Interview With Peter Brown, Supervising Sound Editor On ‘Peacemaker’, ‘Aquaman’, ‘Game Of Thrones’ & More!
A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to chat with Supervising Sound Editor Peter Brown, the man behind the audio landscape of projects such as the brilliant ‘Peacemaker’ and the ‘Aquaman’ movies. He’s also worked on a whole bunch of the ‘Fast & Furious’ and ‘Paranormal Activity’ films, ‘Star Trek Beyond’, ‘Birdman’, ‘Game of Thrones’ and so much more! In the interview, we discuss the creative challenges of bringing “Eagly” to life for ‘Peacemaker’, and working our what the “cow” and “butterflies” sound like.
Picking up where 2021’s ‘The Suicide Squad’ left off, the action-packed series finds ‘Peacemaker‘ (John Cena) returning home after a miraculous recovery from his encounter with Bloodsport – only to discover that his freedom comes at a price… The series explores the origins of Peacemaker and his subsequent missions, a man who believes in peace at any cost — no matter how many people he has to kill to get it.
In addition to discussing ‘Peacemaker’, we also touch on figuring out how to make people talk underwater for ‘Aquaman’ and working on “The Trench”. But before we got into all that, I began by asking Peter to explain what his job entails, and how he came to discover his love for sound.
Geektown: Before we get into talking about your work, do you just want to explain what a Supervising Sound Editor does?
Peter: Sure. The position is in charge of a team of folks who are responsible for putting together all the sound that you see in a television show or a film, except for the music. The music is done by a different team. It’s usually a music supervisor. There might be someone whose just in charge of needle drops, and a composer whose in charge of the score for the project. Then there’ll be a separate set of music editors who work with all that. Both of our teams, music and us folks over here in sound, bring all of our material together to a mixing stage where two or three mixers will take all that material and combine it together to make a finished soundtrack with dialogue, sound effects, and music.
I’m in charge of translating whatever words or pictures, or sounds, or whatever the director uses to tell their story, I translate what they say into eagle squawks, explosions, or dialogue inside of a helmet, or the sound of alien space force, whatever it is that they want. A lot of directors don’t have an oral language. They don’t really know how to talk about sound in clear words, and so we’re kind of translators to try to figure out what it is they mean when they say, “Well, the scene should feel a little bit more purple.” You’re like, “Oh, I got it. Yeah, you want to hear low wind on the horizon, and just a touch of a cactus wren or a red-tailed hawk, and perhaps some distant heat lightning.” I fill in the spots in between the dialogue. That’s what we do.
Geektown: Awesome. Yes, that’s a very good vivid description of it! How did you actually get into the industry in the first place?
Peter: I’m from Rochester, New York, which was the Land of Eastman Kodak when film was king. My father, as an electrochemist working at Kodak, had the privilege of more or less free film and processing, which was great in a day when it was super expensive. Eventually, there was a time when he would bring home boxes of Super 8 film from the stuff that was sent back from retailers that had expired. So, I could load that into my camera and shoot little Super 8 movies, and get them developed for free, and learned how to splice them and cut them together. I spent a little time in my youth playing with actual motion picture film, and decided eventually that I wanted to go out and do that for real.
After undergrad, I came out to the west coast, and went to film school, which was really my entry into the business. It touched on all the different disciplines, from writing, to directing, to producing, cinematography, picture editing, and sound. In a school full of people who all wanted to be the next John Singleton or Steven Spielberg, I found that I was one of those rare people who could actually tolerate doing sound for hours, and hours, and hours on end. It seems like part of success in life is knowing what it is that you’re good at, and what you enjoy doing, and pursuing that. I really, really like sound, and kind of knew without any contacts or knowing anybody in Hollywood on the west coast that it was kind of going to be all up to me to do something.
A lot of the other disciplines seemed like you needed to spend years being a cinematographer, or years directing short films, just years and years doing stuff without really any money back from it before you could get established. Sound definitely was something that you might not get paid a tonne to do, but you could walk right out of school and start doing it. It really is such a very labour-intensive career. You spend a lot of long, long hours. That’s exactly what I did. I got out of grad school, and went to work at the Creative Cafe for Stephen Hunter Flick. I’ve been doing it ever since, just slinging sound.
