Moment and Memory: An Interview with Brendan P. Baker and a Review of Marvel’s Wolverine: The Long Night
A conversation about directing audio fiction and bringing comics into an audio reality, plus a special review of the first episodes.
Today, Marvel and Stitcher have dropped the first two episodes of their audio fiction podcast Wolverine: The Long Night, which was first announced in December 2017. I was over the moon to be able to interview the director Brendan Patrick Baker, who is known for his award-winning production work on Love + Radio. Not only that, but Marvel sent me the first few episodes in advance so that I could write a review, which you’ll find here as well.
(The following conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.)
Let’s talk your origin story first. You are most well-known for your amazing production work on Love + Radio and Invisibilia, and your featured works on This American Life and Radiolab. Tell me a little bit about how you got there and what was involved in those roles.
My educational background is in English and music and public radio was a good place to combine both of those skills. I’ve been working in and around the public radio podcast world for a little over a decade, primarily as a freelancer and specializing in, for lack of a better word, what I would call “creative engineering”: using audio engineering techniques for creative ends. When I started working with Nick van der Kolk on Love + Radio, our first cooperation together was the episode “The Wisdom of Jay Thunderbolt”, which to our shock ended up winning the Third Coast Gold Award for 2011. We got to be on what feels to me like the cutting edge of podcasting at the time. When I left the show, I already had an interest in audio fiction because there are some exciting possibilities about what can be done. Audio fiction feels like it’s another one of those cutting edge fronts.
You were the sound engineer behind Mac Rogers’ The Message. How did working on that audio drama help inform your work on Wolverine?
That was my first involvement in a fictional audio project. It became the experimentation ground for a lot of the techniques that I would up using in Wolverine: The Long Night. In both cases, we were trying to use the tools, approaches, and the sound vocabulary I’ve developed in my other work, and apply it to a purely fictional universe. There’s a lot of exciting stuff happening out there in audio fiction and the cool thing is that there’s no real set of rules. I remember when I first got into podcasting, I was told, “oh, there are all these rules you have to follow and this is how you do radio storytelling.” This is something I’ve resisted over the years, and Nick and I both resisted with Love + Radio, and here it just feels we’re trying new techniques that worked really well.
Brendan has never produced anything that I would consider “standard”, and Wolverine is another experiment that has, so far, paid off. I listened to these episodes for the first time in the dark, eyes closed, headphones on, and I could hear the echoes of his work on Love + Radio and The Message in it. Do not listen to this without headphones, because the experience of Brendan and assistant director Chloe Prasinos’ production magic will be lost to you. The very idea of that possibility is disappointing to me.
Since you bring up this subject about rules in audio storytelling, I’d love to briefly talk about tthe distinctions and similarities you’ve identified in direction & production with nonfiction versus fiction storytelling.
It’s a different set of challenges. This is the first time that I’ve been the director of actors. I realized that there are a lot of similarities between being a director and being a good radio reporter. You’re sitting down with someone, looking into their story in very close detail, you’re asking questions, and getting an understanding of what’s happened to them. In some sense, that’s what’s happening here.
When we got the early script drafts from Ben Percy, Chloe and I would sit down and think “what is happening to these characters, what are they experiencing?” One of the things I did was make rough cuts of the episodes with Chloe and I acting out all the roles, which we then sent to Ben. This was part of the collaborative experimental process in figuring out how to best present these stories in an audio-only framework. When it came time to work with actors, it was very similar and every step of the way we were trying to achieve a fuller understanding.
Something we’re able to do in the audio fiction context is play with time. Here we are, following two agents who go to Alaska to investigate a series of murders. As people are telling them their story, we get the shift of being in the room with the agents and whoever they’re talking to and then going into their subject’s head, in the kind of way we did with Love + Radio. They’re telling their story and then all of a sudden the environment and reality surrounding them falls away and you just hear their voice and as they’re telling their story, other sound design blossoms around them. In Love + Radio, that was sort of a creator reenactment of someone’s experience. Here, it’s their memory, their story, their subjective experience. We’re able to oscillate between these two modes, objective and subjective, past and present, throughout the series to create these different puzzle pieces that shape the whole picture of what’s happening in Burns.
