She came to Los Angeles from Sweden over thirty years ago with no intention of joining the film and television industry. But since then, Anna MacKenzie has won several awards and participated in films and TV series such as Ford v Ferrari, The Sopranos, Mamma Mia 2, and The Bourne Ultimatum as supervising sound editor, foley supervisor, and ADR supervisor.

Her field of work is mainly ADR, the dreaded post-production process where actors must re-record their dialogue in a studio setting. Her success has been built on communication, building trust, and professionalism. “Seventy percent of my job is to be a shrink”, she says.

What does a Dialogue/ADR Supervisor do?

As a Dialogue/ADR (Automated Dialogue Replacement) supervisor my responsibility in a movie is the talking. Both by the people on camera and all the background voices, which weren’t recorded during the filming since the extras aren’t allowed to talk during filming, and we populate them afterward. The responsibility for the dialogue in a movie includes getting it all edited, cleaned up, and delivered to the mix stage, and it’s an entirely different thing mixing it. That’s another person – the re-recording mixer, the final mixer. I’m responsible for all the talking in the movie and cleaning up the production sound to the point where it can be mixed.

How often does it happen that some parts of the dialogue can’t be used?

All the time.

And then you bring the actors back in?

A director’s cut is always included in the contract, and that’s the first step in post-production, and that’s when we come on. That’s when they start communicating with us, and then we work towards the point where the movie gets screened for an audience to see how commercially viable it is. We start cleaning up the movie, and the effects guys create basic effects because even though it’s not the final product, you still want a big explosion in the test screening to get the best score possible from the audience.

For us, it might be that they want to change the dialogue. I do a lot of action movies, and there is a lot of going back in and re-recording. If you have a crazy war scene with a bunch of stuff blowing up, you can’t use that production sound. It’s buried in there somewhere. So, if it sounds really bad even for the test screenings, we have to go in and start shooting ADR.

The dialogue portion of my title is cleaning up production sound and making it mixable. And the ADR portion of my title is going through and deciding what I think we need to redo with the actors. Then I meet with the director and the picture editor, and they let me know what lines they want to redo for performance or if they want to change dialogue because once you start cutting the movie, you may have to rewrite things to make the story work. I compile that, and I go to a recording studio specializing in ADR – which is very different from how a music studio is set up – with the actors, and they redo their lines. I cut that in so that no one hopefully ever knows that we did that.

The third leg of my job is all the background voices. So, I work with casting directors who specialize in voice actors, and they provide suitable actors. Then, we spend days populating all those people in the background.

But you also do foley, and that’s your connection to Pole, right?

Yes! I had gotten to know Bernard (Löhr, co-founder of Pole) because I did Mamma Mia 2, and obviously, he was on that since he’s Benny Andersson’s mixer. Through Bernard, I got to know Max (Lachmann, co-founder of Pole) and right now I’m working on foley on a project through Pole.

Tell us a bit about foley.

Foley is anything that pertains to people moving through a universe. So, it’s every footstep, every picking up a pen and writing, every picking up the coffee cup. In American movies, that all gets done: every single footstep, every single everything. Then what foley also does, for example, when I did Ford v Ferrari, the effects guys would say, “We’re going to crash this car into these sand bunkers, and we need more spray of sand on the hood.” and we would enhance the effects that way. I’ve done a lot of foley editing, but I’m not a foley artist. Those are very specific, amazing people who are artists in their own right. Usually, I’m the supervisor during recording and give my input, and then I will cut it into the movie, which is my current collaboration with Pole.

In your opinion, what is the most important thing to know about dialogue ADR in films and TV series?

Filmmakers know the script and what was recorded, hence what the actors are saying. They don’t normally think about that a first-time viewer doesn’t. So, I must remind them, and it’s constantly an uphill battle to make sure the dialogue is intelligible.

It’s fantastic when you get to work with directors who realize how important the sound quality of the dialogue is. You’re given the chance to do your job. They all want explosions and cool sound effects, and of course, they want the audience to hear what the actors are saying, but there’s a big disconnect oftentimes between wanting that and accepting the fact that we must do ADR since everybody hates doing ADR. Actors and directors hate it and will say things like, “I really liked that performance; why do we have to do it over?” Well, because you can’t hear the voices through the sound effects and the music, and instead of being invested in the movie, people will go, “What did they say?”