Geektown: This is the mid-90s, really you were starting out?
Peter: Yep, ’95 when I got out of school.
Geektown: You did some work at ‘Starship Troopers’ I think back in the day. There’s a ‘Hellraiser’ film in your credits, and ‘Spider-Man’ is in there.
Peter: Scott Erickson’s first film.
Geektown: Right, yeah. ‘Terminator 3’, one of the ‘American Pie’ movies, the ‘SWAT’ movie…
Peter: Ah, the early years of bitter struggle [Laughs].
Geektown: Lots of sort of interesting stuff! As we come more up-to-date, you’ve got the ‘Paranormal Activity’ films, a whole bunch of the ‘Fast & Furious’ movies. You did some work on ‘Game of Thrones’, ‘Star Trek Beyond’. You’re in post on ‘Aquaman 2’ at the moment, but ‘Aquaman’ and the ‘Peacemaker’ series are some of the latest things you’ve been working on. How did you get involved with the ‘Aquaman’, and subsequently I’m assuming that’s how you got into ‘Peacemaker’?
Peter: Actually, no. They’re completely unrelated.
Geektown: Oh, really? Okay. How did you end up on ‘Aquaman’ and then how did you end up on ‘Peacemaker’?
Peter: ‘Aquaman’ was because when Justin Lin stepped away from the ‘Fast & Furious’ franchise for the first time, after ‘Fast & Furious 6’, they found James Wan to direct ‘Fast & Furious 7’. I was the studio’s choice for a sound guy on that film. I knew of James’s films because it just so happens that a guy that I’ve been working with since 2000, Joe Dzuban, had done all of his independent films, like all the ‘Insidious’ series. I said, “Whoa, shouldn’t Joe be doing this too?” He’s like, “Oh yeah, I love Joe.” So, we did ‘Fast & Furious 7’ together, and it made $1.4 billion or something crazy like that. I don’t know if Hollywood is superstitious, but if something works, there’s some effort given to not changing anything. So, I think we were a natural team when James moved over to Warner Brothers to do ‘Aquaman’. Then that one went out and made like $1.2 billion. James lays golden eggs. He’s just made a tonne of successful films, and we’re there to support him every step of the way.
That’s how that happened. Yes, Peter Safran is one of the producers of ‘Aquaman’, and is the producer of ‘Peacemaker’, but the relationship between the two films is entirely coincidental. The person who brought me in to do ‘Peacemaker’ was one of my old compatriots from the early years of bitter struggle, Fred Raskin. He was the picture editor who kind of came up under Sally Menke when I was coming up under Steve Flick. When he got his first big break doing ‘Annapolis’, which was Justin Lin’s first big studio film, he insisted that I do the sound for it. We had a great time working together ever since whenever we can. I think after ‘Suicide Squad’, Fred saw a good opportunity with ‘Peacemaker’ to try again. That’s how I came to that project. I think having done ‘Aquaman’ just means when your resume goes across Peter Saffron’s desk or somebody at Warner Brothers desk, or if you’ve done ‘Game of Thrones’ and it goes across somebody’s desk at HBO, they’re like, “Oh yeah. These guys are probably not going to harm us. Let’s give them a shot.”
Geektown: Yeah, absolutely. So, ‘Peacemaker’ is the latest thing that you’ve been doing. I absolutely loved it. It’s just a wonderful strange… That opening credit sequence is one of the best things ever! It must have been a really interesting project to work on for you as it’s not at all grounded… You’ve got aliens, and weird bug creatures in there, as well as all the superhero stuff. What’s your approach to coming to something like that? Where do you start, and what sounds are you finding for it?
