Episode 141Dolby Creator Talks

The Sound of Babylon

January 16, 2023

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Our coverage of the 2023 Academy Awards continues with another film on the Best Sound shortlist — “Babylon.” The work of director Damien Chazelle (“La La Land,” “Whiplash”) is certainly no stranger to awards season, so this is definitely a film to watch out and, in this case, listen for.

Joining us today is re-recording mixer, sound designer, and supervising sound editor Ai-Ling Lee; supervising sound editor Mildred Iatrou Morgan; and production sound mixer Steve Morrow.

If you’ve seen the film then you already know it is a bombastic depiction of Hollywood decadence in the time of transition from the silent film era to “the talkies.” And from the what we’ve heard in today’s episode, the production was appropriately over-the-top as well.

Damien’s thing was — ‘this is great, but let's go bigger.’ I think Margot Robbie had a story where she said, ‘I put everything out there and I was going crazy.’ And he walked over and I thought, ‘oh, that's it. He's gonna tell me to tone it back.’ And he goes, ‘ok, can you go a little bigger than that?’ That was kind of the idea behind the whole film. It's — let's go bigger, let's go bolder, let's go beyond what's reasonable, and then we can pull back from there. But let's just see where that line is. And so that's how we treated it on production. We just went as extreme as we could.

Steve Morrow, Production Sound Mixer, “Babylon”

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