Have you noticed it’s become more difficult to understand movie dialogue over the past few years?
Do you have to turn on subtitles when you're watching something at home to catch every line?
You're not alone. Here's what's going on, and a few ways it might get fixed.
I don’t have hearing loss, but lately I’ve relied more and more on subtitles to make
sure I don’t miss any lines of dialogue that are crucial to the plot. Knowing I'm not alone
in having these experiences, I reached out to several professional sound editors, designers,
and mixers, many of whom have won Oscars for their work on some of Hollywood's biggest films,
to understand why this is happening. One person refused to talk to me, saying it
would be "professional suicide" to address this topic on the record. Another agreed to talk,
but only under the condition that they remain anonymous. But several others spoke openly about
the topic, and it turns out there isn’t just one culprit – it’s a multi-faceted situation.
Mark Mangini, the Academy Award-winning sound designer behind movies like “Mad Max:
Fury Road” and “Blade Runner 2049,” says there are multiple root causes at play here.
"It's really a gumbo, an accumulation of problems that have been exacerbated over
the last 10 years ... that's kind of this time span where all of us in the filmmaking
community are noticing that dialogue is harder and harder to understand."
"I can't hear you."
Let’s sort through that so-called "gumbo" and pinpoint some of the most prominent causes.
When it comes to dialogue unintelligibility in movies,
one name looms above all others: Christopher Nolan. The director of "Tenet," "Interstellar,"
and "The Dark Knight Rises" is one of the most successful filmmakers of his generation,
and he uses his power to make sure his films push the boundaries of sound design, often
resulting in scenes in which audiences literally cannot understand what his characters say.
“Take them up to the surface. People of their
status deserve to experience the next era of Western civilization.”
And it's not just audiences who have trouble with some Nolan films: the director has even revealed
that other filmmakers have reached out to him to complain about this issue in his movies.
Donald Sylvester, who won an Oscar for his work on "Ford v Ferrari" and is currently serving as the
supervising sound editor of "Indiana Jones 5," says Nolan is a singular figure in this regard.
"I think Christopher Nolan wears it as a badge of honor. I don't think he cares.
I think he wants people to give him bad publicity because then he can explain his
methods to everybody and we can all learn. But I don't think other people actually understand it."
Oscar-winner Jaime Baksht, whose credits include
“Sound of Metal” and “Roma,” thinks the complaints about Nolan's work,
specifically about unintelligibility in the twisty action thriller "Tenet," are overblown.
"I think in the case of Mr. Nolan, with ["Tenet"], the characters have a mask,
and he wants to keep the original sound because I think for him it's more real."
“Each generation looks out for its own survival.”
“That’s exactly what they’re doing.”
Presumably that mentality also extends to "The Dark Knight Rises,"
in which Bane's mask muffled a significant percentage of that character's lines.
Speaking of Bane, let’s talk about Reason Number Two…
One of Nolan’s frequent collaborators is Tom Hardy, who has developed a delivery
style that is often so indecipherable it's as if he's purposefully challenging
audiences to lean in and understand what he's saying. Hardy is an extreme example,
but what about actors who aren't quite on that level of unintelligibility? Thomas Curley,
a production sound mixer who won an Oscar for “Whiplash” and has also worked on
“Yellowstone” and “The Spectacular Now,” has encountered this issue several times.
"It seems to be a little bit of a fad with some actors to do the sort of soft delivery or
under your breath delivery of some lines. That's a personal choice for them.
Our job is to record it as well as we can regardless."
"Say your line exactly as I'm about to. Just as I'm about to do."
"Sure, okay."
"Would that it were so simple."
Mangini points out that in the old days, "you could count on an actor's theatricality
to deliver a line to the back seats." But acting styles have changed so dramatically
over the years that it has become much more difficult to capture great sound on the set.
He says things get tougher when actors adopt that more naturalistic style.
“It's even harder for the production sound mixer to capture really quality sound.
Now we get those compromised microphone positions here in post-production, reaching for a dialogue
line that is barely intelligible or maybe even mumbled because it's an acting style, and already,
we're behind the 8-ball in trying to figure out a way to make all of those words intelligible."
Karen Baker Landers, whose credits include "Gladiator,"
"Skyfall," and "Heat," among many others, has her own term for it.
"Mumbling, breathy, I call it self-conscious type of acting, is so frustrating. I would say
a lot of the younger actors have adopted that style. I think the onus [OH-nuss] also falls
on the directors to say, 'I can't understand a word you're saying. I'm listening to dailies,
and I can't understand.' No amount of volume is going to fix that."