Peter: When you look at something like that, you kind of… I mean, we approach everything sort of the same, how we make this as cool and as awesome as possible, what’s in it, what do we have that’s good, what don’t we have, what is going to be tricky? “Eagly” was, right out of the gate, the thing that was going to be tricky. The “butterflies” were going to be tricky. The “cow” was going to be tricky. There are all these different creatures. And the gorilla, we knew was going to be tricky. In the case of the eagle, we spent a lot of time trying to figure out what to do because we have bald eagle recordings, but I had noticed years before that as birds go, no offence, bald eagles are pretty boring compared to their vocal range… I just knew it was going to be a handful to construct a language for this bird in a character form… I knew we were going to have to go beyond bald eagle sounds, and trying to morph different sounding birds with different recording qualities together was just… That was one of the sound jobs that was going to be very, very, very hard. As visual effects would change, it would become even more impossible. So, I started looking around for Falconers, or people who kept birds, where I could try to go out and record and put together a library of stuff.
Peacemaker’s “Eagly”
Then, James Gunn announced that he had used a voiceover artist named Dee Bradley Baker for the rat in ‘Suicide Squad’, and loved working with the guy. He may have actually worked with him earlier on one of the ‘Guardians’. I’m not sure. But he said, “Let’s have Dee Bradley Baker do this character.” We set up our ADR recording situation right into his home, and he would watch the film and perform Eagly stuff, and it was miraculous. Miraculous what this guy could do with his voice. He would just sit there and nail Eagly, and give Eagly a personality. Just through his own talents, he could morph every bird sound he’s ever heard and bend it to the particular needs of the scene. So, a job that I would say would have been extremely difficult and potentially not that great, was made a lot easier and really fantastic just with James having the foresight to identify the right talent and bring them in.
Geektown: Wow. I’d never realised that Dee Bradley Baker was the voice of Eagly for that series! That’s nuts. Dee Bradley Baker, for people who might not know the name, he’s the voice of the clones in the ‘Star Wars’ animated series.
Peter: Oh, really? His work is everywhere. He’s done a tonne of stuff. He’s on a fun journey.
Creating the sound for Peacemaker’s “cow”
Geektown: Yeah, he’s done voices for ‘Avatar The Last Airbender’, ‘American Dad’, ‘Legend of Korra’… He’s a huge voiceover artist, but the one thing that he’s probably best known for is being the voice of all the clone troopers in the ‘Star Wars’ animations. That’s incredible he’s the “voice” of Eagly too! With something like the cow, which is this huge alien creature, how do you go about creating sounds for something like that?
Peter: We didn’t see it for quite a while because the visual effects were so complicated, it was just kind of a blob. It would slowly come together, but we would understand certain things that Fred would tell us, or James would mention, it’s being milked, and all this stuff. We put together mock-ups using things like cows, or other big animals like camels or bulls, and there are definitely some whales thrown in there. You start to piece this thing together and let James have a listen to it. I remember the main guidance we got from him on that was that it should sound… He wanted us to kind of feel sorry for it… He wanted to be sort of plaintive and suffering. So, you’d go with that type of emotion and then you’d start to look for sounds that fit.
Before, you might have been looking for animal sounds that were bellowing, or scary, or big and powerful. Then you’d just change it and you’d start to listen to sounds that are like a wail, or a moan, or something that kind of tugs on the heartstrings. That was really the work of Steve Robinson, the world’s greatest sound designer, who laboured for weeks, and weeks, and weeks putting all of these different pieces together. It is a lot of different pieces. There are so many different animals that go into the making of that huge beast. There were dogs. Dogs was an odd one that didn’t really expect to see in there. It’s just a lot of different tones to it.
You have to have stuff that works for when we’re closeup. When we finally get down to see the cow, you need to have things that are good for echoing in a terrifying way through the wooden staircase when Economos is first creeping downstairs with the helmet. A tonne of fun, and really just got great support from Fred and from James on it.
Geektown: What about the “butterflies”? You mentioned they were tricky to approach as well.
