Nashville-based soundman Peter Kurland, whose credits include the Oscar-winning films No Country for Old Men and Walk the Line, has worked with the Coens since their very first film, Blood Simple. “I began as their boom operator, and then became their production audio mixer on O Brother, Where Art Thou?, so we all came up in the business together,” he says. “When I started mixing for them, it felt like a very natural progression.”

Kurland describes doing audio for the Coens as a dream job. “They have a very clear idea of what they want and how to shoot it, and they’re extremely prepared, which helps me a lot. We know in advance what most of the shots will be and what the big technical challenges will be. Their shooting schedules are very short, they move quickly, and my job is to get great sound but also not slow them down at all.”

No Country was shot largely on location. “We began in Marfa, Texas, and shot there for several weeks and then moved to the Santa Fe, New Mexico area, where we shot the rest. Then we did some interiors on a stage.” For Kurland, the main audio issue was dealing with all the locations, “particularly shooting in the middle of the desert. So we needed a lot of radio mics, and what’s weird is that out in the middle of nowhere it’s very quiet but you also get all kinds of RF interference, which we had to work around. The Coens and I prefer to try and record everything on the boom, so virtually all the dialogue was mic’d using our principal exterior microphones ── the Sennheiser MKH-60s ─ and boom operator Randy Johnson.

“For the scenes on horseback and others that we couldn’t boom, we used Lectrosonics 200 Series radio mics in conjunction with Sanken COS-11 lavalier mics. I like the Sankens, as they sound great. They’re very small and easy to hide, as there’s a lot of action, and we never had a lot of time to set up and make changes. They’re perfect for the job.” For the interior sets, Kurland, who used a Zaxcom Deva II recorder and a Zaxcom Cameo mixer throughout the shoot, used Schoeps CMC641 as his principal indoor microphones. “They’re small and very good for scenes like the ones shot in air ducts,” he notes. “And we also like to record all the principal interior dialogue on those mics. And I’ve used them on nearly every film I’ve ever done.”

No Country also presented Kurland with a very unusual technical challenge. “We had several scenes on the phone between characters, and for one between Tommy Lee Jones and Kelly MacDonald, Kelly was actually in Scotland and we had to do those calls live ─ which is pretty unusual,” he notes. To do this, he used a Comrex DH-22 Telephone Interface and a Viking DLE-200 box, “which lets you take phones on the set and make them functional.”

Kurland also spent a lot of time with the postproduction mixing team: Skip Lievsay (also supervising sound editor), Craig Berkey (also sound designer) and Greg Orloff. Kurland comments that the situation was very unusual for him. “There was very little looping. The Coens don’t like it, and post was able to use nearly all the production tracks ─ even if we used alternate tracks ─ as I recorded multiple tracks.”

   
CONTACTS:

Comrex
www.comrex.com

Lectrosonics
www.lectrosonics.com

Schoeps
www.schoeps.de/E-2004/navigator.html

Sennheiser
www.sennheiserusa.com

Viking
www.vikingtelecomsolutions.com

Zaxcom
www.zaxcom.com