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Reader SurveyJeff Wexler
Oct 2, 2002 12:00 PM, by Blair Jackson
You might say that Jeff Wexler was born into film. He’s the son of Oscar-winning cinematographer (and occasional director) Haskell Wexler, and he notes, “I absorbed a tremendous amount of knowledge from Haskell and from just being around the set all my life, riding around on the dollies at the age of two and things like that. My first day on the set when I actually had to do a job felt very familiar; I felt like I’d been there all my life, which I actually had been.”
Not wanting to compete with or draw comparisons to his famous father, he gravitated toward production sound, breaking in on “low-budget, non-union Roger Corman movies, where a lot of people got their start.” Now entering his fourth decade in the field, Wexler has amassed an impressive list of credits, including such films as Bound for Glory, 9 to 5, The Natural, Ghost, War of the Roses, Get Shorty, Independence Day (for which he was nominated for an Oscar), Jerry Maguire, Fight Club, Almost Famous, 61*, Rat Race, and Vanilla Sky. When we spoke in early July, he had wrapped work on Martin Brest’s new film, Gigli, starring Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez, and done some re-shoots (“they call them ‘scene enhancements’ now,” he says with a chuckle) for the Owen Wilson-Eddie Murphy film I Spy. Along the way, he’s been able to work on a number of films and commercials with his father; that’s quite an accomplished team.
“For the most part, all directors proclaim that they’re ‘really into sound; it’s really important,’” Wexler says. “Then you begin to discover what they really mean by that, and you find out that the fundamental reality is that the entire soundtrack can be done later. And this is one of the things that separates the production sound department from almost all the other departments on a movie set the day of shooting. Even if the sound team completely screws up, or the director completely screws up, you still don’t lose a day of shooting. You can loop things, use ADR; in fact, they refer to ADR as ‘re-shooting the sound.’ Everyone knows this, and some directors are quite willing to say, ‘I don’t care, get me a guide track, the sun’s going down. We need to get it on film; I’ll worry about the sound part of it later.’ That’s the extreme position, although it’s also sometimes the realistic position if you are working with a lot of mechanical effects or wind machines, where the sound we can record on the day could never be in the movie.
“Almost all directors say they don’t want to loop anything, and they say it for all the right creative reasons, which is the importance of the performance on the day and that sort of thing. They all know it does not hurt the movie in terms of the budget or time to do most of the sound later. It’s in every budget. The best situation is where you have an experienced and realistic director, a talented and experienced first assistant director, a location manager who understands that you cannot make a scene work if you’re trying to shoot a three-walled set constructed under the freeway and it’s supposed to be Iris’ bedroom - it just isn’t going to work.
“I’ve been extremely lucky to work with people who do have an allegiance to the production sound track, because of all the things it can bring to a movie. Not just the fact that you don’t have to replace the dialog. But the fact that the actual recording itself lends something to the movie; it tells you something about the characters. I’ve always said that I feel like I’ve done a really good job if I can sit in dailies with my eyes closed and listen to a scene - the raw recordings before anyone else has gotten to them - and you can tell something about the characters, how they’re feeling, where they are in the room, what emotions they’re having.
“Obviously that doesn’t happen all the time. A lot of times, I’m just glad I can hear something, because maybe we were fighting the wind machine, or the actor insisted on playing with his props during his whole speech and there are noises, or you have the actors who sound just fine when you’re talking to them as real people and as soon as they start acting you can’t understand a word they’re saying. Those situations aren’t nice, but they happen all the time. I’ve had directors come to me and say, ‘Could you understand what she was saying? Is there some sort of microphone we can use to make that more understandable?’ I say, ‘Take off your headphones, forget about the microphones. Go over and listen to this person speak. Tell me if you can understand anything she’s saying.’”
Wexler does considerable preparation before his first day on the set, talking to the director and feeling out his or her needs with regards to the production sound, getting involved in location scouting whenever possible, and making notes on the shooting script: “I do an extensive breakdown on the script as soon as I get it and highlight areas where I think there might be some difficulty, and areas that need some attention before shooting, whether it’s building something somewhere or changing something physically in a location. I might say, ‘Can we find a place that maybe looks the same but is a little quieter than the place you’ve chosen?’ Because, if we’re doing a quiet, emotional scene, you don’t want to have to go to the actors and say, ‘You gotta speak louder.’ Or, ‘We’ve got to get this quickly because at 1 o’clock they fire up this factory next door.’”
Where technology is concerned, Wexler has always been part of the vanguard in production sound, experimenting with new gear before it was widely used, but noting that “the changes that have come in our field, say, in the last five years, are all equipment-based technological changes that haven’t had much impact on the actual work that we do. Recording sound is still not a big mystery; there’s little magic involved. It still boils down to: If things sound good and you record them properly, they will sound good, and all the technology in the world will not change that.”
That said, he was among the first to use DAT on the set, and he was an early convert to the increasingly ubiquitous Deva nonlinear digital system. “When I first started using DAT,” he recalls, “I was not about to make any director or producer be the guinea pig for a new format that everyone believed would never work. So I ran my Nagra, which I completely entrusted all my work to, and ran both machines for the first three pictures, and then I went to running two DAT machines [on War of the Roses in 1989]. At that time, I was a co-owner of the postproduction facility where all the sound transfers were being made, so I didn’t have to let anybody know what we were doing. On the set, people would came over, look at the sound cart and see the Nagra and figure everything was fine.
“Then, when I started using the Deva, there was initially quite a lot of resistance from people in postproduction and from various others. Of course, ultimately the promise of nonlinear work is that we’ll be using the same sound files; there won’t be questions about the quality of transferring the material because it’s digital data, not audio.”
Though the Deva has 4-track capability, Wexler notes, “I almost never use all four tracks. That’s my own personal choice. I’m still an old mono kind of guy - I’d rather give them one good track that makes sense to everybody. It requires no apology or explanation: ‘Oh, the good sound is on three or four.’ Or, ‘When you remix it, it’ll sound great!’ There are other sound mixers who love using multitrack, and they also shower a scene with multiple techniques. In other words, they’re not content to just boom the scene with one microphone; they’ll also put wireless on the actors; they’ll put plant mics. And whenever you get involved in multiple techniques, it would be suicide to commit all those to one track - you need to split those things off. You need to make them discrete, so somebody can reconstruct whatever it was you were thinking of on the day, later.”
Wexler will use the other tracks for additional material that might be useful to the editors later, such as a sync ambience track or live effects that are essential parts of the scene, such as a television playing in the room or a telephone, but generally he likes to get as much as he can in mono off the boom, while using wireless mics on the other tracks. Wexler really trusts his boom operator, too: He’s been working with Don Coufal for 25 years. “He really understands what the camera sees,” Wexler says, “and he understands what he needs to do to make dialog work. And that’s really the most important thing that we do - make the dialog work for the picture.”
