Yahoo Lifestyle Oscar Nominee Tod Maitland Recalls “Pleasant Surprise” Of Timothée Chalamet Channeling Bob Dylan, Teases Bruce Springsteen-Based ‘Deliver Me From Nowhere’
After investing more than five years perfecting his Bob Dylan chops as A Complete Unknown wound its way to production, Timothée Chalamet saved his most persuasive performance for the film’s crew.
Production audio mixed Tod Maitland, part of the team nominated for an Oscar for Best Sound for the film, recalled the star coming to him 10 minutes before a key scene started shooting at New York’s Carnegie Hall. “He said, ‘I’m going live,’” Maitland recalled.
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The idea had surfaced during rehearsals, but once the decision was made at the start of the 53-day shoot, decades’ worth of moviemaking customs was dispensed with in a flash. Everyone behind the camera, including director James Mangold, recognized they were entering uncharted waters. ‘We threw away all those [pre-recorded] tracks,” Maitland added. “We never had one timing mechanism, we had no earpieces. No playback for this entire movie. It was basically like recording an album and a movie at the same time.”
Maitland, a six-time Oscar nominee, spoke before a screening of the film Tuesday at the House of Sound, an audiophile’s nirvana and product showcase housed in a narrow townhouse on West 17th Street. (Earlier in awards season, Maitland and his colleagues took part in Deadline’s craft series The Process, talking with Mangold about the sound work on the film.)
Chalamet “ran the show” in terms of bringing the production around to the benefits of live performance, Maitland said with admiration. Sequences like the 23-minute concert at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival that concludes the film were incredibly complex to capture as a result, but the filmmaking team was “pleasantly surprised” that the star delivered the goods. “I thought we’d be replacing a whole lot of guitar and voice and all that,” Maitland recalled. “We replaced very little. Some harmonica, for sure – but he was still pretty good at harmonica. It really came down to the amount of work. … Even when he was off camera, he’d still be playing just to keep the energy on the set.”
Asked whether Dylan communicated with the production or the star during the years-long process of getting the film made, Maitland said the musician and Mangold met just one time, well before cameras rolled. Deliver Me From Nowhere, the Bruce Springsteen movie set for release later this year on which Maitland did production audio mixing, was a markedly different story. “On the contrary, Bruce was there almost every single day, to the point where he’s, like, in the way,” he laughed.
Springsteen has already gone on record with his enthusiasm for the project. “Jeremy is such a terrific actor that you just fall right into it,” the singer recently told SiriusXM’s E Street Radio channel. “He’s got an interpretation of me that I think the fans will deeply recognize. He’s just done a great job, so I’ve had a lot of fun being on the set.”
Returning to Dylan, Maitland called Mangold “a very strong director who knows exactly what he wants,” Maitland said. “He was very involved in my mixes,” especially for dailies, as filmmakers and execs at 20th Century and Disney were determining whether to slot the film in 2024 after it wrapped in June, too late for a festival berth.
Mangold felt the proper mix in the dailies would convey a collective sense of confidence in the live-Dylan approach. Of the dailies, the director told Maitland, “‘That’s what the studio execs hear, that‘s what the actors hear. That’s what everyone who watches dailies … is going to associate with this movie for four months until we go into post-production. So he would come to me sometimes and go, ‘Just give me a little more guitar here, a little more vocal.’ He was more in tune to my mixing than on any movie I’ve ever worked on.”
Along with the live recording challenge, which Maitland said was unlike any he’d encountered in the 16 music-based movies before (among them Across the Universe and West Side Story), there was the matter of microphone placement. Chalamet emulated Dylan, holding the guitar “very high up on his body, where normally I would have a Lavalliere microphone,” the mixer explained. “I couldn’t do it because the guitar covered it. So, the only way I could do it was by putting a microphone in his hair, which was a huge conversation to get the hair department on board with that. They had to weave it in in the morning and now they had to monitor it all day long. The wire kept sticking out the back. But it’s worth it. That wire is going to cost you 20 dollars in CGI as opposed to replacing these tracks. You’re never going to be able to replace these tracks.”
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