Midnight Mass interview: The sounds of Crockett Island with supervising sound editor Jonathan Wales

1428 Elm: I tell people before you watch a Flanagan film, make sure you have a box of tissues at hand. When you’re working with sound, how do you manage that mixture of horror and emotion?

Jonathan: It’s actually really tough. One of the overriding things is to try to stay out of the way of really great actors giving amazing performances. It’s very important not to do anything to take away from that. I think one of the key things we keep coming back to is that we need to be honest about what we’re doing. So, we try to stay away from artificially hyping, or artificially doing things that are not important to the scene, or to the emotion of what’s going on.

Sound itself is a storytelling component, so where it’s necessary for us to do something to help tell the story, then we want to do that. But we need to do it in a way that is a contributing element, and we need to do it so when you watch it, what you get is the emotion of the story. It’s not the goal that you want people to go, Wow, the sound there was really cool, or the music was really cool. What’s necessary is that you come away with an emotional response to the story.

And I think that’s one of the most important things that we try to do, is stay honest to the story telling. You know, wherever possible, I hope you can’t tell what I did.

1428 Elm: and sound can definitely play a part in those emotions. I mean, it’s emotional just hearing those hymns sometimes.

Jonathan: As humans, we’re very easily manipulated emotionally like that, and we spent a long time sort of working on the balance of, is the music helping, or is the music pushing too hard? Are we going over the top?

All of those things are very important. Mike and Trevor and myself, and Trevor Gates, and The Newton Brothers are constantly changing this stuff. We will go through several iterations usually of what the music will be, how the music will interact, and it’s an open playing field to try and work between us as a team to figure out we get to the place we’re getting to.

The good thing is, Mike Flanagan is incredibly specific as a filmmaker, he knows exactly what he likes. His vision is always in his head, and we are always trying to help enhance that so that everybody can really enjoy it and learn from it.

1428 Elm: When we’re talking about sound, specifically about Midnight Mass…it’s set on a somewhat isolated island, so you’ve got all of these background sounds that maybe most people don’t think about. You’ve got the waves, sea gulls, and all of this. What challenges does that type of setting present for you?

Jonathan: Well, there are two big issues; one of them is the geography of the island, so we actually had a map. Mike Flanagan drew up a map, and it was like: here’s where this house is, here’s where the ocean is, here’s where the church is, because it was very important that we didn’t end up with, “Oh, there’s just seagulls everywhere and you can always hear the ocean.”

There are places on the island where you don’t hear the ocean. And Riley’s house is right next to the beach, so you do hear the ocean there. That was very, very specific how we did that. And then in the church we barely hear any sounds from outside the church.

Honestly, we started with a lot more stuff in the background, because we’re sound people. One of the things Mike had to remind us was this island is dying, people are leaving. There’s nothing good here. Nobody moves to the island, people only leave it, and that was one of the key things, trying to make it really feel like…for instance, in the downtown area (if you call it that), we had more people and more life, and we had to get rid of that. It had to feel like it was not a sort of happening place.

So, the backgrounds are really very important, it’s very important to set the backdrop, because there’s no sounds we get off the recordings from the actors in terms of background, so the waves, winds, birds…everything is all 100% chosen, and 100% put in to create this feeling on the island.