180 - The Oscar-Nominated Sound Team Behind Oppenheimer

We have an all-star team of sound artists whose work on “Oppenheimer” is nominated for a 2024 Academy Award®. They are certainly no strangers to that award show, as they already have NINE Oscars between them!

Today’s panel includes:

- Richard King - Sound Designer and Supervising Sound Editor

- Gary A. Rizzo - Re-recording Mixer

- Kevin O’Connell - Re-recording Mixer

- Willie D. Burton - Production Sound Mixer

We discussed how they approached getting inside the head of the brilliant but troubled “Father of the Atomic Bomb,” J. Robert Oppenheimer, as well as working with the brilliant, and very particular director Christopher Nolan, who loves working with IMAX cameras so much, he used some unconventional methods to record the dialogue.

“The IMAX camera is very noisy. Usually [Nolan] would do the wide shots with the IMAX camera and then he'll use the 70mm for dialogue. But there's times that we have short scenes — like three, four, five lines. But what we have to do is — he will say, ‘cut, print,’ and the actors will re-act that scene, just like they did it on camera. Re-doing it, wild. The same pacing. Oh yeah… We try to get everything we can for post, knowing that he wants to use all his original track on production. Now, whether he totally used it all? [But] I think he used most of it.”

—Willie D. Burton, Production Sound Mixer, “Oppenheimer”

Be sure to check out “Oppenheimer” ahead of the Academy Awards, live from the Dolby Theatre® on March 10th!

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You can also check out the video for this episode.

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