Sound designer re recording mixer Leslie Shatz has used his finely tuned skills to service many movies from cutting Yodas dialogue in The Empire Strikes Back to collaborating with Toto on David Lynchs Dune. Yet with Blonde now streaming on Netflix based on author Joyce Carol Oates fictionalized look at Marilyn Monroe life and death he and filmmaker Andrew Dominik Killing Them Softly The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford reunite a third time to create a striking sonic experience.
Andrews very untraditional in terms of sound Shatz says. He wants sounds to have an emotional context.
In order to immerse audiences in their heroines psychological trial the team crafts a soundscape that augments the narratives thematic resonance. One of the things we talked about was to keep the sound moving to give it a swirling feeling to keep you in a dreamlike state or keep you unsettled with the world constantly moving around you. Shatz continues I experimented with panning the music also because the music had a very dreamlike aspect to it that lent itself to being moved around the room. As Norma Jeane herself transformed into the silver screen persona of Marilyn Monroe star Ana de Armas changed her own natural Cuban accent into the icons breathy voice. Ana wanted to perfect the voice of Marilyn in post and she devoted much time and energy to it. The process proved beneficial. We took it under a microscope. This included recording dialogue for recreations of Monroes films utilizing period specific equipment. We were using a ribbon mic and a way that the instruments record her using equipment and processing to give it a period feel.
Bringing in ambient sounds of children playing and street traffic from real life locations that Monroe visited added a grounded reality to the films surrealist bent. Because we did not fill it up with a lot of prosaic sounds any sound had to be right. You could not bury it in the mix of a lot of other noise going on. Shatz elucidates The swimming pool sound was from that Bel Air location. The props were very specific. The phone ring is absolutely accurate for that particular telephone.
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