Karen Baker Landers on the Surgical Use of Sound in ‘Pearl’

Director Ti West takes an 'Old Hollywood' approach to Pearl, the second film in his X horror film series. Set in 1918, the film tells the backstory of Pearl, who grows up on an isolated farm in Texas. Here, 2x-Oscar-winning supervising sound editor Karen Baker Landers talks about evolving the sound to match Pearl's descent into madness, using subtle, natural sounds to create feelings of anxiety and tension, working sound around a massive score, showing restraint on the gore sounds, and she talks about the sound of specific scenes, like the subjective approach on Pearl's dance tryout, and more!

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Interview by Jennifer Walden, photos courtesy of A24

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Director Ti West took an unexpected approach on his X film follow-up titled Pearl. (The third film in the series MaXXXine is currently in the works). Pearl – set in 1918 – has an “Old Hollywood” aesthetic that immediately calls to mind The Wizard of Oz, with big score that carries the opening scenes. But the sound of the film evolves to match Pearl’s descent into madness. As she embraces her dark side, the world, sonically, retreats into its shell to escape the predator in its midst. This was intentionally (and masterfully, I might add) orchestrated by Oscar, BAFTA and MPSE Award-winning supervising sound editor/sound designer Karen Baker Landers at Formosa Group, as she reveals in this interview. The evolution is subtle, but by the time the film ends, you know that the world has changed to make room for Pearl.

Here, Landers talks about working with and against the look of the film, designing sounds to fit with a big “Hollywood” score upfront, and slowly evolving that approach to embrace the psychological horror of Pearl’s craziness. Landers discusses the restrained use of horror sounds, the use of foley creaks and groans to enhance the farmhouse’s negative vibe, and the subjective experience of being inside Pearl’s brain during her dance tryout. She talks about the subtle sounds in specific scenes, like Pearl’s mom singing a lullaby in the basement and Pearl taking a bath, the decision to leave Mia Goth’s performance of Pearl’s monologue raw and unrefined, and much more!

Pearl | Official Trailer HD | A24

What were director Ti West’s goals for sound on Pearl? There is a tie to his previous film X, in that Pearl is Pearl’s backstory, but sonically, was there any connection?

Sound supervisor/sound designer Karen Baker Landers

Karen Baker Landers (KL): This was the first time I had worked with Ti. I was originally going to help out on his previous film X but my schedule didn’t allow it. So when I knew I was going to work with Ti on Pearl, I spent a couple of weeks watching every film of his that I could find, including X. But Pearl was completely different. They’re very different films.

Pearl is an homage to the Old Hollywood aesthetic – from the sound and use of score to the look of the film. True to that style, the score plays prominently and carries a lot of weight. What did that mean for you in terms of sound – for the use, density, and placement of sound effects?

KL: Pearl‘s technicolor “Old Hollywood” feel messes with your senses because it looks and feels like one thing but then as you’re watching it, you’re thinking, “Well, that just happened. That’s odd.” Everything just got odder and weirder and weirder as the film goes along. The whole film (until the end), you’re kind of left of center in how you’re supposed to feel, emotionally. That was what I got out of the film.

When I approach the sound, I’m always thinking, “What best tells the story?” The score was certainly a character in the movie, and so from a sound design perspective, we had to find the moments to dance around it. Ti was great with that. He would bring the score down very low so that maybe it was just percolating underneath this weird environment, this weird world that just got weirder and weirder.

We did try to keep the sound up front when it was appropriate. For instance, in the beginning, you hear the rooster crow, some chickens, and pretty birds up front. You feel it physically in the speakers up front. As the film goes on, that gets less and less. And, we do have the music spread out, especially for theatrical release. We do a full surround mix with music and backgrounds, but it’s to varying degrees because it’s all about the experience for the audience and where you want their focus to be.

