Tag: The Walking Dead

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Emmys Q&A: Andrew Lincoln

Michael Ausiello is founder and editor in chief of TVLine. This story appeared in the June 19 issue of AwardsLine.

If there were an Emmy category for rawness, Andrew Lincoln wouldn’t just be under consideration for a nomination, he’d be the frontrunner for the win. The work the actor did on AMC’s The Walking Dead this past season as grieving Sheriff Rick Grimes felt so real that, at times, it was difficult to watch. (He didn’t even watch himself!) Here, the 39-year-old Englishman opens up about how he approached his widowed character’s breakdown and whether he thinks Emmy voters will be able to overcome their genre bias to give him and his hit cable series a chance.

It was such an intense season for you. How did you recover and wind down after playing all of that rage and desolation?
It is a brutal and dark place you have to inhabit, but I’m very good at disengaging. And there’s no better way to unplug than having children. Changing diapers is one of the most leveling things that has ever happened to me. Realizing that my children are the center of the universe and not me is probably one of the greatest ways to acclimatize.

Your former leading lady, Sarah Wayne Callies (who plays Lori, his TV wife), told me last fall, “When Andrew goes down the rabbit hole, he goes all the way down.” What did she mean exactly?
I love acting. I just love it. It’s in my bones. I remember when I was a kid, I watched an interview with Dennis Hopper talking about Jimmy Dean on the set of Rebel Without a Cause. Jimmy said to him, “If you’ve got to cry in a scene, you’ve got to cry. Make it real.” And that’s all that I believe in.

Sarah also mentioned that you didn’t want her on the set the day you shot the big scene where Rick learns Lori died. Why?
Because she (had already been killed off). A lot of it is about feeling relaxed enough to make mistakes, or to look like a fool, or to dare to go to a place that I wouldn’t necessarily go to. Maybe I was a bit self-conscious with Sarah being there and not wanting to turn that scene into a spectator’s sport. I admire her so much as an actress, and I was so upset about losing her as (a costar) that I just wanted to do it justice—do her justice.

How did you gear up mentally for that scene?
I just took myself away for a couple of hours while they were setting up and listened to a song and got into a place that wasn’t very happy.

What song were you listening to?
It was Snow Patrol and Martha Wainwright’s “Set the Fire to the Third Bar.” Don’t listen to it. You might end up collapsing. (Laughs.)

Your TV son Chandler Riggs (Carl) played a big role in that scene. He essentially telegraphs the news to Rick about Lori’s death. What was it like playing a scene like that with, essentially, a child?
Chandler Riggs is just the most intuitive, wise boy; he’s a wonderful actor. And as a father, as a human being, you just see that. (Rick getting) confirmation from (Carl that Lori died) broke me. I spoke to the director and said, “I think it’s vital that this guy that’s been so stoic and the linchpin of this group needs to drop his gun. And you need to see him fall to the ground. I think you need to see him taken down by this news.” This is a man whose instincts to survive have been driven primarily by two people—and one of those people is dead. It’s like taking his balance away.

Why do you think the Emmys have been slow to embrace the show?
I don’t really think about it too much, in all honesty. It was (former exec producer) Frank (Darabont) and everybody at AMC’s intention to elevate the genre. As soon as I mention the word “genre,” people make an (assumption), don’t they? It never occurred to me that this would be a genre show. I think this is a family drama set in Hell. That’s what I see it as. It just so happens that there are zombies.  I absolutely understand that this isn’t everybody’s cup of tea, but all I would urge people to do is give it a chance. There’s some incredibly bold storytelling.

Should you find yourself with a nomination, is there an episode you are personally proud of?
You’d have to tell me. I don’t actually watch the show.

Really? You didn’t even watch your big breakdown scene?
No. I kind of know what happened—I was sort of in it. (Laughs.) I kind of thought, you know, when I was on my knees wailing, “Well, I left everything on the ballpark here.”