At the same time, it’s understandable that actors fear ADR and think they won’t perform as well off the set without the director and other actors.

Oh yeah.

How do you help them perform their best?

Seventy percent of my job is to be a shrink. How you help them perform their best is you have to treat ADR – which many people don’t – as a closed set, you know, like nude scenes or whatever you have closed sets for when only the people that have to be there. And ADR, I think a lot of people would be more comfortable being naked than doing ADR, so you have to create a set even though it’s in a recording studio where they feel entirely safe to fail and where no people who don’t need to be there are there.
Sometimes, it helps if the director is not there. I’m a neutral person to the actors, and I have learned over the years that often, the lines that the director wants them to do again are lines they had issues with on set. Where they didn’t quite get it or when there was a difference of opinion between the director and the actor on how the scene was going to be played. So, it’s not unusual that there’s friction around the lines of ADR that they’re being asked to do. I’ve also learned to ask the director if there have been any issues so I know what I’m stepping into.

I also have to be kind and totally honest. Building that trust always takes time, but it’s essential.

My preparations include going through sometimes hundreds of lines. I will check every single line, and I will know why we’re doing this. I have to be able to look people in the eye and explain why we’re doing this, and since I’m dealing with directors and actors, they can read in a second if somebody’s not being truthful, so I need to know beyond a shadow of a doubt why we’re doing something.

We used to have to shoot a lot more ADR when I started because we didn’t have the tools and plug-ins that we do now. If there was a problem with a line, we had to shoot a couple of lines on either side if it was going to stay within a certain angle just for matching purposes because otherwise, it would stick out like a sore thumb when the line came. Nowadays, I am down to cutting out syllables that are problems, but that’s also why I need to be able to say, “Look, I want you to do the whole line, but I’m only going to use the middle portion of it because that’s the problem.” When I can say that, they can relax a little bit since they know that I will use the minimum amount possible.

When doing ADR, does it happen that you record several actors simultaneously?

No, never in live-action but in animation, which I rarely do.

You always record them separately even though the lines are part of a dialogue between people?

Yeah, for principal actors. For groups, the background voices, then you can have 15 people in the room at the same time. In a restaurant scene, for example, then everybody can talk at the same time. But if you have three people on screen and a medium shot, you must do those separately because you want to be able to pan them on the screen. You have to think about that stuff, but for the principal actors, there is only one person in the room. Maybe in 30 years, I’ve had it twice when two people talking but it is super rare.

Different perspectives can sometimes influence the perception of a story. How do you ensure that your perception syncs with the director’s vision of the story?

That’s really the whole job. Once they’re done shooting and we start the director’s cut, we will have spotting sessions, or you hope you will have spotting sessions. Sometimes, if it’s somebody that I’ve worked with a lot and it’s our fifth movie together, he’ll say, “You know what I want, we don’t need a spotting session,” but the idea is that you sit down and you watch the movie together and they point out what they want the tone to be and how they envision things going. A lot of times, because sound is so important, you can go off in a completely wrong direction to the feeling they want. That is also why it’s good we have temp mixes so we know if we’re on the right track.

How do you develop the sound palette for a project, and is this influenced by the director?

It is if they have a particular idea. They will, more or less well, communicate their vision of the movie sound-wise. Most of them are not very good at articulating what they want because they don’t know sound that well. Most directors are visual people, so we have to try to figure out what they mean. Often, the sound crew will be hired based on stuff that they have done before, so the director will refer to that work to convey his vision.
But, the sound of the movie, in that regard, is not the dialogue and ADR; that’s the sound effects, and they are more of a mood-setter. I’m just trying to get rid of the problems, and I would say I have the least glamorous job in Hollywood. The supervising sound editors will be hired based on the sound effects and sound design of their previous works.

If I get hired specifically, it’s because they know that I will take care of them, i.e., I will not mess up their dialogue, meaning that I will work hard at preserving as much of their dialogue as possible. I work well with the actors and get good performances despite ADR. That’s the main reason, but also if they like how I create the soundscape of the background voices since background voices are the one thing I do that has a similar effect to sound effects.

