Mangini, Mark (1956- )

Denis Villeneuve and his sound team explain how far they went to achieve an aural experience that would feel somewhat familiar, an unusual approach for sci-fi.Sand in Death Valley was manipulated in different ways for the “Dune” soundscape.“Dune” is in the details, and Denis Villeneuve knows nearly all of them. The French Canadian filmmaker grew up obsessed with Frank Herbert’s seminal sci-fi novel and has spent the last few years of his life adapting that 1965 book into a budding film franchise. The first installment came out in October and the second one will begin shooting later this year, so if there’s anything you want to know about the inner workings of “Dune,” Villeneuve is the man to ask.But last week in Malibu, Calif., as he regarded a blue cereal box with evident amusement, Villeneuve admitted that one key detail had eluded him until now.“I’m learning today there were Rice Krispies in ‘Dune,’” he said.We were at Zuma Beach on the kind of warm March afternoon that New York readers would surely prefer I not dwell on, and Villeneuve’s Oscar-nominated sound editors Mark Mangini and Theo Green were nearby, pouring cereal into the sand. This wasn’t meant to provoke any sea gulls; Mangini and Green wanted to demonstrate the sound-gathering techniques they used to enliven Arrakis, the desert planet where the “Dune” hero Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) discovers his destiny.Theo Green, left, and Mark Mangini, demonstrating their work in Death Valley, were part of the Oscar-nominated sound team on “Dune.”“One of the most compelling images in the film is when Paul first steps foot onto the planet,” Mangini said. Since the sand on Arrakis is laced with “spice,” a valuable and hallucinogenic substance, the sound designers had to find an audible way to convey that something special was underfoot.By way of explaining it to me, Mangini ground his work boot into the soft patch of sand that he had dusted with Rice Krispies. The sand produced a subtle, beguiling crunch, and Villeneuve broke out into a big smile. Though he’d heard it plenty of times in postproduction, he had no idea what the sound designers had concocted to capture that sound.“One of the things I love about cinema is the cross between NASA kind of technology and gaffer tape,” Villeneuve said. “To use a super-expensive mic to record Rice Krispies — that deeply moves me!”Green using Rice Krispies to explain how a crunch was achieved in “Dune.”“Dune” is full of those clever, secret noises, nearly all of which are derived from real life: Of the 3,200 bespoke sounds created for the movie, only four were made solely with electronic equipment and synthesizers. Green noted that with many science-fiction and fantasy films, there is a tendency to indicate futurism by using sounds that we’ve never heard before.“But it was very much Denis’s vision that this movie should feel every bit as familiar as certain areas of planet Earth,” Green said. “We’re not putting you in a sci-fi movie, we’re putting you in a documentary about people on Arrakis.”Explore the 2022 Academy AwardsThe 94th Academy Awards will be held on March 27 in Los Angeles.A Makeover: On Oscar night, you can expect a refreshed, slimmer telecast and a few new awards. But are all of the tweaks a good thing?Best Actress Race: Who will win? There are cases to be made for and against each contender, and no one has an obvious advantage.A Hit: Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s “Drive My Car” is the season’s unlikely Oscar smash. The director Bong Joon Ho is happy to discuss its success.  Making History: Troy Kotsur, who stars in “CODA” as a fisherman struggling to relate to his daughter, is the first deaf man to earn an Oscar nomination for acting. ‘Improbable Journey’: “Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom” was filmed on a shoestring budget in a remote Himalayan village. In a first for Bhutan, the movie is now an Oscar nominee.To that end, Green and Mangini made an early expedition into Death Valley to collect natural noises that could be used later for the film’s sonic palette. “When an audience hears acoustic sound, there’s a subconscious box that gets checked that says, this is real,” Mangini said. But within that reality, Mangini isn’t afraid to push things a bit: While working on “Mad Max: Fury Road,” for which he won an Oscar, Mangini mixed the sounds of dying animals into the crash of the movie’s most formidable vehicle.For another “Dune” demonstration, he began to bury a small nub of a microphone in the sand. “This is an underwater microphone, a hydrophone,” Mangini explained. “It’s the sort of thing you’d usually drop in the ocean to record a humpback whale, but we found another way to use it.”In “Dune,” the characters use a staked device called a thumper to rhythmically pound the sand and summon massive sandworms. To get that sound, Mangini and Green buried their hydrophone at different depths in Death Valley, then used a mallet to whack the sand above the buried mic.One sound involved a microphone normally used underwater.A mallet was then used to whack the sand above the mic.“We’d also record it above ground to get the actual sound of the impact,” Mangini said, demonstrating his method for me with a few sharp thwacks into the Zuma Beach sand. “Each one of these hits is the ka-dunk of the thumper, as you see it in the film.”To give the sandworm’s gaping maw some grandeur, Green recorded a friend’s dog as it gnashed its teeth, while Mangini added grumbling whale noises that matched the rhythm of the thumper — gunk, gunk, gunk. And how did they convey the sandworm rushing through the sand, liquefying every particle in its path?“I had this idea of taking a microphone, covering it with a condom and furrowing it under the ground,” Mangini said.“I was not aware of that,” Villeneuve said, trailing off. His sound designers laughed. “We never told Denis about the condom,” Green said.Green and Mangini worked with Villeneuve on his previous film, “Blade Runner 2049,” and the director brought them both on board as soon as he nabbed the rights to Herbert’s novel, instead of waiting until postproduction, as is more customary.Denis Villeneuve brought the sound team on board early so it could have “the proper time to investigate and explore and make mistakes.”“I wanted Theo and Mark to have the proper time to investigate and explore and make mistakes,” Villeneuve said. “It’s something I got really traumatized by with my early movies, where you spend years working on a screenplay, then months shooting and editing it, and then right at the end, the sound guy comes and you barely have enough time.”By hiring his sound designers early and setting them loose, Villeneuve could even take some of their discoveries and weave them into Hans Zimmer’s score, producing a holistic aural experience where the percussive music composition and pervasive sound design can sometimes be mistaken for one another.Our Reviews of the 10 Best-Picture Oscar NomineesCard 1 of 10“Belfast.” More