David,

    Yes, I looked at all the clips. What a treasure trove of material. Thank you so much. I was particularly pleased with the Murray Spivak interview. I had never seen him on camera and alive. I also loved seeing SHINE again. One of my favorite movies and soundtracks. My son is a budding piano player and this is an awesome vivid example of someone getting lost in their work. I showed it to him immediately.

    I got misty eyed watching the GREEN MILE again. That flashback sequence really came out well. I am proud of it especially because the sound in it is totally fabricated; post-produced if you will. I received it with only the barest of sync dialog (of which there is very little) and had free reign to make it sound like anything I wanted it to. Those opportunities are rare. 

    The bits with John Roesch doing Foley/Mangini on the sets is correct in that portions of it are staged because of a reshoot that happened after the fact. The Green Mile had been converted to the Retirement home at the end of the movie for a "match move" going from Tom Hanks standing in the Mile to the Retirement home corridor. By the time the Cinema Secrets guys showed up, the jail cells were gone and we had to use the white corridor for the re-enactment.

    As for the flashback itself, when Coffey grabs Paul's arm, it is sweetened with the sound we use later in the scene of the knife stabbing the screen door. The Jump Rope swishing sound is also sweetened with human vocals but I can't remember what we used. My goal through that whole sequence was to re-purpose and recycle critical sounds as clues and metaphor. It's probably someones breath. The red paint brush is definitely Billies "Shhhh" when he meets the girls. I remember Frank making me take out a particularly cute doll squeak on the CU of Billy's boots coming in the door and kicking it as he comes in to find the girls hiding.

    There is a nice moment as Billy is cutting the screen door with the knife where we post-lapped an additional knife cut to sync with the shot that follows it, of Paul lurching backwards. It's an allegorical "stab" to Pauls heart, which kind of encapsulates the purpose of the scene. Simple editorial technique but it works so well here. 

    There is also a reversed "suck" sound over the last shot of Paul as the sequence ends. This was always meant as a sonic signpost that the event was over, as if John Coffey took back his magic and it all rushed back into his body. 

    I made all the mouse vocals with my voice. Real mice don't make much sound and I knew what I wanted so it was easier to just BE a mouse.

    In Foley we heightened the spring creaks in John Coffeys bed to make him sound heavier whenever he lay down.

    Frank mentions, early in the CINEMA SECRETS clip, the special presences and "air" that define the space in a film. I worked quite hard on getting this right, which I think we talked about. The MILE was a quiet place and I needed to have sonic texture that wouldn't be boring for three hours as we moved in and out of cells and in and out of the MILE. I needed the sonic equivalent of LIGHT and SHADOW. CHIARASCURRO as they say in Italian. I learned from Joe Dante how painters use a touch of blue to make white seem "whiter". An old visual trick to give texture to something that is textureless. I extrapolated this idea to the silence of the MILE. 

    To create silence I needed to "define" the space with little sounds that highlight the emptiness. I recorded several hours of great basic "airs" for the Mile but they needed differentiation and a spacial quality. To each unique air I added what I dubbed "ear candy". I set up a quad microphone setup in several of the empty rooms, bunkers and jail cells I recorded and had an assistant stand in each corner. As the recorder rolled I had them make small, barely imperceptible sounds at random that reverberated in the space we were recording in. These sounds included dropping silt and sand to the floor, shuffling around in socks, tapping on the walls, creaking and scraping lightly on wood objects. All of this sound was done to "imply" some kind of life or movement in an otherwise stultifying space. This "ear candy" was cut as a sweetener track on top of all the airs so that we could fade it in and out as necessary based on the needs of a scene.

    I hope this helps. Other memories will come to mind as I think back.

Best,