Words by Charles Steinberg

The very first thing you notice about Brent Kiser is his dynamism. The jack of all sound mixing trades brings enthusiasm to the discussion that could make even a vacuum cleaner being repaired sound interesting. Every bit of this charisma was needed for his role as a sound supervisor on the new big-screen adventure that thumbs its nose at genre boundaries – Everything Everywhere All at Once.

The wacky and wild brainchild of the filmmaking tandem Daniels [Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert], Everything Everywhere All at Once observes the tender and tenuous bonds of a working-class Chinese American family in the frame of a rollicking romp through the multiverse. And it has sent ripples through this verse. The unexpected box office hit has been a powerhouse, taking moviegoing audiences by storm and surprise, drawing them back into theatres again to get the full effect of its unbridled cinematic ambition. 

To keep up with this ambition, and inhibition, Kiser had to be pot-committed and roll deep. His team of sound designers, mixers and miners brought an all-hands-on-deck attitude to their close coordination with Daniels and all departments of editing. The result: a cyclonic mixture of sound effects, dialogue, and music where some combination was always vibrantly present.

Like a chief conductor, Kiser orchestrated the blending of sound in a film which featured the gamut, locating the sweet spots in what must have been a gargantuan endeavour of synchronicity. Zealously transparent and humorous, Brent Kiser reveals his unsung heroics of sound mixology with humility, shedding light on the practical preparation behind what presents as movie magic to his audience that just got a lot bigger.

Can you explain the “re-recorder” in your title? 

It’s an old school term for re-recording something. On my side of things, if you say you’re a sound mixer, that means you’re on location. When you mix all the music, dialogue, and effects at the end they call that a re-recording mixer because back in the day you did everything on tape and you would record your path. With every move, instead of hitting save, as you would today, it was re-recorded. Before you had flying faders and automation, there would literally be like four dudes on the [sound] board like, “ready…go!”  

Even back in the ‘90s, everything was recorded to tape, so let’s say I wanted to move a footstep sound two frames, I would have to be like, “Hey dubber 45, move the footstep two frames.” Now I do everything in “one box”; my recorder’s built-in. What I deal with is the overall creative and mixing of the movie with all of the editors. I’m also the liaison between the director and my team. 

When I finally came out to LA...I didn’t have the money to pay anybody, so I did all the sound gigs. The thing about me is that in a world that is so compartmentalized – you’re just a re-recording mixer, or you’re just an editor – I had to wear all of those hats, which has given me a better understanding of how to run a team. I can tell people what to look out for and also fight for my team when the director says, “I need this by tomorrow.” I’ll be like, “No no no no.”

I would think that on a project of this ambition scale, you couldn’t work on anything else concurrently.

No. The good thing though is that I happen to be on the same floor as the picture editorial house, so one of the big reasons it was able to work is that they would be able to run down the hall during an edit and say, “Hey can we do this?” It was great during the process of editing to be a part of it and set Daniels up with a library. Daniel Kwan is an amazing editor and sound designer in his own right, so we gave him a bunch of sounds and said, “Figure out what you want and let us know how we can make it happen.”

Is that a normal practice to give directors and editors a huge bank of sounds and say have at it?

Like a music producer, If I get you the samples and they’re cleared and you’re free to use them, you can focus on the creative process. I’m here to help the director in that same way. What I really am is this sound sherpa to help you up the mountain. I recommend a trail. [Directors] might go, “We want to find out what’s over there,” and I’ll say, “Ok, well we’ll need pickaxes and snowshoes because we’re going off-road. Let’s go!”

I’m all about empowering the director and picture editor with sound. The belief is that you can’t find the picture unless you find the sound.

This being a multiverse movie, there are so many different environments to mould the sound to. I don’t know how many there were.

I think the correct term is “a shit ton”. But the big thing was not establishing all the different verses, it was having a signature of that verse that could leak in and play everywhere else. All the verses were blending and leaking into each other. There were obviously a lot of film influences here but a big one was Wong Kar Wai’s The Grandmaster. Especially when Waymond is looking all dapper in Hong Kong and making the rain feel smooth and cinematic. 

Then there was Drunken Master. The big thing about that movie is the American version kind of sucks. The Mandarin version is kind of good, but the Cantonese version is transcendent. The fights are more about the rhythm and [the sounds of the movements] almost become the score. It was important for us to keep a musicality to the fight sequences. And they all sound different, which was a point of anxiety for me at first because it sounded like they came from three different movies. Now going back and watching it, it feels great.

On a film like this when there is so much going on soundwise between effects, dialogue, foley, and score, do you build up categories of which sounds correspond with which actions?

Yeah, we call them pre-dubs. So, in my template, I’ll have, for example, sound effects pre dub A, B, C, and so on. For each one, I’ll have eight mono and eight stereo channels. Usually, my A’s are foley supplements, like a chair being sat on with a big creak in it. B’s will be things like doors and cars, any practical effect. We went all the way to J on this movie! And that’s sixteen channels on each one. That’s just for sound effects/sound design. 

I think my sound team has done as much detailed work as a movie like Dune on Everything Everywhere All at Once. But our team is much smaller. One main difference is that a Dune team will get a bunch of temp mixes and do the movie four or five times over to figure everything out. But I’d say we have as many tracks. With sound effects and foley, we were over three hundred tracks wide, and that’s not including ADR and music.

I want to talk about your work in relation to the score because I love Son Lux to death.

First of all, they’re the nicest dudes ever. It seems like that: the most talented people just don’t have an ego because they know they’re good. There’s just no reason for them to be assholes. We were in the room together and it was in the pocket, magic. There were parts where they’d say, “Yo turn down our score, your parts need to go up.” Usually, in a battle, the music always wins. 

The soundtrack is forty-nine cues! They’ve fully extended the “Now We’re Cookin’” cue into a song with a back and forth between Ryan and Randy Newman. They also did a special track with Moses Sumney…and Andre 3000 came on to play the flutes in the score too.

What?!

He apparently showed up with a trash bag full of vintage flutes and just went to town.

I know Ryan Lott has an interesting background in sound design and production before Son Lux. Was it easier to work with him because he knows where you’re coming from? How much did you two communicate and what was the nature of your discussion? Did he have any sage advice?

At first, it was harder because he was giving me sound design notes and I’m looking at the Daniels like, wait do you want that? Who am I listening to? Then we cut a bunch of jokes and laughed about it and I started getting into the groove of watching someone’s rhythm. He’s orchestrating the musical moments and I’m jumping in to fill it out. It’s almost like a jazz thing where he’s leading the band and I’ll come in with a piano accent on the side. Then we’re able to go back and forth and play. 

People have role models in every aspect of art and filmmaking. What are some of yours? Which movies made you notice your role?

There’s this guy Will Files. He is it. He just did The Batman. We worked on mixing Honeyboy together and we were sitting there talking and he asked me about the first film I worked on and I told him it had a million-dollar budget. He was like “That’s not bad, it’s a modest sound budget. My first budget was two million.” I had to tell him that a million was the budget for the whole film I worked on. I got like ten thousand bucks [Laughs]. I always look up to Will because he can record cars for three weeks to get the right Batmobile sound. When I do that, I’m doing it on my own dime on a weekend, calling up my guys and offering them beers if they hold a mic [Laughs]. But yeah, if I don’t notice the mixing in a movie, I know it’s good.

Do you have one of those rare jobs where the better you do it the fewer people notice what you did?

We’re an invisible art. People are noticing me on this film but they’re not really noticing me. It’s not pointing me out, it’s more like I’m just a part of this amazing cinematic experience.