We really played off of the Old Hollywood aesthetic in the beginning…

Peter Staubli (sound designer/re-recording mixer) was very instrumental in the placement of sounds. Ti is super involved in this process, too. We really played off of the Old Hollywood aesthetic in the beginning, but you start to see that something’s up with this mom, and Pearl’s a little odd. When Pearl goes into town and meets the projectionist, we’re still kind of keeping it a happy light town, but when things start to shift in the film and you go “uh oh,” that’s where we stopped with playing that approach. We went completely “psychological” or “emotional” and almost played against the image.

…but when things start to shift in the film and you go ‘uh oh,’ that’s where we stopped with playing that approach.

In terms of score, we got temp tracks early on, which was great. That helped a lot because it’s such a specific character. Without the temp tracks, it would’ve been really difficult to know what’s going to take the lead – whether it be design or score, or both. There are times when sound takes it. There are times when music takes it. There are times when they work really well together. For instance, during the dance audition where Pearl is up on stage and we go into that weird World World I part with explosions. That was very interesting.

I’ve worked on a lot of different types of films and, I have to say, Ti is a true filmmaker. He’s just in it. He reminds me very much of a Quentin Tarantino-type director. I think his brain is just interesting to be around.

There’s an evolution of the story as Pearl really embraces the darker aspects of her nature. How were you able to help support that with sound?

KL: In terms of environments, when you have somebody that’s a predator or is weak or is very kind and loving, nature reacts to that. The world reacts and gets that energy. And so how does the world react in this film? In this time period, we were working with farm animals or winds or insects. How can we use that to make the world react to this kind of crazy?

This story is Pearl’s descent into madness. Using some of the farm animals and things in those moments, we try to subtly reflect that without doing a caricature. But, these animals get that they’re around a predator. She’s getting in deeper and deeper into her sickness and her madness and she knows it. How does sound support that world? That’s one of the things we tried to work with quite a bit. By the end, her world has just gone quiet.

By the end, her world has just gone quiet.

There are some pretty graphic kills in here, but when you think about it, it’s really about mental illness and knowing you’re sick, but nobody is telling you that you’re sick. We could have gone campy and really have done some fun goofy/gory stuff, but – first of all – Ti wouldn’t have allowed that. And I wouldn’t even think to go there because this film really had this edge to it. Here’s this young woman on a farm with her elderly parents who are getting older and her father is in a wheelchair and he can’t speak. Her mom has some serious issues, too.

I like to do a deep dive into the characters. It’s just the way I like to work. It’s fun to really listen to the director and see what his thoughts are. Ti wrote it, and he directed it. He was the picture editor. So I was able to really do deep dive into these characters, and think about the mental illness side of this. How would Pearl hear certain things? How would she hear the projector?

When you’re full of anxiety or depression, sounds are a little sharper. That’s subtle sonically, but it has a cumulative effect by the end of the film.

When you’re full of anxiety or depression, sounds are a little sharper. That’s subtle sonically, but it has a cumulative effect by the end of the film. We’re trying to set you in her world mentally. The audience would never realize consciously that we did that, but they’ll feel it. The whole approach was geared more toward mental illness in a time period where you really didn’t have resources and then make it kind of fun and creepy, too.

When Pearl was out there chopping up the body parts, we went very quiet. It’s not graphic gore, not a lot. It’s very, very quiet. And then when her mom sings her the lullaby (or she thinks her mom’s singing her the lullaby) everything becomes very quiet. You can hear Pearl walk down the steps; you hear her dress brushing the sand off the steps. The step creaks when she sits down. Again, super subtle, but it’s the kind of sound work that I love because it’s surgical. You really have to go in and be specific, and that takes a lot of thought and effort.

I liked your approach to the sound of the death scenes – like Pearl strangling her dad off-screen, or the projectionist and the pitchfork, and Mitsy and the ax. It wasn’t gory; it just made the point that Pearl has done horrible things…

KL: She does these very graphic murders and killings, but you still care about her because she’s broken. That was our approach because I don’t consider this a horror film by any means. I consider it a psychological thriller.