"Was that alright with the mutterings? It felt a little--"
"No, no, no, it's fine."
Editors can try to surgically manipulate lines of dialogue to
make them easier to understand, but they can only do so much.
Another ingredient in this complicated gumbo is
how the sound team is treated during the process of filming. According to Mangini:
"What we see from our brothers and sisters in production is a never-ending [complaint]
that they don't get the respect they need to get the microphone where it needs to be
to capture the sound clearly. That's because as movies have matured in the last 15 years,
movies have become more visually exciting. And because of that, it is less likely that you're
going to be allowed to put that boom mic right where the actor is, because it's probably going
to drop a shadow because it's in front of a light that the camera team insists has to exist to get
the perfect look of the shot. So [the visuals have] taken precedence over what we hear."
Sylvester agrees with that sentiment.
"If the sound guy goes, 'Can you get one more take for me?' they go, 'Nope, we're wrapping.
We've gotta move on to another setup.' It's because pictures are the most important thing,
and we do a good job fixing sound at the end of the day. So they go, 'We'll fix it in
post.' And we do, unfortunately. But it's not because we want to. It's because we have to."
Another Oscar winner, Craig Mann,
acknowledges that less time on set can have a negative effect on the sound crews.
"There's more demand on crews to do many setups a day, and that could be a contributing factor. The
production sound guy is the tip of the spear in terms of our first line of defense, and oftentimes
if there are problems, the good ones will approach the director or the AD or the DP and say, 'Hey,
this isn't working, you're going to miss this.' Oftentimes it gets handled. But on the other side,
sometimes there are a lot of production sound guys that do not feel empowered or have had a
bad experience about speaking up in the past, or whatever the reason is, and the material gets back
to the cutting room and it's a mess, and [they say], 'Well, we thought everything was fine!'"
When I raise this subject with Karen Baker Landers,
she agrees that the demand on crews is getting out of control.
"I would blame it more on schedule and budget and maybe trying to rush. It's an art form to
be a dialogue editor. It's an art form to be a great production recordist. Then to
be able to get the clarity of dialogue in a mix with everything else going on and have
the dialogue feel natural and not forced is another art form, all of which take time.
Budgets and schedules are crunched on a lot of projects, and some of these are amazing films."
Thomas Curley indicates that the evolution of technology
is a factor in not being able to clearly understand movie dialogue.
"A lot of it has probably happened more recently because of the almost ubiquitous
use of digital audio and digital cinema now … When everything was shot on film and edited with tape,
it was a much more laborious process and it was much more technically challenging to do a whole
lot with sound design. Everything had to be a very conscious choice and a very intentional
soundscape that they create. Since it was so cost-intensive and labor-intensive, they wanted
to make sure that the story got across first and emotion gets sort of directed with music,
and that's about it. And every pass that you do with an analogue system depletes the
quality as well: it's like making a photocopy of a photocopy. But now, they have much faster
turnarounds and much more capabilities as far as what they can do with the sound design,
including playing around with ambience and sound effects.”
In other words, as technology has grown more advanced, the sheer amount of options directors
have at their disposal has skyrocketed – and sometimes, those options can result in a mix
that’s jam-packed with hundreds of tracks competing for the audience’s attention.
Curley sums up this phenomenon by referencing one of Jeff Goldblum’s most famous movie lines:
"It might fall into the realm of the 'Jurassic Park' thing:
they spend so much time realizing that they can do all these things,
but not thinking about if they should do all these things."
All of the factors we’ve discussed so far are the result of decisions made on sets.
But later, when editors and mixers work with that footage day after day in post-production,
another element can set in. Donald Sylvester
refers to it as “familiarity,” and Mark Mangini describes it like this:
"By the time you get to post, every single syllable is known by heart.
So imagine what that creates in a sound mix where we're supposed to correct the dialogue.
We're no longer critically listening like we should be. Because we're in fact zoning out
on whether or not the audience is actually getting the critical information they need.
We know what the critical information is: we've been dealing with it for months. So in a sense,
we have to challenge ourselves daily – and we certainly do this in sound – to
try to remove ourselves from that equation and re-inject ourselves with a fresh perspective
to see if we're actually making clear dialogue such that the audience understands it."
