Back in April, Searchlight Pictures released the film “Chevalier” about Joseph Bologne, one of the most acclaimed black composers of his generation. The film premiered to rave reviews at the Toronto Film Festival and was distributed theatrically throughout the USA. A few months ago, the company released it on Hulu for streaming.

With the film now widely available, OperaWire had a chance to speak with Supervising Sound Editor Greg Hedgepath, who has worked on films such as “Twister,” “The Incredible Hulk,” “Footloose,” “Selma,” “Straight Outta Compton,” and “Queen & Slim.” He spoke about the process of working on “Chevalier” and what his position entails.

OperaWire: How did you got involved with this project with “Chevalier?”

Greg Hedgepath: Well, over time I’ve been doing more and more music-based projects or music-centric projects. And so the people at the studio reached out to me and asked if I could get involved and I said sure I’d love to. It wasn’t a done deal by any means. I had to meet the director and the editor, and it went off very well. I basically told him that I’ve always wanted to do a period piece because “Chevalier” takes place during the beginning of the French Revolution. So that just opened up the door for all kinds of things to do with sound. So I knew I wouldn’t have to worry about the exteriors or the environment being boring because as the movie goes along, the revolution gets bigger and bigger, so we could then grow all of the outside ambiance and everything, which really adds to the mood of the movie and you know what we sound people love to do is manipulate the room, as do composers, because that’s what we do psychologically. We kind of mess with your emotions.

So I met with the director and I had done some research on Chevalier and so first they sent me the script and I read that. Then they gave me what’s called a Beats page, which talks about all the different points. So I highlighted the heck out of that, really read that over to see where they were coming from. But I think what helped to sell it wasn’t intentional, but I went on Wikipedia and got the Wikipedia page on Chevalier. It’s about 14 pages because there’s so much about him. And at the time it had all kinds of little tabs because there is so much information and I read through it. And at the meeting the director said, well, it looks like you’re pretty well prepared. I said, Oh yeah, I would love to sink my teeth into this. I told him, “I don’t even have the gig and I can’t wait.” And so I think my enthusiasm got to him. So he hired me.

OW: Having done so much research prior to starting work on the film, what did you learn about Chevalier that you then brought to the film? 

GH: He was a former slave. His father, who was his slave master, brought him to France, and so he knew no French and he knew nobody. He was the only black person in his environment. And as a supervising sound editor, I’m usually the only black person in my environment.

He was also an amazing composer, amazing violinist, and master fencer. And in the film, he beats one of the best swordsmen at the time, which really happened and it happened in a bar as opposed to in the way it’s depicted in the film. In the film, it looks more formal but he would fence anyone anywhere. When he was training, he beat his fencing master. So there was that. He was also a master horseman. And there’s just a whole list of things that anything this guy attacked, he became a master of it. He’s called Chevalier, Saint George because Chevalier means, soldier to the court of King George. So that was another interesting thing because he was the only black person who was a soldier to King George. So he had to be special and he did get a chance to lead troops for the revolution. When the revolution really kicked up, his regiment really did very well because they were led by him. He’s just a fascinating guy.

OW: Supervising Sound Editor is a job most people do not know what it entails. What is a description of your work on a film like “Chevalier?”

GH: Sure. To explain what I do, it’s best if I give an overview of the sound process which is really rudimentary because it’s pretty involved when you are getting into it. The way we work is we have different people working on different disciplines. So we have somebody working on just the dialogue, somebody working on all of the dialogue replacement, which is called ADR or automated dialogue replacement. We also have somebody working on dialogue ADR, and somebody working on effects backgrounds, depending on how involved the film is. A designer like this film had a lot of design. I did most of it, but I did have some other people work on it. Then there’s music, and the music department, interestingly enough, is totally separate from everything else. So the composers go off and do their thing. The picture department gives them the picture and they’re composing. The director and producers go over and hear the music. The sound team never hears it until we get to the final stage. That sets up an interesting situation where they’ve been living with this music and loving this music and we’ve been doing all this cool stuff and sound design and then when the two get together, it’s the first time they’re hearing our work. So they tend to want to hear the music and play it louder. So I’ve learned over time to do that. And then as time goes on, try to pull it back and play some of the other things where it’s needed.

As a supervising sound editor, I’m in charge of all the editors except for the music departments. But I’m in charge of all those different disciplines and keeping track of what they’re doing. The ADR and looking at how it’s going and whether we have to replace something. I look at whether we have to record sound effects.