Peter: Yeah, we had some elements that Fred brought to us in his cut, in the avid, a type of fluttering. Like a really, really fast fluttering. We really felt like they needed to have a little bit of a squeaky language for moments like when Murn’s butterfly is dying on the floor. The big scene with them was really the attack of the police station. I think that was in episode six. They couldn’t all sound the same. It’s difficult to have a huge flock of these creatures, and just use the same types of sounds over, and over, and over again. You’ve got to layer in stuff that works together that doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense. One of my favourite pieces in there, which I thought really, really worked well but wasn’t what you expected, was a bottlenose dolphin. The clicks and the beeps that they make seemed to work perfectly for them. I don’t think I would have expected that.
Geektown: It’s interesting what you can find that fits!
Peter: There are just zillions of them. It was a fun challenge. Between wings and screeches, and then just the impacts when they would dive into people’s mouths and all those great gross effects, we had an awful lot of fun with that. It’s really just a marvellous show to work on.
Creating the sound for Peacemaker’s “butterflies”
Geektown: I could imagine it must be! Things like that must be really interesting to pick up and play with. Were there any scenes outside of the creatures that were particularly challenging to put together?
Peter: In television or cable, you really don’t have a tonne of time to have problems. You just try to come up with solutions as fast as you can. Compared to working on a feature, like with something like ‘Aquaman’, we’ll be on the movie for nearly a year for maybe two hours of content. Whereas something like ‘Peacemaker’ will have almost seven hours of content. That all has to get done in half a year. Your ability to luxuriate on a difficult problem doesn’t really come up. You just have to work through things as best you can.
Most of it was just the amount of content. I think the creatures were difficult. The gorilla scene… That was really hard. Not only in trying to get definition to the gorilla’s voice, but also when it gets chainsawed in the end. I remember getting the gore particularly right in that the sound of it going through bones and ribs, and also trying to bend his voice so he sounded like he was dying in a very heart-wrenching kind of way, on top of the mega grossness, was very hard to get all of that content packed into the relatively narrow dynamic range of a television show. You don’t have all the speakers you have in a cinema. You don’t have the dynamic range and control you have in a cinema. This is going to get pumped out through some streaming service into somebody’s living room, and it’s going to come out of two speakers. You want to give it all you’ve got, but if you give too much of any one thing, everything mushes together and it doesn’t sound articulate and beautiful in a gross way.
Geektown: With the “gross” sounds, is that stuff that’s specifically recorded? Are you getting Foley artists to do things for that, or is it coming from banks of gross sounds that you have already somewhere?
Peter: It’s a combo platter, and I think it’s something that’s constantly evolving. There might be a sound that I used 20 years ago for a bullet impact that I’ll still use today that’s just been sitting in the library. So, some things are timeless like that, or they become favourites and go back to them. I think anybody who’s in the creative business, or who really responds to the creative challenges of this work doesn’t want to reinvent the wheel every time, but you want to make it somehow different. You don’t just want to regurgitate what worked last time. So, I think you’ll always temper what’s in your library with trying to rework it, trying to go out and record new material that you think would work.
There’s usually some type of flavour when somebody gets shot in the head. There’s some piece, like you’re not hearing enough of the skull crack, or it’s all too much blood and you’re not really hearing any brains. There’s some particular flavour when you’re dealing with gore that you want to accentuate. Or something in the picture that speaks to you. Something, blood spraying on a wall. If it’s spraying on a drywall wall, that’s not the same as it spraying on the side of a truck, or spraying on the inside of a refrigerator, or spraying in subway…
Every specific space has its own auditory characteristics, and I think, if you’re serious about doing sound, you want to try to translate all those nuances into the film. People won’t necessarily notice them, but they’ll get lost in the show they’re watching if you do it right. That’s what we want. We just want people to be entertained for 45 minutes or so and forget about everything else. Foley also will be a part of that. Sometimes you work through what you’ve got in your library, you go out and record what you can, and you mix it all together. It’s like, “You know what, this is still missing something else that really has a sync component to it, something that we really need to have a human perform while watching this picture.” So, you add that to the Foley queue list and see what they can come up with. And great Foley work will be preserved, and that will go into a library and get reused later on. What do you call that then? Is that sound effects from a library? Or is it Foley?
