Sound designer, editor and mixer Ren Klyce is a seven-time Oscar nominee, five of those nods coming for David Fincher movies–Fight Club in 2000, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button in 2009, The Social Network in 2011 and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo for both sound mixing and sound editing in 2012. (Klyce’s other two noms are for Star Wars: Episode VIII–The Last Jedi for sound editing and mixing in 2018.)
Now Klyce is again in the awards season conversation for Fincher’s Mank (Netflix) which centers on screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz (portrayed by Gary Oldman) as he races to finish director Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane on a tight timetable, secluded in a bungalow in a desert town miles removed from Los Angeles as he recuperates from a car accident in 1940. Attending to him are his secretary Rita (Lily Collins) and his German nurse (Monika Grossmann).
In the process, through Mankiewicz’s worldview–marked by his abiding social conscience and wit, at times caustic–we are introduced to not only Hollywood but life in the 1930s, ranging from the grandeur of Hearst Castle and high society to the struggle of the rank and file during the Great Depression. We also become privy to Mankiewicz’s own inner struggles with alcoholism, as well as a professional battle with Welles (played by Tom Burke) over screen credit for what became the classic Citizen Kane. The Mank cast also includes Charles Dance (as William Randolph Hearst), Amanda Seyfried (as Marion Davies, Hearst’s wife), Tuppence Middleton (as Sara Mankiewicz, Herman’s wife), Arliss Howard (as Louis B. Mayer), Sam Troughton (as John Houseman), Tom Pelphrey (as Joe Mankiewicz, Herman’s brother), Toby Leonard Moore (as David O. Selznick) and Ferdinand Kinsley (as Irving Thalberg).
For Klyce, Mank posed layers of challenges on top of the conventional goal of having the soundtrack support the story. “We hear all the dialogue, feel the motion of the music, get a sense of surroundings and characters through sound design. It helps us to connect with the characters,” Klyce explained.
But beyond that, Klyce noted that Fincher wanted this work to have its own distinct sound with the film being vintage black and white both visually and sonically. “He wanted the film to sound as it was coming from the 1930s era,” related Klyce.
“Even more interesting,” continued Klyce, it wasn’t enough to capture that old fashioned movie sound in the mix. He said that Fincher “then wanted the audience to feel that they were watching this old black-and-white movie inside an old-fashioned movie theater back in the 1930s.
First off, getting a 1930s’ feel to the sound entailed much research including looking into how soundtracks were made back then. “Cameras had beautiful lenses, the technique of printing images was sophisticated,” said Klyce. “The sound portion wasn’t as sophisticated. It took many years for sound to catch up with visuals. You had limited dynamic range, limited frequency range, There was noise.”
It all came back to Fincher wanting Mank to play like an old film rather than a new film chronicling something that was old. Klyce said that Fincher’s goal was for “the audience to feel that this film was actually made in the 1930s and found in some archives, dusted off and played.” Thus he didn’t want it to be digital sounding but rather “largely mono, scratchy, noisy, gritty, dirty.”
For Klyce, a prime challenge became having a film lasting more than two hours play “without having the audience exhausted by dated sound.” He described his task as having to “walk a fine line between it being too distressed, too aged versus too clean.”
Ironically from an audio standpoint, Klyce noted that Mank had been “on the backburner of his (Fincher’s) wish list” for some 20-plus years. Based on a script written by Fincher’s father, Jack Fincher, in the 1990s (Jack Fincher passed away in 2003), Mank if it had been made around the time of its conception would have had an optical soundtrack, which would have been more akin to how a film was made in the 1930s. But the long wait for the film to come to fruition placed it during a time when digital audio is the norm, making it that much more challenging to create sound as it used to exist.
As for the movie theater experience of the 1930s, Klyce described it in part as hearing dialogue from the screen bouncing off the backwall and creating an echo. Klyce and his team experimented with digital reverb, contemplating the deployment of impulse response technology and creating an inverse algorithm. They also explored recording in a historic movie palace like the Grand Lake Theatre in Oakland, Calif., trying to replicate the experiential sound of yesteryear but outside traffic noise and other control factors within earshot of the venue got in the way.
