fter finding out how sound helped
move us to tears in Star Trek Into Darkness and was created for
the suits in Iron Man 3, the third installment of our new series
Sounds Like a Summer Movie takes a look at how supervising sound editor Peter Brown, who’s been with the
Fast and the Furious franchise since
Tokyo Drift and has an Emmy for his work on the “Blackwater” episode of
Game of Thrones, got engines revving for
Fast & Furious 6. Warning: Major spoilers ahead.
To please the film’s car aficionado fans, Brown had to make the cars
sound bigger than life — but still accurate. “We can’t just take the
sound of the greatest car ever recorded and throw it in for what you see
onscreen,” he says. “We start out with an intense research project
working with Dennis McCarthy, the guy who finds the cars and builds all
the cars like the flip car or tank that don’t really exist in the real
world. We talk to him and figure out what the cars are in and of
themselves: Are they a V8? Are they are a four-cylinder Japanese motor?
What is the reality of the engine? Then once we have a list of those, I
go out and try to find who it is in Southern California or the world who
has the greatest example of that particular engine. So for the case of
Dom’s Dodge Daytona, I found a guy who buys retired NASCAR cars and
refurbishes them and then, I think, he uses them for folks who want to
go out and actually have a day at the track and drive around. It’s got a
V8 in it, but a really souped-up racing engine so when it first comes
off of that elevator and gurgles and burbles and boils through the room,
the sound just fills up the room and any car aficionado is gonna be
like, ‘Yeah, that is a big, beefy V8. That sounds correct,’ but it might
be a little bit more monstrous and large than the actual car from the
early ’70s was.” It’s not just about finding someone who has a beast of
an engine, Brown adds. “You also need to find someone who’s got a car
that’s solid enough to drive like a teenager, just completely
irresponsibly: jam the transmission through all the gears, reverse hard,
downshift. You know, just basically do everything a parent would be
afraid that their teenage son is probably doing with their car when they
let him have it for a Friday night.”
That, of course, is when the fun really begins. “What I do is I rent
an airport out in the middle of nowhere, which in this case is the
middle of the Mojave Desert, and bring the cars there,” Brown says.
“There’s nothing out there. It’s very, very quiet. Two or three planes
land during the day, and we have walkie-talkies so hopefully we can hear
the talk from the pilots as they say they’re coming in so we can get
off the runway. It was in October that I started recording, so as
generally happens, I hadn’t seen any of the film at that point. I’d
probably read a script, but [director] Justin Lin is always working on
the script and changing things around, so I really don’t know exactly
what the cars are gonna do. I have to record sounds for any circumstance
— whether it’s just gonna be driving down the street or hit a pile of
concrete and fly through the air for 60 feet — so I have a long list of
specific maneuvers that I have the drivers do. We have professional race
car drivers drive these things around so that they can make the cars
howl and whine and scream, but not break them. It’s everything from
driving in a straight line at 5 mph to doing a 60 mph sideways drift a
few fight away from us poor fools standing out on the hot runway holding
microphones at the cars.”
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