Geektown: Are you somebody that always has a recording device on them so if you’re out and about wandering, going to the shops or something, and you walk past a sound that you’re like, “Oh, that’s interesting.”
Peter: Yep, that’s me. I’m that guy [Laughs]
Geektown: I have spoken to a couple of sound editors before, and it seems to be they all have some sort of recording device that’s always on them at all times just in case.
Peter: It used to be really difficult, but now thanks to iPhones, you don’t even need the recorders anymore. The sound may not be the quality you’re necessarily looking for, but some sounds are so unique and just so original that an iPhone is enough. Even for dialogue sometimes. If we can’t get an actor to the stage and there’s a last-minute line change, we can call them up and record them. Have them record something on their phone and send that to us. You can get away with it. It’s not great. It’s not pretty, but in a pinch, your phone can be a much better recorder than nothing.
Aquaman
Geektown: That is true. There is so much you can do with them these days. It’s quite impressive where the technology’s gotten to at this point. Moving from ‘Peacemaker’ to ‘Aquaman’, in that you’re dealing with a lot of underwater sounds? I would guess something “sounding like it’s underwater” is usually a negative thing in your job, but with ‘Aquaman’, that’s more of a requirement!
Peter: Yeah, we had to go through a lot of experimentation on the first one to get what it sounds like to be underwater. There was an awful lot of consternation and concern about what the dialogue would sound like underwater, because I guess they’d already established with ‘The Justice League’ a way of Aquaman talking underwater, which involves air bubbles. That was definitely something that James did not want to do. He just wanted people to be talking underwater. So, we had to find that light touch of processing that would imply that we’re underwater, and yet not obscure the dialogue. It’s very easy to obscure dialogue even when you’ve got nothing to obscure it. Sometimes it’s just hard to get lines to be clear.
That was something we spent a lot of time fiddling with on the first ‘Aquaman’. Once we had it, we just continued to refine it. We tried to use little sound tricks, like when you would first introduce the concept you would ladle on the processing and the effect a little heavy so that people got the idea, and then pull it back as the scene would progress. You’d just get lost in the scene, and you don’t necessarily need the effect obscuring what the lines are. Its the same type of trick that you’d use in backgrounds and atmospheres. If your two characters walk into a busy factory at the beginning of the scene, you’ll have sounds, clangs, motors whirring, individual sounds that you’ll highlight at the beginning of the scene and set the stage. But then as the dialogue progresses through the scene, you don’t keep all that sound going. You duck it far back into the background so it no longer obscures the dialogue, and everybody forgets that you’re not actually hearing a busy, roaring factory like you heard when you walked into the place. Even though nothing’s changed in the factory, you’re using sound to focus the audience’s attention on what’s important at any given moment.
Geektown: Yeah, it’s like if somebody walks into a nightclub, you’d get the same thing as well.
Peter: Yep, you’d get the “womp-womp” and the big sound, the music is blaring, and then imperceptively it fades back. Or at least in cinema, it moves into other speakers that aren’t the centre speaker where your dialogue is coming out. You can have your cake and eat it in the world of sound.
Geektown: Were there any particular sequences that were memorable for you for ‘Aquaman’ in terms of either being tricky to create or just fun to create?
Peter: Reel seven was pretty fantastic. That’s when they encounter the Trench. They’re sailing across to the end of the world, or the centre of the earth. Those creatures evolved a lot. When we first started working on that scene, they were just dudes in rubber suits stomping around on the deck. By the time it was finished, they were these crazy detailed monsters, really savage and scary. So, putting that sequence together was fun. There was a flare in there. Who doesn’t love a flare as a sound guy? Anything burning is usually pretty good. Then there was a flare underwater that guided them as they dove down.
It’s a scene that goes from a ship’s deck in the middle of a raging storm with lightning and crashing waves, and monsters, and harpoons, and breaking windows, and flares, to diving into the water, and a bubbling underwater flare. Then fighting on the bottom of the ocean, and then swimming through this tunnel where you could use the acoustics of the underwater world to have the screeches of the trench off in the distance. This was another way that we played with what it sounds like to be underwater, that type of bouncing, complex echo that’s not really a cavern, but is the way sound gets weird underwater. They travel through this tunnel. There’s a big chase. Then they go to some kind of time warp maelstrom that deposits them in the “Land that Time Forgot.”