I never get asked to do true classic horror films (and I would love to) but one thing I do appreciate in films that I watch, like in The Black Phone for instance, is the restraint. That could have been budgetary – they shot in just a few locations – but what restraint they showed in making that movie. There’s some graphic violence, like kids beating up kids and the dad hitting his daughter with the belt, but the really horrible stuff is implied and not shown. And I really respect that.

Everything in the farmhouse is so squeaky and creaky. For instance, there’s that first big bedroom door squeak that acts like a record scratch dissolving the music of Pearl’s fantasy when her mom finds her dancing around her room. Were you able to go out and record some door and floor creaks and squeaks? Any helpful sound libraries? How about foley?

KL: For squeaks and creaks, we didn’t go out and record because we have such a huge library with millions of sounds. There were things we did record though that needed to be specific to the film.

That’s exactly right, though. That squeak is kind of a record scratch. That took forever to get right. We made it longer; we made it shorter, trying to find what’s the impact emotionally. Do we take it until the score goes completely out? Do we stop it midpoint and let the score carry out? Do we reverb it out? But the sound itself was something that we pulled from our library.

Did foley help contribute to the squeaks and creaks? Can you talk about the foley, your collaboration with them, and some key sounds (or some of their notable contributions) to the film?

KL: Yes, foley helped with that. I used a foley group called Postred in Georgia (the country). They are super artistic. I was introduced to this team by Wylie Stateman. He started my career, and he’s brilliant. Just look at his body of work. He understands foley and was probably the first person who introduced me to foley as being artists who are creating sounds instead of just foley, oh, those are the ones who do the feet. It’s so much more than that. I learned my love of foley from Wylie. And I learned all about miking and how to get sounds that are huge, how to record them properly so you can play them back and they don’t hurt. They’re big, they’re impressive, but they’re not painful. All those kinds of things I learned from Wiley, and that’s how I met Beso Kacharava and Tina Babakishvili from Postred.

I’m a huge fan of foley and I’ve been so fortunate to work with some of the best foley artists on the planet.

I’m a huge fan of foley and I’ve been so fortunate to work with some of the best foley artists on the planet. Foley is more than what people think. You can go onto a foley stage and do design elements and play with sounds and orchestrate to picture.

For the foley on this, I wanted to take the approach that the house is old, but it has also absorbed a lot of negative energy from what’s been going on with the family. So the house just needs to have its moans and groans and play off of things. Like, we use the house to punctuate the mom a couple of times. For instance, in my mind, when mom enters a room and the door makes that classic deep slow creak as she enters, that’s the house making a tired, old, “here we go again” sound.

For the foley on this, I wanted to take the approach that the house is old, but it has also absorbed a lot of negative energy…

In the barn, you’ll hear the old windmill creaking at certain times. You’ll hear wind going through the barn. To pick those sounds out tonally takes a lot of time because it really has to convey the right emotion. It has to feel right and also work with the score because some sounds can rub.

So the house was definitely meant to feel like it’s been through a lot and has absorbed a lot of negativity.

Let’s look at some great scenes. There’s that huge thunderstorm when Pearl and her mom finally have it out. During the fight, her mom’s dress catches on fire. What went into the sound of this scene, and how were you able to use sound to help add to the tension here?

KL: This is an example of nature reacting. I think women are super in tune with that. I think we just have a sixth sense – whether we choose to listen to it or not – about our environment. I think we can affect that. Just as your animals know when you’re in a good mood or a sad mood or whatever, they react to you. I took that idea one step further in the kitchen scene when they have their showdown, using more powerful booms for Pearl’s energy and more cracky high thunder claps for mom’s rage and energy. Nature is battling it out with them and the dad is just stuck there quietly in the middle.

We started with some rolling thunder earlier on in the movie, like the storm’s a brewin’ and something’s up.

We started with some rolling thunder earlier on in the movie, like the storm’s a brewin’ and something’s up. Nature’s picking up on it. Pearl is almost at the height of her crazy and the storm and the fire reflect that, as does the way her mom slams the table.

