‘Moonage Daydream’s Sound Team On Creating The Ultimate Immersive David Bowie Experience – Deadline FYC House + HBO Max

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Editor’s note: The following interviews were done outside of the FYC event series, as there was no panel or screening. When director Brett Morgen invited Oscar winners Paul Massey and Nina Hartstone to collaborate on the sound for Moonage Daydream, he told them what he was aiming for with his David Bowie documentary. “He wanted this to be incredibly immersive,” Massey explained as part of Deadline’s FYC House + HBO Max event series, “and not just immersive in an Atmos kind of a way with using objects in the room, but immersive for the audience to the point where they could shut their eyes and be on a rollercoaster ride of audio without even watching some of the [visuals].” For re-recording mixer Massey, that meant taking a fresh approach to the Bowie songs in the film. “We were really blessed by having access to pretty much all of the original 24 track recordings of David in the studio and live, which meant I could do a complete remix of the music from top to bottom,” Massey said. “The reason that’s important, really, is to bring those mixes into a theatrical environment, which has, as we all know, a very different acoustic space to a stereo left-right that they were originally mixed for.” Moonage Daydream features extended sequences of Bowie live in performance.

As Morgen explained in a Twitter post, “[W]e had to separate the music stems from the room and the crowds. To create authentic reverb, the sound team rented a football stadium and played the full mix through the PA, recording the ambience on 12 mics.” Hartstone, the film’s supervising sound editor and sound designer, went even further than that.