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NESSA JOHNSTON The Magic of the Space: An interview with Niall Brady and Steve Fanagan about Room (2015) [This is a pre-copy edited version of an article accepted for publication in The New Soundtrack following peer review. The definitive publisher-authenticated version is available through Edinburgh University Press.] ABSTRACT This article discusses Niall Brady and Steve Fanagan’s post-production sound work on Room (Abrahamson 2015), focusing on their working methods and collaborative approach with each other, director Lenny Abrahamson and editor Nathan Nugent. The film takes a striking approach to post-production sound design, relying heavily on sound to build a credible narrative world, despite the first half of the film being set in an extremely confined and soundproofed space. KEYWORDS sound design sound post-production sound practice Irish film industry silence Room Lenny Abrahamson Steve Fanagan and Niall Brady are based at ScreenScene and Ardmore Sound, leading post-production facilities in Dublin and a key part of the small but now thriving Irish film industry. Room is their third collaboration with director Lenny Abrahamson, previously working together on Frank (2014) and What Richard Did (2012). An Irish-Canadian co-production, Room has won multiple awards and nominations, including an Oscar nomination for Best Picture, and an MPSE (Motion 1 Picture Sound Editors) USA nomination for Best Sound Editing (Dialogue and ADR). Room tells the story of five-year-old Jack (Jacob Tremblay) and his mother, Ma (Brie Larson), from Jack’s point of view. Imprisoned together in a soundproofed shed by their captor, Old Nick (Sean Bridgers), Ma hatches a desperate plan for her and Jack’s escape after years of confinement. Having been born in captivity, Jack is initially unaware of the world outside Room – for Jack, Room is a world of fantastical possibility rather than grim confinement. Their escape means that Jack must learn to cope with a much bigger, brighter and louder world, readjusting his senses accordingly. This interview piece discusses the working process and creative approach that enabled Brady and Fanagan to craft Room’s vivid sound world. As part of a relatively small production, both took on multiple roles, with Fanagan as sound designer, sound effects editor and re-recording mixer, and with Brady as dialogue editor, ADR supervisor and supervising sound editor. This interview is abridged from several interviews carried out by Nessa Johnston at ScreenScene in Dublin and via Skype in early 2016. Nessa Johnston: Tell me about the process of working on Room. At what point did you come into it? Steve Fanagan: It was clear around the time we were working on Frank that Room was going to happen. Those conversations are very informal, but begin quite early on, and so we were thinking about it and talking about Room before they shot it. Because we had started to talk about it before they went and shot, we began to build a sound library for them [director Lenny Abrahamson and editor Nathan Nugent], as we knew that the Room space itself would be a weird challenge for them in offline. As they edited they were going to need sounds, just simple room tones, but they had to be room tones that were neutral because it's a soundproof space. We needed to try and piece together a library of almost still airs that had different characteristics and different pitches and tones to them. By the time they were heading away for the shoot, they had this collection of hundreds of gigabytes of sound to start thinking about. Niall Brady: Myself and Steve work quite closely together. Steve made recordings around his house, I recorded things in my own house – it was just about recording some source material, some textured material that might be an ingredient in the film. 2 We know there’s going to be a room space and it’s not going to be like any space we’ve recorded before. There are no sound effects libraries on the shelves that say: ‘this is the Room sound!’ so you start by just gathering things. SF: We also figured there’d be little details like air con and different hums and ticks, cistern filling – little environmental sounds that might become useful. I think one of the big challenges with Room is that the first half of the film is in that space, but time passes. There are time cuts, but you’re in the same day, it’s just later in the day, and a really simple way to illustrate that is in the room tone change, in the sound. NJ: It’s really interesting that the sounds you started with were basically silences. SF: Working at the studio you have access to a lot of dead spaces like ADR booths and mix theatres, so that was really a starting point. What does this room sound like that’s supposed to be dead? And of course, silence doesn’t really exist, it’s just the absence of modulating sound like a car by or a siren in the distance, but there’s a tone. At different times of day there are different tones, and if you turn the air-con off or turn it on, it changes, or if you turn some machine on it hums. It became this cool exploration of that sort of sound. Niall was doing the same – he got some really cool stuff up in his attic, because that’s where his water tank is, so he captured that fizzle. It’s almost silent. He was recording things in the middle of the night to make sure the outside wasn’t getting in. NB: I’ve an attic space, so I went in under the eaves and recorded there. We have a central cupboard that serves as the flue for the gas that has a closed door and something that ticks inside it, so I recorded that. I don’t know if those things ended up in the film but they become textures. So Nathan had something to cut with at the start of the edit. SF: We became quite mildly obsessed with finding little spaces where we could get these almost ‘nothing’ airs. They’re actually really characterful. And when you combine several of them to make a scene, suddenly you have these nice little, almost musical, sounds. When played together there’s suddenly quite a bit of character and depth to them. Room had to be that – it had to be a dead space. Yet, within that dead 3 space, there’s so much character, both visually and personality-wise, that some of what those airs should be immediately became obvious as we started watching it. We wanted a sense when Old Nick visits that some of the outside world would get in for the briefest moment and it feels different. Once he’s in, everything has to feel more oppressive, and again tonally, with air, with very subtle use of EQ, you can make it feel that way, without playing the Jaws music! You’re trying to figure out a very subconscious way of saying something’s not right here. Or the world has suddenly become more claustrophobic. When Old Nick comes in, the magic of the space goes away. Jack is stuck in the closet, we’re often stuck in the closet watching as Jack watches – we suddenly end up in this much more confined space. And it’s the one time that Room feels small, I think. All that was playing on our minds as we collected these sounds and then figured out what to do with them. Another thing that we did in all those spaces – those dead spaces – was record impulse responses, so that we could then build reverbs. We used Altiverb to create reverbs from these bespoke IRs. Again, we were looking for that sound that’s a dead space, but it’s not nothing, it’s something; it has to have a character. NJ: You worked on the sound for Room in pre-production and then in post- production. SF: Because they shot in Canada for several months the next conversations we had about it were when they completed filming and were beginning to get into the edit proper, their first pass on it. A few weeks after that I began to work on the sound; it was probably the earliest I’ve started to work on a film in post proper. When Niall and I work together he tends to work on the dialogue and ADR and he’s the supervising sound editor; I look after the effects, the Foley and the sound design. I also mix, and there’s another of our colleagues that mixed with me, Ken (Galvin), who I mixed Frank and Room with. In the weeks that followed, they had their first screening coming up for financiers and invested parties and decided that they wanted to do some sort of simple but effective 5.1 temp mix. So Niall and I spent about five days just prepping that, cleaning things up a little bit, doing very surface work, working with the effects that Nathan had been cutting, cleaning up the dialogue and then doing a one-day mix. 4 NB: We spent a bit of time cutting the scenes in the police car and in the hospital because they were technically problematic. They had to roll down the windows in the police car because there was condensation building up, and as a result there was this wind blowing across the microphones, so we spent a lot of time with those scenes early on.

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