One of the things we’re trying to do from the sound design perspective is replicate the way sound works in the real world. Like, there’s a protest out on the street and we build the whole sound of the protest happening, the crowd, someone on the bullhorn, and then the way the listener first encounters that audio is through a YouTube clip. You’ll hear the filtration of the YouTube clip playing on someone’s computer in a room and then you go into the computer and the perspective shifts and now you’re there on the street with all these people.
When I was first imagining this moment-memory shift Brendan described, I did so with a silly whooshing sound effect like you’d find in a cheesy procedural, but this team has created something smooth, effortless, and enveloping. It’s truly immersive. Brendan’s experience and background shows in a way that will make your world melt away into fiction, just the same as happens in the shift between past and present.
This drama started out like I expect mysteries to start out: gruesome and cruel and dark, all bleeding out under the surface of a series of murders that need to be solved. A plot setting and conceit we are used to witnessing, but then developed into a soundscape that breathes new life and new meaning into it. The use of the ambisonic microphones and recording on location is inspired; they made me think I was chasing and being chased, that I was in a room or a car or a forest I’ve never seen. But sometimes, that soundscape can be overwhelming. I got lost in it, occasionally to the point where I had to rewind and refocus my attention on what the characters were actually saying. It is possible that this is the result of overproduction — there’s a lot happening and stacked together, there’s music, and sound effects, and environment — but even so, the design makes the moments when all the background drops out and rolls back in, a piece at a time, that much more impactful.
I saw that your writer was influenced by Serial and True Detective. Tell me a little about your influences on this podcast in terms of sound design.
If you’re a podcaster, you’re always thinking about how the heavy hitters have presented their work, but from the sound design perspective, I don’t think I had a particular template in mind. I wanted the script to tell me what it needed and I had some concepts I wanted to work with. I was interested in how you present a scene in an objective versus a subjective way and how you use intercutting between past and present. Built into Wolverine’s character is this question of memory and reliability, because in canon his memory has been wiped or he has a memory implant or he’s injured and the trauma will wipe the memory, so there was a really interesting platform already present to start playing with these ideas. That’s where I went to first: what does the storytelling need and how can I use what the story is telling me to present it in an interesting sound design way. I can get kind of high concept as I talk about these techniques I want to achieve but ultimately they have to serve the story otherwise there’s no point.
While I was researching, I found you and writer Benjamin Percy talking about the balance between having an action-heavy hero and creating an audio drama. What can we expect from The Long Night sound-design wise, in terms of action scenes versus tension-building, like the kind we find in a lot of mystery and horror audio?
I will say: we do have fight scenes! That was one of the first questions that came up: Wolverine is such an amazing character, but how do you do a fight scene in audio? Or maybe another question is “should you do a fight scene in audio?”. And the feeling was “yes, yes, we should!” But maybe the fight scenes aren’t what anchor the series. Maybe it’s that the kind of tension we need to build into the overall story doesn’t revolve around two characters fighting, but revolves around internal conflict that Logan is wrestling with.
From day one my approach to the fight scenes was “let’s treat it more impressionistically,” like a piece of music. Deru does the composition for our score, with additional contributions by Max Spransy. Each piece of music has its own tracks broken out, and Chloe and I can deconstruct the music and use each piece selectively, so the music shifts in coordination with whatever is happening on stage. It’s this collage compositional process, deciding when to take a bit of ambience out of the mix or the rhythm of different sound effects, even when it’s not really music. In those moments, it’s more like a descent into chaos and the music builds around you and there’s a rhythm to the confrontation. This is one of the cool things about audio fiction: the strength and the power comes from the listener’s imagining of all of these worlds themselves. The audio is the scaffolding for someone else’s imagination, but the listeners are the ones really building it.
Music is one of the first things I zoom in on when I’m listening to audio fiction, and Deru and Spransy have not disappointed. Whether it’s subtle and built into the soundscape or attention-grabbing, the music has familiar threads looped all the way through so that it’s cohesive, but not so that you feel you’re listening to the same loop. Many of the moments in which my heart raced or my body felt unquiet were because of the music building up above or hovering amid the environmental sounds.
I read that you were recording on location for Wolverine. What was it like to direct that and what did it involve?
