Oscar-winning sound designer Eugene Gearty, who came on as SCAD’s chair of Sound Design in December, is set to give a Q&A following a screening of Michel Gondry’s “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” at SCADshow on Jan. 23.
“Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” is one of a number of films Gearty has designed the sound for, including numerous collaborations with filmmakers like Ang Lee, Martin Scorsese, and Joel and Ethan Coen. The screening is part of a day-long event called SCADFILM In Focus: The Art of Sound.
Before coming to work on “Eternal Sunshine,” Gearty had just finished work on Ang Lee’s film “Hulk.” He and his partner, Philip Stockton, were called in by Focus Features to meet with Gondry. Gearty said he thought Gondry was skeptical at first — after all, his movie was rather lo-fi compared to “Hulk.”
“He, I think, was questioning whether we were the right group for the job,” Gearty said. “We got the opportunity. We did what we call a temp mix, where we put in individual things just to get an idea of how it’s going to be, and we broke the ice very well from that point.”
For “Eternal Sunshine,” the creative idea behind the sound design in the film was the concept of erasure. One of Gearty’s favorite sound moments in the film comes in a scene where Joel (Jim Carrey) gets out of a car to yell at Clem, the girlfriend he’s trying to erase from his memory (Kate Winslet).
To get the proper effect on dialogue in the scene, Gearty went to Red Hook in Brooklyn and played back some of the scene’s dialogue and recorded it “in-situ” — or, the recording sounds in their natural environment.
“I put [the recording] up against a brick wall, I turned my mic away about 90 degrees, and got this nice, reflective quality,” he said.
Gearty said that Gondry was pretty hands off and gave him free rein to do what he wanted, which is very rarely the case with directors. That relationship varies by director, but it’s usually a give and take of feedback and development. Martin Scorsese, for example, always gives examples of what he wants. When Gearty was working on “Hugo,” they watched Jacques Tati’s movie “Playtime,” which helped Gearty come up with the sound for the inspector’s boots.
“Marty’s amazing, because he’s got this depth of film knowledge that he is relying on to direct us,” he said.
Gearty has worked on a number of films with Ang Lee, including 2000’s “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.” They have a close creative relationship, and the director is very particular, he said — for example, if someone is in a fight and gets hit on the wrist, it has to sound different than if they were to be hit on the shoulder.
The one sound in “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” that Gearty said he had free reign to design was the sound of the Green Destiny sword. That sound ended up being serendipitous —when Gearty first heard the score for the film, he realized that composer Tan Dun had used a waterphone — the same instrument that Gearty used for the sword.
“We just hit upon something,” he said. “It has to be right, if two guys came up with it!”
While he has worked on big movies in the past and loves the work his fellow sound designers pull off in films like “F1” and “Oppenheimer,” Gearty said he prefers to work on smaller films. He recently worked on Oliver Hermanus’ film “The History of Sound,” which came out last year.
“At this point in my career, I’m looking for beautiful, delicate things,” he said.
When it comes to how he’s seen sound design evolve over the course of his career, Gearty said the biggest change is how blurred the lines between sound mixing and editing have become.
“It goes back to the 50s, if not the 40s, where, if you were an editor, you took a piece of magnetic sound film stock, you cut in a piece of dialogue, and that was your job,” Gearty said. “The mixer, then, would mix that. There was a very strong separation of church and state.”
Gearty said he was a proponent early on in his career of learning both sides of the craft, and was happy when the Academy Awards decided to combine its two sound awards into one in 2020. He said that while he thinks big projects will still require an “army” of a sound team, the future of sound design will be more individualistic.
“The future sound designer coming out of say, SCAD, is going to be one person doing all the disciplines,” he said. “Cutting the dialogue, cutting the sound effects, creating the mix, editing the music, mixing the music – that’s all a very real, future-appropriate way of working.