For example, there is a scene where Chevalier is walking with a character named Montalembert in Montalembert’s garden and they’re walking on gravel. Our Foley crew, which is another aspect that is anything that’s not a sound effect that you cut from a library, has to go in and do additional work. So sometimes if somebody puts their hands together and rubs them, I could find that in a sound effects library, but it would take me longer to find it. So we’ll record the motion. Anything that people interact with or when they’re walking, that’s Foley. So in this case, the Foley people used gravel that wasn’t the right size and it was too small or something too crunchy. So I just went out and recorded some gravel myself. I just had the picture on my phone and I went with a microphone walking, recorded it and we put it in the movie and it worked.

So it’s up to me to figure those things out before we get to the dub stage so that we don’t have surprises and so that people don’t we have to rethink the entire idea.

And I have to have an idea of what I want to say with a scene and what I want it to sound like in my head. You know, we’re not just throwing it against the wall. So for instance in a scene where he looks toward something; I have to think, “what distracts him?” “What sound would that be?” “Or what’s going on off-screen?” “Or is the off-screen stuff too loud?”

And that will help me figure out whether I have to pull it back so we can focus on the guy.  And so it’s figuring out in advance, what might I want to do in this situation.

OW: How many tracks of sound do you have for a film like “Chevalier?”

GH: We probably have thousands of tracks, let’s say 50 tracks of individual sound. So we have to then put that through a funneling process to where we make it more manageable. So we’ll take, let’s say the dialogue is 14 tracks, 80 yards, eight tracks. We’ll take those and maybe we’ll end up with dialogue that’s six tracks, 80 yards. We try to funnel it down so that the effects which are 500 tracks and we bring it out to maybe 25 tracks so it’s in a little sub. So when we mix you know exactly where it is and you don’t have to hunt for it. So it’s all about the organization. 

OW: You said that music and sound come together at different points. However, this movie has a number of scenes that actually have musical numbers. There’s a duo between Mozart and Chevalier and there’s a bunch of operatic scenes as well. How does that work when you’re doing the sound work? Was the process different on this film?

GH: The process does vary because, for example, if you’re doing a concert movie, then you’re going to have a lot of live music from the venue and sometimes they actually redo some of it or add parts to it. In this case, none of the music that you see is being played by the actors. So in the duel at the beginning between Mozart and Chevalier, they were performing a playback track that had been recorded in advance.

The guy who plays Chevalier, his name is Kelvin Harrison. Kelvin was a child violinist and as he got older and into acting, he stopped. But what he did was take lessons to kind of get his technique back together. And the guy who played Mozart interestingly was an actual violinist who had never acted before and I think he does an amazing job. But if you look at the picture, you’ll see sometimes we’re looking over Mozart’s arms and you can see his hands. But Chevalier will be in the background playing. But just by nature, seeing him play and you know that everything he’s doing is right, it makes everything that Chevalier is playing right. Your brain says this is real, basically because Mozart’s so good.

And also because Kelvin is so good at following the hand movement up and down the neck. 

In the case of the music like that scene in the beginning playing, they used Mozart’s actual piece. But the composer had to compose what Chevalier was playing because he was playing against what Mozart was playing. So that was something totally new and it had to be in the style of the period, but it had to be different enough so that we could tell who was playing.

Something about that scene was redone because we couldn’t differentiate the two of them enough. And in that case, we did a lot of tricks where when Mozart’s playing, Chevalier is a little bit lower and then we switch levels when we’re tight on Chevalier or when they’re apart, we then pan them left and right. Most of the time they’re both in the center, but when they’re on different sides of the stage we can get away with, we pan them.

But we don’t want to spend a lot of time going mono stereo, because then your head gets jerked around. So we would do it in specific places and there were a lot of things we found out while we were making that scene where for example Chevalier, if you listen to him, while he’s playing, especially towards the end of that, we never really change perspective on him. Meaning that when we’re away from him, we don’t lower his level or when we’re right up on him. There’s only one time where you cut to the balcony, where we pulled him down and made it sound more ambient as if you’re in the hall. And the rest of the time we’re right with him. And normally in a film like this, you would kind of go with perspectives, but in this case, we wanted the music to flow, so we didn’t want to interrupt it too much.

So that stuff was all prerecorded. And again, they’re playing back to it.

OW: What about the opera scenes?

GH: There’s a scene where Chevalier is interviewing Divas to be in his opera. He’s interviewing these women and women come in and they’re singing and not doing it very well. He’s just getting frustrated. He’s trying to be nice. In the scene, it turns out the women who were singing were actual opera singers and they had to be taught how to sing badly because they just wanted to sing on cue and when they did their vibratos, it was against everything that was holy to them. But they did it and did a good job.