In Craig Mann's experience, though,
the idea of familiarity is not a widespread issue. He tells me,
"As someone that does this on a daily basis,
I think dialogue clarity is the number one priority on the mixing stage. Dialogue,
music, and effects, in that order, is usually the chain of priority. If you can't hear the dialogue,
we're going to find a way to hear it. So I don't necessarily agree with getting numb to it.
I think it's incumbent upon us to have that fresh ear every time we show up."
Interestingly, Sylvester also points out that unfamiliarity may be an issue in some instances.
"What I'm wondering is if sometimes, some of these films that we see,
people are saying words that we don't know what they mean – such as 'Dune,'
where they start talking about characters and places that sound unfamiliar. They do
it in such a way, offhandedly, where it's like, 'What did he say?' Some of it is the content."
One of the most fascinating things I learned when speaking with these folks
is the gulf in quality that can sometimes occur between what a film sounds like in
the mixing stages and what it can sound like when it plays in a multiplex. Mann
says this isn't a new problem — it's actually been happening for decades:
"You mix it at your level in the mixing room, and theoretically, that is supposed to be the
same level that is represented in the movie theaters on the Dolby Cinema processors,
therefore giving you an exact translation, more or less, of what you've done on the mixing stage.”
But when directors and editors were mixing movies at outrageous volumes,
particularly in the 1990s, theaters took things into their own hands.
“What would happen is, [ultra loud mixes] would get to the theater,
there would be complaints from the patrons, and the theater would be compelled to turn
down the mix. And when the next feature came in the next week, the level was never reset,
and now that level is playing way low for the regularly mixed movie. That's a problem that
vendors have been dealing with for many years. I know [it's still happening]. For example,
the Landmark Theater chain does not play their theaters above 5.5 on the cinema processor,
where the set standard is supposed to be 7 on that processor.”
The idea that a significant theater chain would purposefully ignore
industry standards for something as crucial as sound is genuinely shocking.
I reached out to Landmark's customer service and asked them directly about this issue,
but they have not responded as of the making of this video.
Meanwhile, Baker Landers thinks part of the trouble may have begun when theaters
shifted away from projecting movies on film. In that transition, union projectionists — the
people who knew the ins and outs of how to properly present a movie with care — were
largely replaced with inexperienced employees who essentially pressed play on a digital system.
She tells me a story about how she went to see one of her own movies at a big multiplex
and the auditory experience was so bad, she was compelled to point it out to the manager.
"I did a film that was [played] at a 4 [out of 7 on the processor scale]. I was at a matinee with
a lot of elderly people because I took my mom, and I'm like, 'None of these people can hear
what's happening.' The manager, who was probably all of 22 years old, said, 'Well, that's how
the film was done.' And I said, 'No, I did the sound on the film. That's not how it was done.'"
When sound pros encounter those dumbfounding levels of separation between the mixing stages
and theaters, Mann says a schism can form about the best way to move forward:
"You're going to have some people on the mixing stage who want to turn [up that volume
higher than the standard of 7] to compensate for the fact that theaters are playing it low.
But [if you do that,] when you go to those theaters that are calibrated correctly,
you're going to blow the doors off that theater because it's going to be ripping loud."
Baker Landers explains that she and her peers do the best they can
and cross their fingers that the rest of the world will do the same.
"We mix and release the film for the best case scenario, saying, 'This is how it should be.'
A lot of times, we'll hear people say, 'They're not going to be able to hear
this in certain theaters in the Midwest, so should we do this louder?' But then you don't
have a standard any longer. You have to say, 'This is the standard. We're doing it for the
optimum viewing experience.' And hopefully theaters and everyone else rise to that."
Mixing sound for theaters can be tough, but mixing sound specifically for streaming has
its own set of challenges. A big one is compression. In layman's terms,
think of compression as audio files basically being shrunk down in order to be efficiently
transported across the Internet to your viewing device. The problem is, those shrunken files are
of significantly lower quality than what you'd get if you watched that same movie on a Blu-ray.
"Do you understand the words that are coming out of my mouth?"
Compression is inescapable when streaming is involved,
but it turns out not all streaming platforms are created equal.
Craig Mann reveals something he says is not well-known outside the sound community:
different streamers have different specifications when it comes to their audio mixes.
"Netflix has excellent specs in terms of dialogue norm and overall levels.
They need a particular level in order to pass quality control, and the level is
essentially based on the dialogue level throughout the length of the program."
But since there's no industry standard in how to measure audio for streaming,
other platforms base their levels on other parts of the sound mix.
