After making several documentaries in a row, Jonathan Demme returned to narrative filmmaking with Rachel Getting Married. Now in its ninth week of limited theatrical release, the family drama starring Anne Hathaway seems destined for an Oscar nomination or two next year. The picture was shot in a two-camera documentary style by D.P. Declan Quinn, and it captures the feel of a wedding party in the New York suburbs, with musical performances running throughout in careful synchronization to the mood of the film.

For the film’s music mixer, Tony Volante at Manhattan audio post facility Sound Lounge, the challenge was creating a cinematic sound design that would maintain the integrity of the original production audio. F&V asked him about his audio strategy.

F&V: It sounds like the shooting style [on Rachel Getting Married] was documentary-like. Was your mix documentary-like, as well?

Tony Volante: It was. We didn’t want it to be too lo-fi. It had to be a good cinematic experience. Yet we couldn’t make it sound too slick, either. There was a fine line where we we had to make it sound real – documentary-esque, if you will. Generally everything in those is kind of mono, without much embellishment in the sound. We wanted to take that kind of experience one step further so it was still a very enjoyable audio experience in the theater. That was the challenge.

So you want a cinema-like soundstage, but you’ve got to be true to the material you’ve got.

Yeah, mostly in the way it’s presented on screen. It looks and feels like somebody’s home movie, or a documentary, cinà©ma và©rità©.

What does that mean in terms of a multi-channel sound field? Are you more conservative?

We are a little bit more conservative, but we still wanted to take advantage of the space in the theater. It would have been an easy decision to put everything straight down the middle. It works that way – but we wanted to try spreading it a little more than that. There’s that fine line where you can make it sound more real by utilizing some of the spatialness of 5.1. But if you go too wild it crosses the line and it becomes unreal.

So we used the 5.1 space to enhance the reality of what you were seeing. If there were musicians off to one side or the other of a room, or if we just needed to have them feel like they were in the house someplace, we used the 5.1 speakers to sell that more, spreading them around the theater a little bit. When you’re watching the actors in the living room, we wanted you, as an audience, to feel you were there in that home with them. That’s what we were trying to achieve. If we had gone straight down the middle, the audience would have been looking at it from afar. We wanted to place the audience in the environment.

The bulk of the film’s last third shows Rachel’s wedding itself, and it has the feeling of a live performance. Was there much overdubbing, or were you working exclusively with production sound?

It was very much production sound. In a few cases, musical instruments were overdubbed to bring out some detail. But for the most part it was mixing production sound. I did the music mix on the film, and another mixer, Paul Urmson, did the dialogue mix.

Was it tricky to split those responsibilites?

Not at all. I designed the room here specifically to accommodate two mixing positions.

What’s that mixing suite like?

It’s a dual-position Digidesign ICON. It allows for a two-position mixing stage. It’s literally two ICONs, side by side, that look like one big mixing console. There’s also a third Pro Tools system offline, which available if we need to look for an alternate piece of dialogue or something like that. You can do that offline and continue mixing.

So this was a lot like mixing a live music performance.

My music mix was very much that way. It wasn’t like a studio recording where you had all this separation. It was like recording a live concert. Even the tracks of music throughout the film that was playing in different locales – out on the porch, or in the kitchen – were all recorded on the set. It was very different from the traditional music mix, where you have a score recorded in the studio that you can spread around in the theater. The music had to still feel like it was part of the production sound. It was recorded that way and had to be mixed that way, so it was not just an underscore but almost another character in the film.

The raw recording you got – of the little band playing out on the porch, for instance – would that be a stereo track?

It varied. There might be a boom mic and maybe some spot mics on each instrument. For the larger performance pieces at the wedding, when you actually see the band up on stage performing, there were more mics and more channels available. Each instrument might have a mic. But in other cases, there were just one or two tracks to deal with. It was all recorded very well.

Some of the most fun I had was fiddling with the panning. You can do some subtle things during the performance. When the trumpet player moves center screen and you follow the trumpet sound as he moves off to the left of the screen as the camera pans ‘ those were the ways we used 5.1 to enhance the reality. In a traditional score you might have the horns to one side and the strings to another side and they’d stay that way throughout the piece. Within these pieces the panning would move. The horns might start on the right, but then you’d see them all of a sudden in the center of the screen and they’d pop to center. And maybe now the band is off to the right, so everything would pan to the right – and then they’d pop back onto the center of the screen again. The panning was always moving around, very unlike a traditional score, where you set it and forget it.

Is that the way you’d think about mixing a music performance for a documentary?

It depends. On those, the sound comes in various shapes and forms. Most often you get them in a two-track mix and there’s not a lot you can do. With this film, there would be a separate horn mic, so if I wanted to just manipulate the panning of the horns and leave everyone else where they were, I could do that. With a two-track mix that’s difficult. Years ago, I did this documentary about the band Phish, and they supplied multitracks of their concerts. With that, we were able to pinpoint and highlight certain things. If there’s a close-up of the piano player, and you have a separate channel, you could raise the piano a little bit at that moment.

Jonathan Demme has a history of really great music documentaries, and great-sounding music documentaries, so I was wondering if you worked closely with him. What was that relationship like?

He’s great at letting you do your thing. I think he does that in general, from what I understand, even with the actors. He’ll come in and listen and give you very specific notes about how he feels about things – and he does have a really great musical ear, so whenever he pointed out particular things and wanted certain things he was always right on the money. But he’d let you do your thing and give you some notes and then you’d tweak it a little bit.

One of the early conversations we had was that thing we talked about earlier. Most of the production sound and dialogue is center-screen. When this music is playing, in some of the bigger musical moments, how spread do we want to get with it? There were two ideas floating around. One was the idea of pushing toward the center and keeping it real. The other was, well, let’s spread it around a little bit and enhance the reality. Ultimately that’s what won out. But we listened to it both ways and ultimately decided it was best for the movie to enhance some of these musical moments with a little bit of wider panning and hyper-reality.