‘Moonage Daydream’s Sound Team On Creating The Ultimate Immersive David Bowie Experience – Deadline FYC House + HBO Max
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Editor’s note: The following interviews were done outside of the FYC event series, as there was no panel or screening.
When director Brett Morgen invited Oscar winners Paul Massey and Nina Hartstone to collaborate on the sound for Moonage Daydream, he told them what he was aiming for with his David Bowie documentary.
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“He wanted this to be incredibly immersive,” Massey explained as part of Deadline’s FYC House + HBO Max event series, “and not just immersive in an Atmos kind of a way with using objects in the room, but immersive for the audience to the point where they could shut their eyes and be on a rollercoaster ride of audio without even watching some of the [visuals].”
For re-recording mixer Massey, that meant taking a fresh approach to the Bowie songs in the film.
“We were really blessed by having access to pretty much all of the original 24 track recordings of David in the studio and live, which meant I could do a complete remix of the music from top to bottom,” Massey said. “The reason that’s important, really, is to bring those mixes into a theatrical environment, which has, as we all know, a very different acoustic space to a stereo left-right that they were originally mixed for.”
Moonage Daydream features extended sequences of Bowie live in performance. As Morgen explained in a Twitter post, “[W]e had to separate the music stems from the room and the crowds. To create authentic reverb, the sound team rented a football stadium and played the full mix through the PA, recording the ambience on 12 mics.”
Hartstone, the film’s supervising sound editor and sound designer, went even further than that. She engaged a group of people to do a sort of Bowie singalong in that stadium.
“We do a play and repeat kind of thing where we play a line [from a song] and they sing it back to us and we can record it clean and really get them to give us the energy and the vibe of people who are in a concert,” Hartstone said. “It’s so key to actually bring the texture and making the viewer feel like they are at that concert, they’re experiencing it. And Brett really did want the viewer to feel like they were in the center of that. He wanted them to be surrounded by the rest of the audience. He wanted them to be interacting with Bowie’s performance on stage as well.”
For Morgen, Massey and Hartstone, the collaborative process began with what’s called a “spotting” session, where director and audio team carefully go through a film to discuss aural elements.
“We watched the film and we’d stop and start and Brett would talk through the footage and explain to us what ideas he had, what his vision was, start opening the dialogue with us,” Harstone recalled. “It was a fantastic opportunity to really get into Brett’s head, but then also just open that whole conversation about sound and bounce ideas back and forth and collaborate with him to really understand how we could tell Bowie’s story and remain pure to Bowie, but also allow the viewer glimpses inside his head by painting pictures with sound.”
For his archive-driven films, Morgen doesn’t feel required to slavishly reproduce the original video or sound. His goal is more subjective and interpretive. For Moonage Daydream’s sonic landscape, that meant giving Massey and Hartstone the freedom to add sounds not present in the source material.
“What we were always trying to do was create emotions and feelings. And it would be things like the sounds of a wooden rollercoaster when you don’t see a rollercoaster because it gives you that sort of tension of clack, clack, clack going up the hill, and then the release of it going down. And having the sounds of birds or the beach when you are on an interior. And these are all things to give the viewer a feeling and a sensation to really help them get closer to Bowie, really.”
“Brett was never worried about being literal,” Massey added. “You know, “‘see a car, hear a car.’ He always said there’s no mistakes either. So, if we try something we like, it might be completely for no reason whatsoever, but he’s happy to go with it.”
For their work on Moonage Daydream, Massey won the Cinema Audio Society’s award for Outstanding Achievement in Sound Mixing for Motion Pictures and Hartstone won Outstanding Sound Design at the Cinema Eye Honors Awards. Late last year, Moonage Daydream earned another very rare honor – the film was shortlisted for Best Sound for the Academy Awards, the only documentary to crack that list (it was also shortlisted as Best Documentary Feature).
“When that [news] was released Brett called me and said, ‘We made the [sound] shortlist,’” Massey said. “I was like, ‘What? You gotta be kidding!’ I remember the moment… I was just thrilled for us as a unit, but even more happy for Brett because this was the first documentary to get into that category since Woodstock, which was well over 30 years prior.”
Hartstone added, “I was so excited that actually the Sound Branch, our peers, had considered the work worthy of us being shortlisted and actually seeing past maybe thinking, ‘Oh, it’s a documentary.’”
Moonage Daydream is now in contention for Emmy nominations in multiple categories, including sound.
“The idea that we might be considered for the Emmys, it’d be incredible,” Hartstone said. “It’d be amazing. I’d be so thrilled to see it get any recognition because I just think Brett has created a masterpiece.”
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