So for the most part in this film, everything was prerecorded, even the end of the film where we had the symphonic scenes. 

Where we came in, was when we had to decide sometimes the way it was mixed and since they recorded on a big sound stage they would feature certain instruments and we had to rebalance the mix because it wasn’t working for what we wanted or wherever the camera was placed.

Most of our time was spent really shaping what was given to us. I mean there’s no way we could ever just take the score and just put it up and let it go. There’s all kinds of things when we’re mixing that happened because we don’t just have two speakers up front. And then if you are doing Dolby Atmos, which we did for this, sometimes you have to determine what you’re putting into the additional speakers. And sometimes it would be music or musical instrument, sometimes it would be an offscreen chorus, something passing by that we wanted to highlight, or in the instance where Chevalier has gotten drunk watching a concert and goes and meets the Queen, he’s walking down the hallway it’s very designy and kind of otherworldly with voices played backwards and just weird sounds. And lot of that we use the Atmos channels for and put things in different spaces.

OW: What was your favorite scene to work on?

GH: There were a bunch and I think each scene had something interesting about it. The hallway scene because nobody told me what to do. I just kind of did it. I did my impression of it. So that was fun. When he walks into this big party, the Queen’s having, I wanted everything to be from his perspective. And then once we cut to the Chamber Orchestra playing, everything’s back to normal.

There are people talking and the Chamber Orchestra is playing. And I just decided, I want to go back to normal. And I crossed my fingers hoping the director would be OK with it, which he was. 

There is another scene where he goes into the alley and he sees all the African people playing. So this is Chevalier’s introduction to black people, basically because he hadn’t been around. So he’s out of water because they’re playing music thats from the islands. So it’s a kind of rhythm he’s never heard before and so he walks in and the guy invites him to come sit down and play the drum on a stretched Scott skin over real African drum. So the way it was originally presented to us and the music editor put it in this way, was that the idea was that Joseph Bologna Chevalier was a genius and he could play any instrument. So the thought was he was going to sit down with his drum and just nail it. Then at the end, he was really going to do a solo. But I looked at it and immediately I could see he wasn’t playing the drums because of the way it was cut.

That kind of thing drives me nuts. So what I did was I asked the music editor and said, “would you mind if I took a stab at this?” And he was ok with that. So I took the piece and I took the drums and edited them so that they were closer to where his hand was hitting. If I made it right where his hand was hitting him off-beat. I didn’t want him to be that bad, so I went through each beat. And each time you move it, it changes the feel.  So there we have to be judicious and it turned out great because people think he played the drums. 

OW: When you guys were sound editing the film, what kind of sounds did you discover as you were creating the soundscape?

GH: Well, I would say that when you know, when you’re doing a contemporary film, there’s almost a shorthand. There are certain things that people, expect to hear or when they hear it, they know what it is. You know, if you hear a motorcycle go by off-screen, you know what that is. Or if somebody rides a bike by, you know what that sounds like. If somebody drives a car by, you know what that sounds like. Helicopter, airplane. So we all know those things. So when you have a period piece like this one, you know it will have to sound different. We don’t want to have the kind of things that people will recognize on a daily basis except for footsteps, and horses. People know what horses sound like.

When I saw the screening of it the first time, I was like, “Oh my gosh, everything is cobblestones” and I pretty much cut the effects from my sound. I had cobblestones in my library and fortunately, that worked and we were able to use that. So we have the cobblestones, we have the horses and then we found that you really had to look at where you are in the city to determine what you’re going to put in, because on the one hand, you can be in the city center, but you can still hear chickens. You still may hear an anvil from a blacksmith, or a church bell. But whereas contemporary movies, when you’re in Beverly Hills, it’s very quiet or when you know it’s different than downtown New York.

So we had to think of this in terms of being more like their version of downtown New York. So we had to put a lot of little sounds in hearing their voices. We really positioned every voice in space where we wanted them. And sometimes we would have some sounds, of a carriage creaking or something. You wouldn’t know what that sound is, but because it sounds organic and like something that’s wood and metal that you would hear from that time, it just works. You don’t have to know what every single sound is, but it just can’t sound out of place. And we also had to think where are we in the city? So what animals will they have here? In the cities, we have more dogs barking whereas when you’re in the country, we had birds and distant horses and crows. So we were always being cognizant of where we were. And we just had to think outside-of-the-box.

We’re just layering it on and it’s almost like you’re creating your own jigsaw puzzle, but there’s no painting on it. You’re just putting pieces together and then you paint on it and then you go and make another piece and you paint on it.