You worked on Sopranos, and you worked on Black Hawk Down, where Sopranos is a very character and dialogue-driven series, while the story in Black Hawk Down is more action-driven. Does that affect your process?

Very much so. A character-driven piece will have much less ADR. There were some Sopranos episodes that were horrendous sounding where there was a lot of ADR, but most of the time, in a character-driven piece, you’re going to be in quiet rooms. You’re going to be on sound stages, and the production sound will be a lot more usable than an action film. So, it very much changes my job.

Although Sopranos, we had to shoot so much TV ADR. That’s because American movies and TV series have to be able to be sold for syndication to network television, and in network television, there can’t be any swearing. So, you can imagine the amount of ADR we had to do for The Sopranos.

You’ve worked in Hollywood for more than 30 years, right?

I think my first credits are from 1994. But I moved there in 1990 and in 1992, I started working as a recordist at a foley and ADR stage because I was initially trained in a music studio. I did that for a couple of years and then went into editing.

What spawned your interest in sound?

I had no interest in sound. It was never my goal to work in the film industry. It was never my goal to work with sound. My boyfriend, at the time, from Sweden, was a music producer. He went over to LA, and for me to have something to do, I took a recording class. I had started being with him in recording studios in Stockholm, but I had never done anything like that, and I can’t play any instruments. Still, I thought studios were a cool environment, and that’s how I ended up doing this.

Of course, there were a lot of steps in between, but it was never something I looked for. It was never something that I was interested in directly.

And what has made you successful during your career?

I have learned how to communicate effectively with different kinds of actors and directors. I try to spend a lot of time editing. Yes, there are plugins you can throw stuff into and try to match cadence and stuff, but to me, it never sounds right, and so I like to actually edit.

Also, having spent so much time on final mix stages, I know what to focus on and spend time on. And understanding how you’re the dialogue and the ADR interplay with the effects and the music. It is a collaborative effort; you can’t take anything personally, even if you’ve spent three weeks working on something. If the director wants to hear the music, you just take your stuff out.

I don’t mind being honest. I’m not afraid to say what I think, but I’m also good at doing it in a nice way. This is stuff that has nothing to do with actual editing. Let’s face it: editing is not brain surgery. There are definitely tricks you need to know, but you are not sending people to the moon. Are you good at successfully solving their problems for them without them having to put too much input into it? You have to take a lot of responsibility. There’s a lot of money and time riding on your performance. You can’t be afraid to take on that responsibility.

During your career, you’ve won several awards. But on what productions have you felt that you really nailed it?

I will say that awards are like speeding tickets. You rarely get them when you really deserve them. But I wouldn’t say it’s whole productions. I have a hard time, just like actors, watching my movies again. There are certain scenes, and I can name a few of those, but what I have been the happiest about are things that you would never notice because it has so much to do with me solving a problem. Maybe the director couldn’t get a specific performance out of an actor, or they couldn’t get a part of the movie to work, and then sound solved that problem for them. That stands out for me.

But if I were to name a few scenes, the subway fight scene in The Fast and the Furious 6 would be one of them. And that certainly didn’t win any awards. A lot of the foley in Ford v Ferrari. It was such a fun show to do because James Mangold has this love-hate relationship with foley, and he is very particular, very detail-oriented. I love working with that guy. In the last Pirates of the Caribbean, Javier Bardem was this ghost made out of driftwood, and it was so hard for them to figure out how they wanted him to sound. To marry the wind blowing through the driftwood with his voice. It’s not a big thing, and most people would probably not even notice it, but it was just getting that vibe and making the directors happy. And again, it was not that I loved it more than anything; it was more a thing that worked out the way so that the directors were finally happy. I also want to mention The Bourne Supremacy; it had a lot of things I ended up being happy with. Movies are split into reels, and most movies are 6-7 reels. The whole first reel of The Bourne Supremacy was ADR. It’s not that they say that much, even though Matt Damon is a fantastic looper (i.e., is great at ADR), but we had to work a lot to make it work, and I dare anybody to tell that that’s ADR. The Moscow fight scene with the car chase through Moscow was such a long sequence, and I’m thrilled with all the aspects, from how it blended with the effects and the background voices.