sound, that was something that Damian Volpe handled by himself.

For the vocal processing, it was a mixture of things. We started with Flux Ircam Trax v3 plugin on vocal performances that we’d done ourselves to picture. That processing helped to make it sound breathier and older and more guttural. From that as a starting point, we added other vocal treatments to make it sound more menacing and dangerous.

We veered away from accentuating too much with animal sounds for this one, so it’s mainly derived from human performances.

And for the sword sound, that was something that Damian Volpe handled by himself. He went away for a week and came back with some excellent stuff, and Robert loved it. Damian has a great studio in New York, and there he played with the sword sound for a week or so. And sometimes you need that – to have someone with a completely different take on things. And he was able to just take that sound and experiment on his own with it.

There was a ball-and-stick game in the film that was absolutely brutal. What went into the sounds for this sequence?

KP: Knattleikr!

From a foley perspective, that was quite a challenge in that grass doesn’t give you a lot back and for the opposing team’s biggest player, we wanted to get all that heft into the foley sound. I knew that would be tough to achieve in the foley theater and so went out to a local park and I ran around like a madman, doing some heavy body falls, stomps, and impacts. There’s a pounding that you get out of a big expanse of grass that you wouldn’t be able to pick up in a foley theater.

There’s a pounding that you get out of a big expanse of grass that you wouldn’t be able to pick up in a foley theater.

Re-recording mixer Mark Taylor likes a mixture of studio shot foley but also real-world foley as well. I think it’s great to have both. You can get all the detail from the studio foley but you can get a lot of weight from guerilla foley.

JH: Weight and realism, I think. Guerilla foley just sounds real…

KP: …and it helps bed everything else in.

JH: Absolutely. It takes longer but the rewards are worth it. The headbutt at the end of that sequence was one of my favorite moments from the movie because just when you think Amleth is finished, there’s another headbutt, and then another, and then another. It keeps going on and on and we ramp up to the end with the sound of his opponent’s whole head caving in. It gets progressively squishier. It’s great in an awful way; sonically and dramatically it works really well for me. I was really happy with how that turned out.

What other guerilla foley did you capture?

KP: Mud! A hell of a lot of mud.

In a regular foley shoot when it comes to feet, you can easily put character into performances by choosing different types of shoes, but when you’re dealing with mud and mess it’s really difficult to get that contrast in there for a scene. It can sound like just a lot of the same thing. So the key to this was to make up many different types of mud.

And we had some pretty bad weather at the time (as James mentioned) so I was off to the fields to jump around in puddles. There was plenty of that.

Another good thing is that when you make lots of mud in the foley theater, you have some great gore opportunities as well.

Let’s look at the mushroom-laced soup scene. At one point, one of the warriors stabs himself in the neck – brutal!

JH: Yes, he was having a very bad day.

That was an interesting scene with all the nuances of sound coming together, working with the music department and everything going trippy and weird, and then working with pitch bends on our sounds.

…it’s something we had to work with sonically to give you that feeling that something is happening and perceptions are changing.

The visuals aren’t really affected by the mushroom soup, so it’s something we had to work with sonically to give you that feeling that something is happening and perceptions are changing.

When we get to the shot with Amleth staring down “No Nose” (aka, Finnr the Nose-Stub), there’s this weird guttural tone that sounds like a horn call for Odin, but it’s actually made from a walrus call. So, again, we have a sound that comes from the natural world but is used in a very different way to be weird and trippy and spooky at the same time.

The composers really delivered on that scene; they did some far-out things with the score.

The fog also gave us the opportunity to weave in and out very quickly between sounds. It was a good device to help us highlight one sound and then the next without it sounding too “constructed.” It helped us to do what we wanted to do sonically, mixing and carving out sounds.

During the Gates of Hel sequence, I loved the foley footsteps on the burning coals…

KP: Thank you! The important aspect of the footsteps there was to keep the surface changing and evolving. When we start out, as Amleth is taking his walk up to the volcano, we used plum slate (loose slate chips) in the foley pit for that transition, to shale, dirt, up to the hot ash.

…we had a lot of very dry leaves and I found those worked great for the ash flying through the air.

Also, because we had done so much with leaves in the film we had a lot of very dry leaves and I found those worked great for the ash flying through the air. I had this idea that at the ends of sword attacks, I wanted to hear a scatter and scuff of embers. So we crushed up these dry leaves and we’d throw handfuls of them and it gives you all this high-end information which worked really well for that scene because there was already so much happening in the low-end (aside from the sword hits). The crushed leaves thrown and scattered cut through the mix and helped to create this sense of heat and ash.

JH: There was this incredible detail that Kevin did that I loved – Amleth was on his knees and Fjölnir is standing above him with his sword pointed toward him and there was all this ash blowing past them. You can then hear hints of ash hitting the blade. I just loved those little tink tink tink sounds. It’s a detail that’s so quiet but it adds information to the scene. I love those little details.

How has working on The Northman helped you to grow your craft?

KP: For this film, we practically destroyed the foley theater. I don’t think I’ve had such a messy shoot. The funny thing is when you go in there as the editor, you’re so enthusiastic that you sometimes forget how hard it is for everyone physically. You’re trying to get the authenticity of the harshness but you forget you’re making two people go through that harshness repeatedly every day. They put so much into the performances and it totally paid off. So, maybe a few more breaks and not quite so much mud next time…

You’re trying to get the authenticity of the harshness but you forget you’re making two people go through that harshness repeatedly every day.

It was so much fun making a big mess, though.

JH: On every job, I always learn something new; one of the things I love about working the way we do in the film industry is that on every job you’re with a different team (different director, editor, producers..) and so every project is like starting work at a new company, where everyone has different ideas to your last job. Every film is different and your approach can be very different as well. I find that thrilling.

I’m always honored and humbled to be working in this industry. It’s a job that I do love and care about. Film is a great passion of mine. So it’s fantastic to have the privilege to work with great directors on some great projects. Long may it continue.

A big thanks to James Harrison and Kevin Penney for giving us a behind-the-scenes look at the sound of The Northman and to Jennifer Walden for the interview!

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