THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER 45 OCTOBER 30, 2019
The Sound of a De-aged De Niro
BEHIND THE SCREEN | CAROLY N GIARDINA
Scorsese’s rerecording mixer Tom Fleischman knew that The Irishman was going to present a whole new way
of approaching voices that would be different from the veteran filmmaker’s earlier crime sagasM
aking septuagenarian
screen legends Robert
De Niro, Al Pacino and
Joe Pesci look decades younger
was one challenge that Martin
Scorsese faced for his Netflix
crime drama, The Irishman.
Making them sound younger
was a whole separate bridge to
cross. Luckily, Scorsese had his
sound team, including Oscar-
winning rerecording mixer Tom
Fleischman, on hand.
The two have worked together
since 1982’s The King of Comedy —
which incidentally starred a much
younger De Niro. Fleischman
and the sound team, including
supervising sound editor/rere-
cording mixer Eugene Gearty and
supervising sound editor Philip
Stockton, revisited the movie, as
well as Pacino’s 1973 film Serpico,
to research the actors’ voices from
three decades ago.
“We experimented a lot,”
Fleischman says. “[We] tried to
match the pitch of the voices.
That was too extreme.” Instead,
Stockton executed “surgery” on
De Niro’s voice in postproduction.
“[He] took out a lot of the extra
breaths in De Niro’s performance,
and there was slight pitch-shift-
ing that we did.”A New York native, Fleischman
had his first encounter with
Scorsese as a student at New
York University, where the film-
maker was an instructor. Soon,
Fleischman was working on a
couple of temp mixes for Scorsese
on Raging Bull. While that 1980
film was eventually mixed in L.A.,
Fleischman returned as a second
mixer on The King of Comedy
alongside Dick Vorisek, often
working late into the night with
Scorsese. “That was really the
first time that Marty and I worked
together,” Fleischman says. “He
knew exactly what he wanted, and
he was very funny.”
Fleischman has earned five
Oscar nominations, including one
for Scorsese’s 2002 crime thriller
Gangs of New York and another for
his 2004 Howard Hughes biopic,The Aviator. In 2012, he won for
Scorsese’s Hugo. In February, he’ll
accept the Cinema Audio Society’s
Career Achievement Award.
Hugo was the director’s first
film to be lensed in 3D and his
first time working in the 7.1 sound
format. “We were able to move
the sound out from the screen
in a more resolved way. That
worked really nicely with the 3D,”
Fleischman explains.
For The Irishman, Fleischman
says that right away, the goal
was to keep the sound more
restrained than prior Scorsese
crime films like Goodfellas or
Casino. “Marty’s main focus was
on the dialogue,” Fleischman
says. “It was all about how the
dialogue and the music — archi-
val songs and Robbie Robertson’s
score — interacted. So the sound
effects were minimal.”
To keep the authenticity of time
and place, the team used archival
sounds, including news footage
on TV sets as well as a recording of
late singer Jerry Vale performing
“Spanish Eyes” and “Al di la” in
a scene set during a gala dinner.
That recording was sweetened
with an orchestra and background
singers to create the sound of a
live performance. The filmmakersespecially took advantage of mix-
ing The Irishman in the immersive
Dolby Atmos sound format for
this particular scene, elevating
the dialogue, audience reactions
and camera clicks. Throughout
the rest of the film, Atmos was
used sparingly to keep the mix
more restrained. “The idea that
Marty had was basically that we’d
almost make it mono. There were
certain moments when we would
expand the track, but for the
most part, everything was kept
very quiet. There was very little
background ambience used —
particularly in the interior scenes,
in the restaurants, in the house.
They wanted to keep it focused on
the dialogue and the music.”
Of Scorsese, he adds, “The
story is much more than just a
gangster film. It’s also about life
and aging and there’s a whole
other layer of story there.” Notes
Fleischman, “Marty just loved
working on this film.”PODCAST!
The weekly show Behind the Screen, hosted
by THR tech editor Carolyn Giardina,
features conversations with cinematographers,
editors, composers and other artists
behind the magic of motion pictures. Listen
and subscribe at THR.com/podcasts.Tom Fleischman has worked on 18 features directed by Martin Scorsese.