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Presumed Innocent Sound Mixer on Bringing Apple TV+ Series to Life

Re-recording mixer Christina Wen on going beyond the dialogue and more during her work on Apple TV+ and David E. Kelley's Presumed Innocent.

Christina Wen has built an impressive filmography across all major platforms from film, television, and video games working in sound in various behind-the-scenes roles from dialogue editor, recordist, sound designer, mix technician, and re-recording mixer. She's worked on several franchises like League of Legends, Call of Duty, The Last of Us, The Walking Dead, Dungeons & Dragons, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, The L Word, Halo, Shining Girls, The Boys, and Tekken. Her latest series is the David E. Kelley Apple TV legal drama Presumed Innocent, based on the 1987 Scott Turow novel of the same name. It was previously adapted into a 1990 film by Alan J. Pakula that starred Harrison Ford. The story follows prosecutor Rusty Sabich (Jake Gyllenhaal), who becomes the prime suspect in the murder of one of his colleagues. Wen spoke with Bleeding Cool about how she got involved with the project as a re-recording mixer, her initial expectations, a standout sequence, and her inspirations.

Presumed Innocent Re-Record Mixer Christina Wen on the Process of Capturing David E. Kelley's Vision to Screen

Bleeding Cool: What intrigued you about 'Presumed Innocent?'

'Presumed Innocent' was an interesting project to be a part of. I was brought on as a sound effects rerecording mixer when I started. I started watching it before I started the mixing process because it's a courtroom drama. There's a lot of family and power dynamics at work. I originally thought it would be more dialogue-driven. I didn't realize how big of a role sound effects were going to play until I got to the mix stage to get to work with our amazing producers, Andrew Balek and Trevor Baker, to realize how much sound effects contributed to tricking the audience into thinking a certain way about the plotline or how the story was going.

Does the limited series like 'Presumed Innocent' dramatically differ from your other work, and where were the biggest challenges you had in the series?

I would say a limited series or any streaming work in general has a lot of similarities. Working with different crews will always be different. Every film, TV, or sound crew I'm working with; I'm adapting to someone else's creative workflow. There's that. For your second question, I thought it was going to be, but it ended up being dialog-neutral. Music and sound effects also had a huge role in the mix. The biggest challenge was being bold and experimenting with mixing sound effects with very abstract methods at times and interpreting them. We worked closely with our producer, Trevor, a picture editor on the series. [Trevor] had a lot of vision, amazing years, and numerous sound and musical ideas on the stage. I listened frequently to his creative ideas, and then interpreted them to my language, manipulating the sound in the mixing. That was a fun challenge.

Did you only work with Trevor or did you also collaborate with David E. Kelley as well?

David E. Kelley's our showrunner, so we had a bigger playback for our executive producers after we were done with our internal round. What happens on the mix stage commonly is we'll have multiple playbacks. The first playback is often just for the internal sound group. That's with the sound supervisors, mix team, and editorial team. We're sitting down together to address any errors mix or sound-wise, like if there are missed things. That happens in the first playback to ensure we did the best we could before we playback to our picture editorial team and producers, who will be here for the playback.

That round was our first time presenting it to the production team, working closely with the picture team so they could provide further guidance on how certain things they envision sound. From there, we'll do another big playback after addressing another round of notes with a couple of creatives on the team. We'll do a final playback for a few executive producers, like our supervising director, Greg Yaitanes was there for every playback we're working on. Rachel Rusch Rich was the executive producer and was also there for our playback in the final round for all the episodes. I was lucky for the first episode because we were graced by JJ Abrams from Bad Robot during the playback.

Was there a particular episode of 'Presumed Innocent' that stood out to you the most you worked on more than the others?

I don't want to give away the plot line, but later in the season, I would say starting from episode four, when tensions get higher because people are prepared to go to court, and we're getting knee-deep into this murder investigation. It got a little busier. There are tons more stories to convey and many flashbacks for the main character, Rusty Sabich, where he's revisiting his memory the night of the murder. What happened? From there, we spent so much time with Trevor Baker and Andrew Balek, our producers, on the stage to experiment with playing with sound effects. Making certain things sound dreamy, plan boldly to create this narrative of whether the audience should believe Rusty's flashback, and that was a huge part of the song effects played in the series.

What were your inspirations growing up and coming up in the industry?

Growing up in Beijing, China, I was passionate about film and music. My parents love media and entertainment, and I grew up listening to cassette tapes of Michael Jackson and Madonna as they were huge fans. They're huge foreign movie fans, and we have a few directors in our country who were influential to me growing up. One of my favorite directors from my hometown is Stephen Chow, who directed 'Kung Fu Hustle' (2004). Being passionate about films at a young age drove me to work in the storytelling industry, and my love for music eventually led me to study sound engineering in college. I eventually found my path to become a recording mixer because I felt like sound is the language of the entertainment industry.

Presumed Innocent was renewed for a second season. The season one finale, which also stars Ruth Negga, Bill Camp, O-T Fagbenle, Chase Infiniti, Nana Mensah, Renate Reinsve, Peter Sarsgaard, Kingston Rumi Southwick, Elizabeth Marvel, and Lily Rabe, releases on July 24th on Apple TV.

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