Retelling Madama Butterfly for his directorial debut, celebrated photographer Michel Comte fared well at this year’s Sundance Film Festival with The Girl from Nagasaki. Telling the story of romance and loss through a Nagasaki survivor married to an American astronaut, the feature-length film won plaudits both for its visual style and structure and the work of sound designer Maurizio Argentieri.
The project pushed Argentieri’s skills and the capabilities of his DPA microphones to the limit.
DPA’s d:dicate 4041-SP Large Diaphragm, 4011 Cardiod and 4006 Omnidirectional Recording Microphones were all used in the sound production of the film. Argentieri also used a DPA d:screet 4091 Omnidirectional Microphone and a d:dicate 5006-11 Matched Microphone Kit with an S5 surround mount. ‘All of the DPA microphones I used sounded amazingly good,’ he says. ‘I need a microphone capable of handling high SPL but one that still delivers a fantastic sound: this is why I chose DPA.’
Argentieri was briefed by Comte at his home in Los Angeles where it was decided that there would be no ADR: ‘There was not a word in the movie that was to be replaced, so all the actors’ performances in the movie are real and original,’ he says. ‘There were a lot of challenging situations. We had a band with a singer performing a couple of songs live while the actors were speaking; a long dialogue scene filmed on the top of Stromboli, an active volcano in Sicily with a very strong wind and real eruptions going off in the background; dialogue under real rain and the sound of the cockpit of a jet fighter while it was flying. This last scene we filmed for real: I put a couple of d:dicate 4006 Omnidirectional Recording Microphones in the jet and hit the record button. The rest is in the movie.’
After training in classical guitar, Argentieri began a career as a sound engineer in the music industry. After a couple of years he realised that the studio was not for him and, with the aid of a friend who was working as an assistant film editor at the time, they began to pull images out of the trash can and put them together on a Moviola with the music they loved. ‘Sometimes we would stay long into the night at the studio, just him and me; we were like kids at home without parents. He was mostly working on documentaries at that time and we had plenty of huge nature shots and beautiful images. For me it was like an illumination: I realised the power and the magic of sound to change the meaning of an image simply by changing the music.’
Argentieri quit his job in the recording studio and became a sound mixer for documentaries. Several years of projects followed, including work for Greenpeace, before he got his break on movies. And he’s certainly made the most of it since, working with the likes of Mario Monicelli, Marco Bellocchio, Bernardo Bertolucci, Giuseppe Bertolucci, Woody Allen, Mel Gibson, Spike Lee, Ridley Scott, and now Michel Comte.
The Girl From Nagasaki was shot in Los Angeles, Berlin, Rome, Stromboli, and Japan. ‘As sound designer I’ve had different roles: production sound mixer, sound editor, and re-recording mixer,’ he explains. ‘I recorded the production sound always using a stereo couple or a surround rig to bring home the ambience, then I had a second moment all by myself going around just with the surround kit recording all the necessary ambient sound to put in the movie. And then we had all the recording of the music to do.’
Argentieri adds that the DPA surround kit was really useful when he and the film crew were tackling a scene in Sofia that involved recording an orchestra: ‘We placed the kit right in the middle of the orchestra to have a different point of view,’ he explains. ‘From the very beginning Michel wanted to give the audience an extraordinary aural experience, so everything was recorded in a way that allowed the microphones to be surrounded by music and sound. Of course we had to do a lot of sound editing and mixing to achieve that.’
The microphones were also used extensively in recording the dialogue of the film. Argentieri used two boom operators mounting DPA d:dicate 4017 Shotgun Microphones that fed into a Manley dual microphone Tube preamplifier. ‘If you want to get an idea of the quality of these microphones you only have to listen to the long dialogue scene at the beginning of the movie between Sir Christopher Lee and the older Gheisha,’ he says. ‘Hearing that, you will be absolutely astonished.’
The microphones even have a starring role in one of the key opening scenes, where Burhan Öcal is seen playing Japanese percussion. ‘This scene is visually like a beautiful art installation and again Michel wanted to give the audience the sensation of being seated close to the percussionist himself, so I had to record his performance live while we were filming,’ Argentieri says. ‘That meant the microphones needed to be part of the installation and the elegance and sobriety of the DPA microphones allowed them to be completely integral to the scene.’
Commenting on his decision to invest in his own DPA d:dicate 5006-11 Matched Microphone Kit with S5 surround mount, Argentieri says: ‘DPA’s surround kit is perfect for modern sound design. In this kit you have three beautiful omnis and two beautiful pure cardioids that you can use together or as singles in other situations. Given the quality of these microphones, why would you want to send them back?’
More: www.dpamicrophones.com