All those were designed and then mixed by Peter to create a build. You have these hits on the table as mom’s slamming her fist and you need to play against her emotion and you need to have that match, but you don’t want to get too big too soon. You want to build and build and build into a crescendo.

…you don’t want to get too big too soon. You want to build and build and build into a crescendo.

That scene took a lot of work. It was working but then we deconstructed it a little bit and moved some of the thunder around to punctuate different moments and that didn’t work. It was about finding the right moments to punctuate emotion – finding the right type of thunder or whatever to punctuate that moment. Who are we playing? Is it Pearl? Is it the mom?

We’re trying to also get the fire to crackle through a little bit, to let the audience know that this is going to be a player.

We had to carefully build that up. If there’s a lot going on visually in the scene, you should have the least amount of sound going on because otherwise, the audience is not in the scene. They’re just getting through it. It’s loud. There’s too much going on. So we tried to balance that in that scene so the audience could still feel engaged in the argument, hear the dialogue, but also feel some of the subtleties. Peter did a great job mixing that scene and that build.

What was your approach to Pearl’s powerful monologue as she’s sitting at the table with Mitsy?

KL: That monologue we kept as close to unaffected dialogue as I’ve ever done – not cleaned up, and not really treated very much. Ti really wanted that to be raw, to be her performance with all the imperfections in there that normally you’d clean out when you’re cutting dialogue and mixing it to make it more pristine.

I’ve never kept a scene so raw. Ti’s thought was that it was more engaging this way.

That’s an exceptional scene, not only from this perspective of Mia Goth’s performance or the directing and the writing, but from my experience in the films I’ve done. I’ve never kept a scene so raw. Ti’s thought was that it was more engaging this way. We did do a cleaned-up version, and it was not nearly as engaging. So we went back to the original tracks and really just let it play.

We did clean out some things like maybe a thunk that came from outside or something that wasn’t part of the scene. And we did our background work and the music’s pulsating under there just a little bit. It’s almost imperceptible. But that dialogue is what’s impressive to me. Ti just went for it. We left it as raw as we possibly could, and you feel it. That’s one of the reasons that scene is as powerful as it is. It’s nothing that you can point your finger to, but cumulatively you feel it.

We did do a cleaned-up version, and it was not nearly as engaging. So we went back to the original tracks and really just let it play.

I could watch that scene over and over (and I did!), and every time it sucked me in because of the sound, the music, and everything, but mostly because of the story and performance. This is a confused girl. She’s just a girl with a crazy mom in an isolated environment. And Pearl knows she’s sick and she can’t stop. She even says, “I gotta admit it felt good the first time I killed something.” Oh my God, I get chills. That was so well done from a story perspective, to leave something that raw and not add little subtle stingers or moments or make it too pristine or add the right breaths. She’s doing her thing and it’s brilliant. I don’t say brilliant very often – almost never because I think it’s thrown around so much – but I think that scene was brilliant.

Pearl and Mitsy go to the dance tryout, and Pearl gives her ‘best’ performance. It’s one of the more subjective moments in the film. Can you talk about your use of sound for this scene inside the church?

KL: We start with the girls chattering outside, setting the tone. For me, when going into a scene, I start to sonically prepare that emotion maybe two scenes prior. (If I can, but not all films lend themselves to that). This film lent itself to doing little subtle shifts, like the cars or the bikes are just maybe a little loud. It’s very specific. We’re trying to keep the audience in Pearl’s head.

For me, when going into a scene, I start to sonically prepare that emotion maybe two scenes prior.

So the exterior shot is very quiet. You just hear a bunch of chatter and wind and the distant sound of barbed wire banging against a fence, just to give it a feeling of space and size for this location.

Then when Pearl goes inside the church, she’s on. She’s completely in her brain so we distorted the voices and we played with a lot of design to show that. The whole weird tonal world is the sonic equivalent of what it would feel like to be in Pearl’s brain. She’s full crazy.

When she starts her performance, it’s all pretend again and make-believe. I’m so happy Ti let us go for it, with the explosions and the fireworks and the tap dancing because we’re in Pearl’s make-believe world.