That was a really fun sequence. It just had all the flavours and nutrition of a great sonic meal. Of course, the whole film was that way. Underwater is kind of like outer space. If you’re a sound guy with a leaning towards sound effects and sound design, you like to do motor racing films, underwater films, science fiction films, things where you’re dealing with stuff where the machines are so loud. Or war, where the machines have their own personality or just an entirely new world that you can create from scratch.
The Trench – Aquaman
Geektown: Yeah, you worked on the ‘Fast & Furious’ films, which must be great from the sound point of view because it’s lots of engines. You’ve got the superhero stuff, which must be brilliant to work on because there’re so many unique things in there. And then, ‘Game of Thrones’ of course, which is its own world of unique sounds too.
Peter: Yeah, if it wasn’t armour and horses, it was dragons and just so much good stuff. The largest explosion in television history – the green fire. Flaming arrows, battering rams. I mean, it really was a lot of fun. And I have to say, I haven’t done much in the world of episodic, but doing season two of ‘Game of Thrones’ and doing ‘Peacemaker’, having the scope, the breadth of a few hours to tell a story is really wonderful. It just seems like to have a good story, to have something with some scope and some character development, it’s pretty hard to cram that into two hours and not have things be pretty basic, pretty dumbed down so everybody can get it instantly. I do like what these two episodics that I’ve done have done with story. They’ve really, really been fantastic to work on because they’re so much fun to watch while you’re working on them.
Geektown: There is such a blending at this point of quality between TV and cinematic stuff. Particularly, with the Disney/Marvel/Star Wars, HBO, and some DC stuff, the quality is just up there. You could literally take so many of these things, like ‘Peacemaker’, show it on a big screen, and it would work.
Peter: Yes. For sure. If you can get your audience to sit there for seven hours. [Laughs]
Geektown: Well yes, there is that! [Laughs] We’re coming to the end of my time, but Is there anything else you want to mention? I know you’re working on Aquaman 2 right now, but I know you can’t talk about that. Is there anything else interesting coming up?
Peter: ‘Fast 10’ will be here before you know it! Well, it’ll be a year before that comes out, but that’s getting done and shooting. There’s a Bruckheimer film, ‘Secret Headquarters’, that will be out I think this summer that has the directors and picture editor of ‘Paranormal Activity’ 3 and 4, Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman. They’ve made a really fun, different kind of superhero movie. That’s the stuff. We hope for a little ‘Peacemaker’ season two. It might be nice sometime in the future, whenever James finishes with ‘Guardians of the Galaxy’.
Geektown: Yes. Yeah, that will be good.
Peter: I don’t know how he’ll be able to pull it off. I would say a large part of the magic of ‘Peacemaker’, was just how together James was in terms of construction, concept, and execution. It was just so tight, how he wrote this thing. I was not working for a guy who was fiddling around figuring out what it was that he had made, or how to tell his story. He knew all that long before I met him. He had this thing so buttoned up and so nailed down so that it just seemed like every dollar that was spent on that project went into achieving his vision. That was a real miracle. That just does not happen every day.
Geektown: Okay. The last question for you. If you had the opportunity to work on, we usually say any TV show, but I will give you film as well given your reference point, so it can be any TV show or movie, past, present or some sort of future genre that you haven’t worked in yet, what would it be?
Peter: Pyrotechnics, I think.
Geektown: So… something with lots of pyrotechnics in it?
Peter: Yeah. Yeah, maybe if they do a documentary series on pyro technicians, I’d like to do that. It all seems to be pyrotechnics in every film I work on. There’s always a scene with fireworks in it, or there’ll be a flare, or there’ll be something or another. The household burned down. Lots of opportunities. I think I’m in the right business!
‘Peacemaker‘ Season 1 can be found on Sky and NOW in the UK, and on HBO Max in the USA.
