by Richard Lightstone CAS AMPS
2024 proved to be a busy release year for Steven Morrow and his team with three feature films, Juror #2, Joker: Folie à Deux, which as of this writing made the Oscar shortlist for sound, and Saturday Night.
Steven wanted to talk about his long working relationship with Director Jason Reitman and their fifth collaboration on the film Saturday Night.
Steve: I was very lucky in that I was Jason Reitman’s first mixer on his first movie. At a certain point, he said, “That’s it, I’m going to bring you anywhere I go.” It’s the same for Eric Steelberg, his cinematographer, so we’ve all worked on all these movies together, we just know each other and work together really well. I went up to Canada for Ghostbusters: Afterlife, and Atlanta for The Front Runner and again for Saturday Night. So, he likes what he likes. He understands and he really appreciates production sound on his movies. He doesn’t like to loop anything. The interesting thing, Jason always likes his headphones hard-lined, so he gets a direct cable from us so he can listen to what we’re hearing, which is nice.
PS&V: The film took quit a while to get in production.
Steve: Jason talked to me about this movie back in 2020. The original idea was to be one big continuous shot. We weren’t going to cut, we’d roll for an hour and ten minutes, and then we would just stop and reset and do it again the next day. A lot of people told him he was kind of crazy for thinking that would be a good idea. But I had been planning to do it that way. Then about nine months before we started shooting, I heard that we’re now shooting on film, and I realized we can’t shoot continuously for that length of time. But there were going to be a lot of oners. We kind of broke it down and thought, okay, what’s the biggest scene that we have, and how many actors are in that scene? What do we need to cover? The biggest scene was thirty actors, plus some live music.
Every day it’s going to be a variation of that, but the maximum is going to be up to thirty actors, with speaking roles, and some without. However, anytime we have an actor with a number on a call sheet, they’re going to get a mic. The way that Jason likes to shoot movies is he’ll add dialog here and there, and just give somebody something to say. Or we’ll just tell the actor, hey, you’re in character, speak, talk, and if the actors are “gun-shy” they might say, “I don’t want to overlap dialog.” But we’ll tell them, you overlap, do whatever if you’re in this scene, don’t pantomime or don’t whisper your dialog, because that’s weird. People don’t do that. You just talk, and we’ll record it.
Just be natural, and we’ll record it and make sure that everybody’s covered. So that was the setup. We’re gonna have an assembly line in the morning, the actors are gonna come to us, and then they’re gonna go to props, or vice versa. We’ll have thirty actors, and Bryan Mendoza, Utility, and Michael Kaleta, Boom Operator, came up with a system where we put thirty spaces on a table for the thirty different microphones. Every day I would label, say, Track One is ‘Lorne,’ and radio mic one is ‘Lorne,’ and we’d have a little Velcro sticker on it. When they would put the radio mic on Lorne, we’d take the Velcro sticker off and put it on the table as spot one, so we would know which is Lorne’s mic.
We’d lay out all the lav mics dangling over a wardrobe rack, with all the different straps that you would need because you can’t roll them up and make them pretty every day and then take them out. Then it would just be an assembly line. Michael would start putting a mic on, Bryan would go down to the ankle, start wrapping it on the ankle, and after the first day or two, you’d figure out what every actor likes, and what they prefer. The AD’s were great, I’ve worked with them a couple different times, and we told them, please don’t bring all thirty actors to us at one time. We can do two or three at a time, and that’s it. So, bring them in batches, and then we’ll take care of them.
PS&V: How was your interaction with the costume department?
Steve: Danny Glicker was the Costume Designer, and he’s done most of Jason’s movies and, we’ve worked together for years. He knows what fabrics are noisy and what’s not. Besides, there was only one set of costumes as the film covers the two hours before the first broadcast of Saturday Night Live. We had a great wardrobe department that understood what the goal was. There wasn’t one scene in the movie where we’d question, who’s getting radio mic’d? Everybody is getting radio mic’d. There are no exceptions in this movie.
For example, Rosie’s blouse was a very silky, floppy blouse. The first day, we placed the lav on her bra, but it was kind of noisy. We thought let’s put it through the buttonhole and let’s see how that works, and then it was like magic, it worked perfectly. So, there’s always time needed to figure out what works best for what outfit.
PS&V: What lavalier mics and wireless do you use?