We recorded in two studios and a summer camp on location in Westchester. The way we recorded this entire series is with a special mic called an ambisonic, or sound field mic. It’s a single microphone that has four different mic elements pointing in different directions and that allows us to record a sphere of sound, but also present sound in a way means the listener can hear things happening all around them. It also allows us to surgically pinpoint certain characters in space and then, in the edit room, focus in on people almost like it were a camera. That opened up all sorts of possibilities about how we were presenting characters, but when recording on location, there were bunch of challenges that came with it too. If there are a lot of leaves, you can hear them crunching underneath or if an airplane was going overhead, you aren’t able to hide from the airplane. And whereas with an digital mic you can mask those things by putting the quieter part of the mic where the noisier part of the leaves are, we weren’t able to do that. A lot of the outdoor scenes were meticulously edited to make sure we were getting something that sounded like being in the forest in Alaska, and then we used those recordings with a mixture of ambient sounds and sound effects to build out the whole sound design.
The other cool thing, especially with the outdoor scenes, is that you have a really long depth of field. You can have character being farther back in the wood and really get the feeling that they’re in the distance rather than having everything and every voice be close miked. And this whole approach allows the actors to be these characters in the moment: they interact with each other, you hear them moving around in space, and it’s not a traditional radio drama where someone’s in front of a microphone and they’re sitting at a table, you really get a sense of motion and blocking. We actually have charts of the blocking notes — like someone enters a door and then has to be at this desk by this line and other character enters — and that was really fun to map out pre-production.
Going into The Long Night knowing they used blocking charts, I could hear how it impacted the sound design and the way the characters interact. It sounds beautifully natural, as though the actors have been unchained from reality itself. Everyone, cast and crew alike, has brought their A-game to this show, to create a small town where everyone has secrets — especially our protagonists. Celia Keegan-Bolger and Ato Essandoh are the voices behind my new favorite mysterious detective duo, Agents Sally Pierce and Tad Marshall.
Let’s talk a little about Logan the character and the X-Men universe. From the setting and set-up in the trailer, it sounds like we’re in territory close to Logan’s iconic origin story, what with the references to his memory loss. What does a listener need to know about Logan and the X-Men continuity?
I think a listener can go into the series without knowing anything about the X-Men or the larger canon. Fans of the canon and of the comics will certainly recognize details and be rewarded with references but this is also meant for a general audience and so I think you can approach it from both of those levels. And in terms of canon and continuity, Marvel freed us from being beholden to a specific canon or specific storylines so this is a Logan who has different experiences. It’s the same character but in a different universe than the comics.
Logan is a character with a wide range of roles over time in the comics. He’s been a spy, a mentor, a samurai, a wild man in the Canadian wilderness, and the trailer seems to be teasing this “savage” loner from this last one. What aspects of Logan’s character will this show explore?
The idea behind the series is to mystify him a little more; he is a very well known character but the way this story is presented, the people in this town of Burns and the agents are learning things about him as they go and the listeners will be learning things about him as they proceed as well. One of the things Marvel mentioned to me is because Logan has such a rich history, you can drop him in any one of these environments and see how he reacts. So you’re going to have to listen to find out!
I can do that!
Richard Armitage brings a new, and yet familiar Logan to audio. You shouldn’t expect a large Logan presence in the first few episodes — he’s the mystery, he’s an unknown factor, but every time he comes into your ears, it’s exciting. The first time he speaks, there’s a tense build-up to it and you’ll be at the edge of your seat to witness Armitage’s vocal talents. And trust me, if you’re skeptical about Wolverine being anyone other than Hugh Jackman: don’t be. Armitage does a spectacular job of recreating Wolverine, his own Logan, without throwing what is essential to the wayside: he is gruff, and snarling, and dangerous, but aching and furious and persecuted. In episode 2, he breaks my heart. That’s too soon to be breaking my heart, Richard, we still have 8 more episodes.
One last thing. I like to open up the floor at the end of my interviews — what’s something you’d like to ask me or tell me that we haven’t touched on?
If there’s any one part we didn’t really talk about, I feel thankful to have the cast that we had. Our cast came from many different places throughout the acting community and having such a diverse crew of people, they really brought different strengths to the table. I learned so much from working with them and it feels like they had a fun time, so I hope we see more of this kind of acting, acting for an audio only production.
I will be following along with The Long Night during its release schedule this spring. Sally and Tad and Logan and someone named Bobby (who you will love, I promise) have all captured my imagination and my adoration. I want to be in Burns, Alaska for a while longer. I want it to give up its secrets. I want to experience those moments and memories. The podcast will run for a total of ten episodes, first on Stitcher Premium and then go for a wide release across all platforms in fall of 2018.
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