The whole weird tonal world is the sonic equivalent of what it would feel like to be in Pearl’s brain.

Then, when she gets rejected, we’re outside and it’s very still. There’s just wind and that distant banging. We’re in that world where Pearl is struggling with her fight to not go full crazy.

So that was an arc, coming into the dance tryout and she’s prepping, then going into the fun dance and the make-believe world that she puts herself in, and then into total rejection with her sitting outside and crying.

And that crying is incredible. Ti just let her go for it. We just played with the subtle footsteps of Mitsy coming up to her. There are certainly sound design things that we could have put in but it wasn’t right. It wouldn’t be right for this style of film. We just let it be as raw as her performance. We tried to sonically stay away from those moments like we had done during the table monologue. When she’s outside after she gets rejected for the dance tryout, we stay away from doing anything other than supporting it. Maybe we elevate the wind or have some distant bird in reaction (not randomly placed). Everything is strategically placed to react to something. Those moments, when it’s Mia Goth as Pearl, we really just go as raw as possible. And it paid off, I think.

There’s also a nice, quiet scene that I appreciate as a sound person, and I have to say kudos to you and Peter on it. Pearl is listening to her mother crying, and as Pearl moves from her room to down the hall, the sound of the crying changes to reflect the occlusion of the walls and the reverb of the spaces. It’s a quiet scene, and the sound of that crying is the main focus. What can you tell me about this scene?

KL: Thank you. Peter mixed that and he’s got a really great feel for that kind of stuff. One of the very first things Ti said was, “I hate sound that doesn’t seem like it fits the picture.” And I do too.

We all hear something that doesn’t fit the picture and think, “That’s not what that would sound like.” Even if you’re making something up completely, it still has to fit. Peter did a great job of keeping that crying in that space using reverbs and other tricks that we use to make things feel like they’re in their natural space so that as the audience, you are part of that journey in Pearl’s perspective.

What are you most proud of in terms of your sound work on Pearl? What made this film a unique experience for you?

KL: That’s a good question. I tend to always gravitate toward the subtle moments. I loved the kitchen scene and the whole storm while they were having their argument, but it was the stuff in between that stands out for me. Like, when she’s in the bathtub and her dad is in the wheelchair next to her. We played with the water and tried to make the tub feel as visceral as we could. That was a scene where we surgically tried to make the sound very specific and real. We’re out of the score here for a while, and when mom comes in, her step makes the floor creek and so we’re kind of introducing mom again. The backgrounds were subtle and the water heater is subtle, but it’s all in there. It’s this subtle sonic concoction that just pops up in the right place and has its little moment and then drifts away. I love the scene in the bathroom with her in the bathtub.

It’s this subtle sonic concoction that just pops up in the right place and has its little moment and then drifts away.

And I loved the restraint that was shown during the monologue, and when she’s riding into town at night. There’s the night shot with her sneaking out the window, and riding past the cornfield, we have some interesting design in there, playing off of what’s going on inside her head. The design on the cut to the cornfield is eerie but beautiful because she’s going to see the projectionist, so she’s in a happy state of mind. Those kinds of things are what I loved. It would be hard for the general audience to look at that and listen to it and go, “Oh yeah, I get what you’re saying.” But it’s very effective, the quiet scenes, and it takes a lot of work because everything plays. I hate being too loud. I’m super sensitive to that. They call me the loud police on the stage. I heard a quote from Smokey Robinson that when he’s recording and working with artists and they’ve gone too far, he’d say, “You’re walking past the money.” And I’ve never forgotten that saying, So that’s what I always think in my head. Like, “Oh, if we push that any further, are we walking past the money?” The subtleties can be left of center, they can be odd, but they have to be bedded in reality because you can’t go full fantasy in here. So that’s what I love so much about this film, the restraint, the arc, and those quiet moments.

A big thanks to Karen Baker Landers for giving us a behind-the-scenes look at the sound of Pearl and to Jennifer Walden for the interview!

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