The shabby apartment in Stephen Karam’s incredible debut film, The Humans, feels like a living, breathing character itself. When the Blake family comes together to celebrate the Thanksgiving holiday, Karam gives them a wide-open playground to explore, but that space is something new for location sound mixer, Tammy Douglas. “It’s exciting, because it’s not just some action flick where you have all the bangs and booms,” Douglas said. “This is a film that’s so dialogue driven, but it’s so interesting how it all comes out.”
Stepping onto the set as a crew member had to feel exactly like the characters feel when they cross the threshold. Richard Jenkins and Jayne Houdyshell’s characters are wondering how their daughter, played by Beanie Feldstein, is going to make this space work for her, and Douglas was curious herself.
“I showed up and we had a prep day where we got to come in and see the actors do a little bit of rehearsal and see the sets. It was so interesting, because it really felt like a real New York City apartment. I know it was very important for Stephen [Karam] to recreate this apartment that he lived in back in the day. It had the dirt and everything. The set was great. The production designer did a great job. He was telling me how he was going to shoot the whole thing with these extra wide shots. He wanted to see the space and it was definitely good to see that they had this strong vision of what it was going to be. And then as a sound person, obviously, it presented many challenges.”
Douglas had to let go of her boom mic. Since Karam shot his film from such wide angles, there couldn’t be boom mic operator in the shot, and Douglas had to improvise. She placed microphones all around the set hidden away from the audience. We joked that she had to break off her committed relationship with her boom.
“Usually, you try to get a boom in there so there’s a richer sound. It’s different than a network TV show where it becomes a lot of wires that you’re running on. I came in, and I thought, ‘Oh, wow, the shots are really wide and the space is very echoey.’ The shadows were pretty intense, so even if there are some shots that could have gotten a boom in close, it still wasn’t movable. So it was pretty much wires, and you’re also thinking about how you want the sound to be cohesive. I knew this is going to be a wire job. There six actors–six wires–and that’s primarily what I’m going to be able to use. The booms are pretty much getting slates, and the boom operator and I put plants down on the right and left side of the room. I was going to try to get something in post that’s giving that echo and some of that presence of the room. Wires are just very crispy. It was definitely challenging, because I love the boom and it was very weird to do a whole movie where I don’t think there was a boomable shot.”
If you look at the text of The Humans, you will notice that Karam added slashes in the dialogue to indicate when the next actor should begin speaking, and it often overlaps. It allows the actors to cascade the dialogue over itself and make the conversation seem more natural. It was like that for the original Broadway script as well. It gives the characters more authenticity, but it also creates a bigger challenge for the sound mixing in order for all the dialogue to be heard.
“Yeah, that was definitely crazy. There were some days where we did 11 pages–which is huge for one day. As a sub mixer, you get your script, and you highlight each actor with a specific color. There were some scenes where all the colors are overlapping, and then you think, ‘Okay…how am I going to do this?’ It was tricky, because you want to hear everybody and there are moments, especially in the scene towards the end when they’re all kind of arguing, where they went a little freeform. It was not one hundred percent on the page. It’s supposed to be nuanced with moments going up and then down. It was exciting, but it works. I’m sure, though, the re-recording mixer had to really go in there. It was very much a, ‘Okay…here we go!’ kind of moment.”
The Humans is available to stream on Showtime.
