Production sound mixer Steve Morrow, who’s a key part of the team up for an Academy Award for Best Sound for their work on the Netflix film Maestro that focuses on the life of conductor/composer Leonard Bernstein and his relationship with his wife Felicia Montealegre, employed Lectrosonics SSM transmitters and Venue2 modular receiver racks for actors, HMa plug-on transmitters for booms, LT transmitters paired with a DSQD digital receiver for communications, and Wireless Designer software for frequency coordination.
Morrow, whose credits also include La La Land, A Star Is Born, and Ford v. Ferrari, had two challenging types of source to capture — a large cast offering overlapping, rapid-fire dialogue, and an orchestral and choral music recorded in real time on set. Maestro director and star Bradley Cooper praises Morrow in a clip viewable on the film’s Facebook page, saying, “I love overlapping dialogue. Steve Morrow, the sound mixer, has a way of miking everybody and mixing it in the moment.”
Often, a great many actors are talking at once, such as in a pivotal party scene (beginning at 47:40) where the camera moves through various parties’ conversations. “For those kinds of scenes, we had 18 to 20 channels going including the SSMs on the actors, a couple of booms overhead, and some plant mics,” explains Morrow. “Then in post-production, the mixers spaced those out across surround channels, so watching the film you feel like you’re in the middle of the party as opposed to all the dialogue having that center-channel feel. It’s a very Robert Altman-esque style, but I’d say now the difference is that the technology has caught up with the idea that it can be narratively powerful to have, say, 20 people talking at once. Thanks in part to Lectro’s performance, the feedback from post was that the tracks were perfect.”
Maestro is as densely filled with music as it is with dialogue, culminating in a recreation of Bernstein conducting Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony at Ely Cathedral in 1973. “The London Symphony Orchestra brought in their recording team called Classic Sound. For our part, we brought a quadrophonic mic and a surround mic. As to wireless, we had an SSM on Bradley, an SSM on each of the main opera singers, a boom, and a pair of [HMa] plug-ons for a mid-side stereo mic that tracked with the camera. We recorded all the music performances live — the one with the choir, the one towards the end where he’s teaching students, all of it.”
He also points to Wireless Designer as being key to juggling the high number of live frequencies in use at the same time: “It worked perfectly. You just show up in the morning and scan, then start popping things on.”
Throughout production, Cooper was devoted to musical authenticity and channeling Bernstein’s expansive personality, so Morrow was pleased to deliver audio that reproduced both music and dialogue.
“Both exceeded all expectations,” he concludes. “When I watched the movie for the first time, I was amazed. I asked Bradley Cooper, ‘What did you have to ADR or re-record?’ He said, ‘Nothing. It’s all production. It’s all original.’ That’s a testament to how well Lectrosonics works and how good it sounds.”
