Courtesy of Netflix
PS&V: You did two very different projects, Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F and Captain America: Brave New World. But first tell me about working with Eddie Murphy.
Willie Burton: It’s always nice to work with Eddie. I’ve done four or five films with him, so it’s like a family getting together again, and it was a nice project to work on. I had my ace team, Douglas Shamburger and Adam Mohundro, which makes my life a lot easier. I get to sit back a little bit more and let them do their thing.
I’ve worked with Eddie enough that we have to be prepared to boom a lot. He does not like wireless microphones, especially if he knows you can use the boom. So, if you just put a mic on him, just to put a mic on him, he’ll say, no. You use the boom for the shot. What we try to do is anticipate. Fortunately, he wore a jacket the majority of the time. So we wired the jacket.
We get the jacket, put the transmitter in, and the microphone under the collar. It’s all nice and clean. No clothes rustle. All that good stuff. But then he’s wears another jacket, and we wire that okay, he’s got two jackets wired. We’re fine. Then Fetteroff Colen, Eddie’s personal costumer, comes to the set with another jacket. Now there’s three jackets. Wait a minute, where’s the other two? Well, he left them in the dressing room.
Now we have to send somebody back to the dressing room. In the meantime, Eddie comes to the set, ready to work, ready to roll. So you have to be ready. We wire a third jacket. Okay, we’ve got it covered, right? Well, then a fourth jacket shows up. I mean, there were a half a dozen jackets. We needed to wire as many jackets as we can with Eddie because when it’s a cut and print, Eddie wants the wire off of him. He just doesn’t want to be bothered.
In the driving shots, we planted mics in the cars and we put mics on the actors. We do everything to make it work. On Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F, there were challenges here and there just like in every movie, but it’s not the most difficult thing in the world to work on a movie like this. It was a fun film to work on and the majority of the film was shot in LA, so being home was really nice.
PS&V: How do you prep for a show?
WB: The most important thing for me is to read the script to figure out if there are any difficult scenes for sound or are there scenes with a large number of wires or scenes in the water or is there playback music and if there is, will there be live singing or is it going to be just playback or combination live and playback?
I look for all those things as I break the script down. Will I need additional sound equipment? Once I do that, then I’m pretty much ready to go, except scouting locations. I like to scout location to see if we are going have any problems with certain locations or will the generator be parked too close to set or are there air conditioners or kitchen refrigerators on. Anything that will impact the sound recording.
During production, my whole team and I watch rehearsals, and then we figure out how we are going to do it. That’s it. I don’t go home and think about the next day, I just like to be surprised on what’s going to happen in each shooting day. That’s how I approach it.
PS&V: Let’s move on to Captain America: Brave New World.
WB: We shot in Atlanta, at Trilith Studios, and Washington, DC. Once again, we had a good cast, and the most important thing for sound is that you have the cooperation of the Director, Julius Onah, and the cast, Anthony Mackie, Harrison Ford, and Danny Ramirez, to name a few, who care about sound and give you a little bit of time to make adjustments and do the things that you need. Work in general on film sets is always a rush, and sound is the last department they want to wait on.
There was quite a bit of green screen and visual effects. We wired Captain Marvel’s costume ahead of time. My team works with wardrobe on the best way to mount the microphone in the costume, which was a little bit of a challenge.
We need to get quality sound, and the cast and the director do not want to loop (ADR). So, that gives us a better shot at it. When you have the cooperation from everyone involved, it makes our job so much easier. Especially wardrobe, they were always very helpful, as well as set props.
PS&V: Did you need to “paint out” wires or the booms?
WB: We didn’t have to paint out wires on the actors, but we painted out the booms a lot. We put the boom in and we would check with visual effects and we let them know that we really need to boom this shot as there’s so much going on. There are lots of special effects and mechanical noises that we needed the booms to be right there to get great sound, plus they have wires on as well. The visual effects team were very professional, and they know that they’re painting out so many other things anyway that to paint out a microphone is not a big deal. They had to paint out lots of stuff. I had Adam Mohundro on boom (Doug Shamburger wasn’t with me). We had Jennifer Elsinger as a local Utility Sound Technician, and Adam worked out nicely.
PS&V: After so many films, do you still get nervous?
WB: As a Sound Mixer, I think the most important thing is just to be prepared. We know what we have to do, you just need to prep, and make sure you’re ready to go. My biggest fear, more than anything when I start a project, is that something will happen to the equipment, and it doesn’t work on the first day. But other than that, I’m fine, people ask me, “Are you nervous? Are you nervous the first day?” No, I’m not nervous the first day. I’m more concerned about if my equipment works, and I’ll get through the day. Once you get the first scene in the can, then you’re cool. It’s okay, everything is working, the mics are all working.
God forbid you go into some location where the wires are not working well. You’ve got a four- or five-page dialog sequence and you’re beating your head against the wall. When I see the first day on the call sheet, I say, “Let’s hope it’s not the biggest scene of the movie.” Let’s hope it just starts gradually and eases into it, and majority of the time, that’s how it works.