Posted in: Movies, Warner Bros | Tagged: they will kill you

They Will Kill You Sound Engineers on Action, Kung Fu Effects & More

They Will Kill You sound engineers Jeff Pitts and Duncan McRae spoke to us about making every fight scene unique, new audio tricks & more.

Supervising sound editor Jeff Pitts (Cuckoo) and rerecording mixer Duncan McRae's (Masters of the Air) latest project is the Kirill Sokolov action comedy romp, They Will Kill You. As a love letter to 1970s kung fu action cinema, the film follows Asia Reaves (Zazie Beetz), who comes to the Vigil, a high-rise building in New York City, after getting separated from her sister (Myha'la) 10 years before, which has been the center of numerous disappearances over the years. Pitts and McRae spoke to Bleeding Cool about the exhaustive trial-and-error process to make every fight sequence unique, developing tricks with older sound equipment, and using one powerful machete.

How Sound Engineers Jeff Pitts and Duncan McRae on Distinguishing Fight Scenes in 'They Will Kill You' and Developing New Audio Tricks

BC: Between the sequences, was there any of them that stood out to you as far as just maybe a degree of difficulty or a way you wanted to separate those parts compared to the rest of the film?

Pitts: For me, I'd say probably the thing we worked on the most was probably the final scene with the creature in that scene, which took a lot of tweaking to get right. It was more about how it landed with audiences and where the filmmakers wanted to take it that we had to navigate. There was a lot of trial and error with that character. Not like something was wrong. It was like, "Okay, we're not going to be able to do it. The read of this is going to be totally different now, so now we need to recreate this in a different way that makes it more menacing." As far as the fight scenes go and the different action scenes, we tried to make them sound different, with each one shifting into its own thing. Even in that final fight, we tried to shift it even in the fight, so certain shots would have a different feeling to it, and I think we achieved that.

McRae: Yeah, absolutely. That final fight is a real balance between the power of the dialogue and the vocal elements, the intense driving music, and all the sound effects they had to really punch as well. It contrasts nicely with earlier fight sequences where there is no music, and that shows a great opportunity for variation in Kirill's filmmaking so we could portray them so differently. There is no feeling of repetition. It was quite fun, that aspect.

Was there any form of experimentation or things that you both probably don't do enough in the respective works that you're able to tap into more for a film, like 'They Will Kill You?'

Pitts: For me, I did a lot more work with using a TASCAM 4-track cassette deck, which I've used in the past, but not to this level. Everything that I designed, I pushed through there to try to get a different sound on it, and it has a knob so you can adjust the speed of tape playback. It was creating these weird little Dopplers with the sound hitting the tape. As far as deep diving into one thing, I'd say it's probably that.

The other thing was recording this main machete the main character wields in the film, and they sent me the original one, like the one they use for close-ups. They're like, "Be careful, because it's sharp; this is a legit machete. I'm like, "Okay, cool," and so I hang it on a mic stand so I can hit it and get some really cool resonance out of it. The fight is with a butcher knife, like a big butcher block knife, and we have one of those. I grab mine, and I'm whacking the sword, and then by the time I was done, I looked at my butcher knife and like the blade was all bent and broken. I mean, it's jacked up. I can't even use it now, but that machete has like a couple little tiny nicks, but still in perfect shape. I'm like, "Yeah, this is like the real thing."

Is there a genre you hope to work on more in the future, or are there similar projects like 'They Will Kill You'

Pitts: This got my appetite for old school kung fu style stuff, which I think would be interesting, because working on this helped me appreciate more like that style of sound effect. Everybody makes them; they don't make fun of it, but everybody makes those sounds with their mouth when they're like doing punches, or they're doing stuff, and it all comes from that. It's really cool that we're able to use some of that stuff, some of that style. Put that in this film, and I'd like to explore doing more of that.

McRae: Yeah, if we could convince Kirill to take a deep dive into a gritty Western, I think he could do some amazing things, and that could invite a lot of that real creativity that Jeff's talking about too. That would be fun.

Warner Bros They Will Kill You, which also stars Paterson Joseph, Tom Felton, Heather Graham, and Patricia Arquette, is available on 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray, DVD, and can be streamed on HBO Max.

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