How re-recording mixer Nick Offord found new ways to create tension on ‘Love and Death’ [Exclusive Video Interview]
When “Love & Death” re-recording mixer Nick Offord and the sound team met with director and executive producer Lesli Linka Glatter, she told them her mantra. “She said right out of the gate, ‘If anybody has a cool idea, let’s try it and let’s see how interesting and great we can make this,'” Offord tells Gold Derby (watch the exclusive video interview above). “And that’s kind of how we approached it.”
So what was Offord’s cool idea(s)? One of them was in the fifth episode, when Candy (Elizabeth Olsen) is driving to the house of her would-be lawyer Don Crowder (Tom Pelphrey). She’s about to tell someone — Don — for the first time that she killed her friend Betty Gore (Lily Rabe), having struck her 41 times with an ax. To hype herself up, she sings along to ABBA‘s “Take a Chance on Me” in the car. “I came up with the idea of when she really hits the chorus, let the downbeat of the song kick in full, and she just starts belting it out with the song,” Offord shares. “It was just a cool way to get into the song. It really felt like it propelled us into where she was going. It just seemed very Candy to let that take over.”
In general, Offord says the sound team’s goal was to create tension. The Max limited series also makes a tonal shift in the back half after the murder is committed and there’s more internalization within Candy, a stark contrast to the perky housewife who point blank tells Betty’s husband Allan Gore (Jesse Plemons) that she wants to have an affair with him in the premiere.
SEE Tom Pelphrey ‘never had more fun playing a role’ than he did playing Don Crowder on ‘Love & Death’
“That was the big note: How can we pull a little bit more tension out of what was happening? Whether it was using some of the great design that Brett [Hinton, supervising sound editor] came up with or the score from Jeff [Russo] or silence. You can just use silence and that just creates a lot of tension. That was a big factor in this mix: How were we going to make it tense but also fun?” Offord says. “Candy’s personality — she’s very bubbly, she’s very fun, so it was kind of walking this bridge of how do we get in and out of the fun? That was kind of what we were doing with the music too. We didn’t want getting in and out of the music to feel repetitive. [We were] using music to feed into the tension, to get out of it. It was a big collaborative effort.”
The most tense scene, of course, is the brutal murder, which viewers see as a flashback in the finale as Candy testifies in court. Cutting back and forth with the testimony, the scene features the women struggling over the ax before Candy takes a massive swing at Betty’s head and repeatedly strikes her — all while Betty’s dogs are barking outside. Offord, who earned Emmy nominations last year for his work on “Pam & Tommy” and “Dopesick,” wanted the scene to feel “very raw” and to stay out of the way of the performances by Olsen and Rabe.
“We were glad there was no music put over that scene because I don’t think it would’ve played as well,” he says. “Because they screamed and they sounded so brutal. I wanted to make sure those would really land. And cutting through and just have that kind of almost distortion type of feel to it, like pain and agony of complete chaos. And we’ll cut away to the ax hitting the refrigerator and that had to really pop and sting. [And then] we get a really big design hit that takes us out of it. It starts off very raw and real and stays real for the most part … and then at the end, when she does the final hit, we put a little bit more emphasis on it to take us out and she’s breathing and the panic sets in.”
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