The venue that proved viable was the scoring stage at George Lucas’ Skywalker Ranch. “The room had hard surfaces. You could make sound intimate or pull back and it can be very echoey,” said Klyce. The room had a screen on the wall with speakers for playback so that an orchestra could see a film during a scoring session. About a dozen microphones were spaced out through the room from close to the screen to all the way to the rear. The final mix benefited from this dynamic of the movie playing in this echoey setup, creating that bouncy feel reminiscent of the bygone era.
For Klyce, the biggest takeaway or lesson learned from his Mank experience is that sometimes its prudent “to ignore your instincts,” particularly when working with a master filmmaker like Fincher. Wanting a film to sound old and then adding reverb to it seemed odd at first. “My initial instinct was this will never work or this is a terrible idea or that’s going to confuse people. But my instinct was based on experience of what we’ve done in the past…I needed to take a leap of faith into his (Fincher’s) thinking. Fincher is freer in terms of his creativity. What he’s reaching for is not just technical execution. He’s looking for an emotional response. You learn to ignore your instincts and take a leap of faith into a vision that may scare you to death to do–and in the end you take a chance.”
Longstanding collaborative bond
Klyce though is predisposed to take a chance and believe in Fincher’s vision given that the two have a long and storied track record. They met when they were 18 years old while working for maverick independent filmmaker John Korty in the Bay Area on an animated film Twice Upon A Time. Klyce was an art assistant in the animation department while Fincher was working in visual effects. Korty and others on the movie started handing out shots to the various animators, giving Fincher what amounted to a second unit photography gig. Fincher asked Klyce to do the music and sound.
Around that same time, Fincher directed his first commercial, the American Cancer Society’s “Smoking Fetus,” which created quite a stir for its imagery. Klyce did the music and sound on the piece. In a prior SHOOT interview, Klyce recalled, “Even back then at the age of 18, David had this ability to get everybody to listen to him. He could describe ideas so passionately. It was like watching entertaining and engaging television. You could visualize what he was saying.”
A strong friendship was born but there was a prolonged stretch during which the two went their separate ways professionally. Fincher moved into the music video world while Klyce cut his teeth in the studio on music production and recording. Trained in musical composition, he started to explore the French musique concréte movement of the 1940s which experimented with sound as music, a philosophical precursor in a sense to sound design as we know it today.
Then what was to become a long fruitful collaboration on features and spots began when Fincher called to tell Klyce he had just landed a feature, Alien 3. At the time, Klyce didn’t have enough experience to be sold to the studio powers that be as a sound artisan on the film. Nonetheless Klyce helped out as much as possible, researching scores from the prior Alien films, and other works by composers who worked on those movies, assembling a catalog of music. Klyce handed Fincher a bunch of DAT tapes reflecting these relevant scores to be used as a foundation or starting point of sorts from which to build on.
Meanwhile commercials emerged as projects for which Fincher and Klyce could directly team. The first, Coke’s “Blade Roller” (an homage to Blade Runner) came in ‘90. And then there was Nike’s “Magazine Wars” in which people pictured on magazine covers at a newsstand come to life and engage in a raucous game of tennis. The spot won a Clio, helped bring Klyce into prominence as a sound designer and began his track record of notable work with Wieden+Kennedy for not only Fincher but other filmmakers such as Spike Jonze (including Nike’s Emmy-winning “The Morning After” spot; Klyce’s collaborations with Jonze also include the big screen with Where The Wild Things Are and Her).
Klyce’s start in the feature film arena came in ‘93 when Fincher brought him on board Se7en as sound designer/sound effects editor/sound effects supervisor and music consultant. Later Klyce served as sound designer on Fight Club and Panic Room, sound re-recording mixer/supervising sound editor/sound designer on Zodiac, and sound re-recording mixer/supervising sound editor on The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. The shared filmography of Fincher and Klyce includes not only these titles and the sound designer’s other aforementioned Oscar nominations but also television series with House of Cards and Mindhunters.
As for what’s next for Klyce, he’s slated to embark on Turning Red for Pixar, marking the feature film directing debut of Domee Shi who won a Best Animated Short Film Oscar in 2019 for Pixar’s Bao.
This is the first of a 16-part series with future installments of The Road To Oscar slated to run in the weekly SHOOT>e.dition, The SHOOT Dailies and on SHOOTonline.com, with select installments also in print issues. The series will appear weekly through the Academy Awards gala ceremony. Nominations for the 93rd Academy Awards will be announced on Monday, March 15, 2021. The 93rd Oscars will be held on Sunday, April 25, 2021.