Steve: Everybody got DPA 6061’s. We had sixteen Sound Devices A20 minis and fourteen Lectrosonics SSM’s. The A20’s were for the first sixteen actors, and then everybody else would get the SSM’s. We were fortunate that we were on the same stage at Trilith Studios the entire time. The whole set was beautiful. It was a two-story set with a stairwell that connected to the hallways upstairs so we could do long complex and continuous shots.
When we coordinated the frequencies, that was it, they were locked in and we never had to think about it again. I had two Midas M32R consoles tied together, because even though each has thirty-two inputs, they are on two layers, and I didn’t want to have to switch between fader layers. So, I put them side-by-side, with channels 1 through sixteen in front of me, and seventeen through thirty-two on my left.
The way I see it is, you look at the sides and okay, Lorne is gonna talk first, then Rosie, then Chevy Chase, then you’d lay it out one, two, three, four. It would change every day, depending on what the scene was, but the reality is you would do that so that the first spoken lines of dialog you would know exactly where they were coming from and you could see what the camera was doing and then decide where everybody else was gonna be.
With the M32R, the actors were on the first layer of both mixers. The second layer of the second mixer was for music, ambisonics mics, surround mics, different feeds from all the live televisions. We pulled all those audio feeds so that the editor would have them. I recorded on two Sound Devices 970’s, and I think we hit fifty-eight tracks. That was when we had the musical guests playing, which Jason wanted to do live.
Jason and I have worked together for years and when we did The Front Runner, Jason wanted to shoot it with overlapping dialog.He wanted it to sound like All the President’s Men. I said let me just have everybody talk and we’ll track everybody. We got up to twenty-two microphones in a scene and we had them all talk and overlap each other. After the first day of shooting, I said I’m going to send this over to post as I wanted to make sure we’re not messing up the whole movie. Our Post Supervisor looked at it and said, yeah, this is perfect, it’s going to work great. So, we did the entire movie that way.
Later, when Bradley Cooper watched The Front Runner, he asked, “How did you guys do that? How did it sound so real? I want to do that for Maestro.” I said we just mic everybody, you have everybody talk all at once and you go for it. Bradley said, “All right, we’re going to do that for all the party scenes and all the big scenes.” When Jason saw Maestro he asked, “How’d you guys record the orchestra live? I want to do that for Saturday Night, I want to do all the music live. I said okay, sure. In the script, it says they complain about the sound quality of the band. “Hey, this sounds like crap,” and the sound engineer on camera says, “one band, one mic, that’s all you get.” So, to match the story, we ended up having to hide a ton of microphones.
PS&V: Talk about Jon Batiste as Billy Preston and the film’s score.
Steve: Jon Batiste came in with his band four weeks into shooting, so we had time to run a digital stage box and Bryan Mendoza could set up mics for the Billy Preston sequence. We had a kick drum mic in plain view but stuffed inside of a blanket. We hid DPA 4099’s, and placed mics on the café lights hanging over the set to get a wider sound. We took direct feeds from the guitars, the keyboard, and put two mics behind the Leslie speaker, and Jon sang into a Shure SM58.
We also put a DPA 5100, a 5.1 surround mic up in the rafters of our set, Studio 8H, to get more of a wide ambient sound of the entire space, to give more options for post-production.
The other interesting part of the story is that Jason said, “I want you to record the score of the movie on set.” “Well, we’ll wrap early on the week that Jon Batiste and his band is here.”
We gave them time to set up and then we came back to record. We had a headphone splitter, so everybody had on headphones in case anything changed. Jon Batiste would give us beats per minute to give them a click and then they would listen and then they would all start playing in time. Jason and his editor would come in and say, “Hey, okay, here’s a scene that we’ve already cut together. What do you think?” Jon would watch with his band and then Jon would give us a beat, let’s say 90 BPM. Then he’d just start pointing and he’d give them a rhythm or something or a note like here’s, pa pa para pa, and they would do that.
I had Noah Hubbell come in. Noah is a Local 695 member, as well a music editor. He ran Pro Tools so that everything was covered and sounded good. The whole work process was different for everybody. Noah has recorded scores. He was a huge help because it’s a lot to wrangle.
Jason would ask, “Let me hear that piece real quick,” or the next day, “Can you give me a clip of that?” When we were back shooting, Noah would be there with his headphones on preparing some downmixes and some edits and give them to Jason and the editors so they could cut picture to it.
My team and I, we came up with a good system of laying out the tracks, and where they’re going to live. It just kind of flowed, and because the script was so good, it flowed nice. When the script is well written, the dialog flows and it all makes sense, and your mix is easy. The entire experience was a lot of fun.