Case in point: Mann worked on Joe Carnahan's "Boss Level," which was originally meant to
be a theatrical release before it ultimately debuted on Hulu instead.
“When we got a look at that spec, they require it to be based on the overall [volume] of the film,
not on the dialogue level of the film. Consequently,
that's a big action movie with shooting and cars and big music,
and the result of that is that you have a much more squashed up, un-impactful mix."
There is yet another important variable in this sprawling equation, and it might be the
most important one of all: the home theater experience. As Karen Baker Landers says:
"Ultimately, the historical record of the film will not be seen in theaters, it will be what you
see in your home theater. That's how most people see certain products. So you want it to be great."
For audio mixers, the theatrical mix comes first, followed by a streaming mix. Then, a stereo mix
will often be created, funneling the full scope of the sound mix through just two simple speakers
in a process Donald Sylvester likens to "taking a beautiful steak and dragging it through the dirt."
"A lot of people watch it on their flatscreen with their sound bar
and they think it's going to be an improved sound situation, but it may not translate.
Some TVs take the 5.1 [surround sound mix] and they turn it into a stereo.
They have algorithms inside the TV. It's not even our mix. We don't even know what it sounds like."
Complicating matters even further is the unfortunate fact that not every filmmaker
knows that you have to rebalance your film so it plays differently
on a home theater. Baker Landers lays out why this is not ideal.
“If you've mixed this for spread in a theater and you just do a simple transfer with some kid
at night who doesn't know what they're doing, who didn't [work on] the movie [originally],
there's a huge problem with that. I think that problem needs to be addressed.
People who aren't in the industry complain to me all the time: 'Why can't I understand
the dialogue? Why am I always riding the levels? The music comes in huge.'"
Craig Mann tells me most modern movies are required to create a separate mix for home video,
but there is still the occasional film which decides to skip that step in the process.
“If you're really having to ride the volume around a lot,
chances are they didn't have a home theater mix on that.”
Now that we know the key issues contributing to this lack of understanding dialogue,
what can be done to make things more intelligible? From the sound of it,
this problem is going to require a multi-pronged approach.
Thomas Curley suggests one prong could involve educating people about the importance of sound,
from studio execs to the filmmakers themselves.
"There's a lot of people who don't prioritize sound. They know that they need to have it,
but they don't necessarily think about it in a very creative way
and don't really like to bother with it much."
Baker Landers agrees.
"Sound is still a mystery to a lot of people. It's intangible. With picture,
you see it. You understand."
Ironically, that lack of understanding of how sound works trickles down to audiences literally
not being able to understand what characters are saying on screen. Perhaps if the processes
of capturing, creating, and shaping great sound were better understood throughout the industry,
substantial steps to improving those processes could be implemented.
Another prong involves sound professionals consistently finding ways to raise their game.
That means thinking outside the box and staying vigilant about the ways the
average person is watching a movie. Donald Sylvester says it’s all about brain power:
"What can we do technically? I think it's our brain that's the technical solution to this.
Because all these gadgets and tools that we use to plug into this are just tools to
make the storytelling clearer or better or more exciting. They're just components. At
the end of the day, you still have to have a brain telling you what needs to be heard,
and when and how ... I think the solution is brain power and being aware of what we're
losing in these new presentation environments that people are watching these films in."
The third and final prong involves having tough conversations on the set
which establish priorities and make sure everyone is on the same page.
Mangini told me a story that illustrated how having a potentially awkward conversation can
result in a change that has a notable improvement on the final product.
After working with the same director for four movies and not getting great sound,
when they teamed up for the fifth time, he finally gathered the courage to pull the filmmaker aside.
“[I said] 'Dude, you keep telling me dialogue is king in your movies,
but you don't put your money where your mouth is. This film, here's what you're going to do:
you're going to call a department heads meeting, introduce your sound mixer, and you're going to
say, 'See this individual? You have to listen to what he asks you to do, or you're going to
answer to me.'' And you know what? We got the best track we've ever got … It takes an infinitesimal
amount of extra effort to get us close to what we need, but it takes somebody with authority to
make it happen. Me as the sound designer, I'm not a loud enough voice. But a director is."
Sylvester offers an optimistic closing thought which underlines that point.
"There's a lot of people who are moviemakers who aren't technicians,
so they don't really understand a lot of this. They just like to make movies.
But if we explain to them how we're not getting the message out properly
and people aren't getting the message, maybe the artists themselves will take steps to fix it."
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