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Sound Editors and Mixers Create Feature Quality on TV Budgets

Thomas J. McLean is an AwardsLine contributor. This story appeared in the June 5 issue of AwardsLine.

For sound editors and mixers, the broadening of TV’s audio palette into feature-film territory requires a lot of work and more than a handful of tricks to get shows to sound as good as they look on tight budgets and even tighter schedules.

“I spend quite a bit of time trying to find the right people who can do feature-quality work but not take feature time,” says Tim Kimmel, supervising sound editor on HBO’s epic fantasy series Game of Thrones.
With 10 hour-long episodes to complete in about five months and a tight schedule on the production pipeline, work often continues until the last minute. “By the time we finish mixing the show, we’re still waiting on final visual effects, so we will end up going back into episodes that were basically completed,” Kimmel explains.
AMC’s The Walking Dead is the first TV series that supervising sound editor Jerry Ross has worked on in a three-decade feature-film career. He came up with a library of high-quality sound effects that the picture editors could cut into scenes as they work.
Ross says it helps to have sounds in a show early because everyone grows accustomed to them. “The sounds that everyone gets used to tend to be the ones people like to keep in the show,” explains Ross. “The alternative would be to start from scratch and build all of these new sounds in there, and then everyone would go, ‘What happened to the thing I was used to?’”
Detailed environment sounds have come to the forefront. On History’s Vikings, sound designer Jane Tattersall is tasked with using sound to help make the footage shot on location in Ireland appear authentically Scandinavian.
“There is nothing in Ireland other than the actual dialogue they’re recording that is all that useful for us, because they have a different landscape, fatter hills, and it’s more rural and softer,” says Tattersall. “We did get some location sound from Norway—it’s much wetter and harsher, and the birds are different.”
The Walking Dead has similar issues for a completely different reason: No cars, planes or other technological background noises exist in the post-zombie apocalypse. “We have to clean them out and exorcise any kind of civilized sounds,” Ross says.
Of course, there also are zombie sounds to create—all of which are done in post. Ross says they incorporate zombie sounds from a handful of “zombie specialists” who come in and record vocals customized for particular zombies. To that, Ross and his crew add effects to enhance the groaning and flesh-ripping sounds.

The sounds of zombies eating flesh on The Walking Dead are partly thanks so this handsome fellow, Dave.
The sounds of zombies eating flesh on The Walking Dead are partly thanks so this handsome fellow, Dave.

The latter effect has a special ingredient in the form of Ross’ business partner Skip Lievsay’s dog, Dave. “When zombies are feeding, we’ll sometimes include recordings of Dave the dog, who, when you wrestle with him, makes some wonderful, gnarly kind of gross sounds,” says Ross. “We’ll take them and slow them down and add Bengal tigers eating and other kinds of animal sounds on top of the zombie sounds we create with our zombie talent.”
Creatures and fictional languages provide stimulating challenges for Kimmel. He uses a similar technique in using actors to evolve established effects and inject emotion into the sounds created for dragons and other creatures seen in Game of Thrones. “With a human element, you can try to direct and find some different emotions for these creatures,” says Kimmel.
Battles also are a challenge to put together quickly. “You need peaks and valleys, as we call it, to make specific sounds stick out and to try to find that fine detail,” Kimmel adds.
Additional dialogue recording is an unavoidable fact of life for shows shooting on location, but it’s kept to a minimum and done as efficiently as possible.
On Vikings, dialogue editor David McCallum says accents and dialects create logistical challenges. He works closely with ADR supervisor Dale Sheldrake, who travels to the international cast members and records lines for up to four episodes at a time. “We need to cross-reference pronunciations and make sure we are on top of how the actors are speaking,” McCallum says.
The final hurdles are some of the most difficult. Each viewer has a different audio setup, from surround sound to small built-in TV speakers. Moreover, the audio specs used by each network and cable or satellite system are different.
“Meeting those numbers and still trying to have the dynamics of feature-film sound, there are little corners that have to be cut,” says Kimmel. “We lose a little bit of the dynamics, so we try to cheat it as much as we can.”