From swift kicks to the alluring tinny ring of a deadly sword swing, soundscapes are one of the most important building blocks of great television, namely that of Netflix‘s Blue Eye Samurai. The adult animated series follows Mizu (Mayra Erskine), a young mixed-race warrior driven by revenge as she lives as an outcast in Edo-period Japan. Her unique blue eyes signify her as an outsider in Japan, as they’ve long since closed their borders to foreign invaders, in addition to her gender preventing her from legally seeking revenge on those who shun her.
In July, Blue Eye Samurai garnered two Emmy nominations for Outstanding Animated Program and Outstanding Sound Editing for a Comedy or Drama Series (Half-Hour) and Animation for Episode 6, “All Evil Dreams and Angry Words.” The nominated sound editing duo Myron Nettinga and Paulette Lifton talk to Deadline about all the hard work that goes into the layers of making compelling and emotional turns befitting of a vengeful ronin.
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DEADLINE: Sound mixing and editing should not be confused with composing. In the context of the series, how would you explain your role for the folks at home?
PAULETTE LIFTON: Well, there’s editing and there’s mixing. So, music is part of the mixing process. There’s also a music editor, so there is some editorial in music sound effects, dialogue, Foley and ADR. So, there’s a number of different types of elements that have to be edited. What sound editing does is we put all of these elements together and they get prepped and sent to the mixer.
MYRON NETTINGA: The great thing about animation, especially, which is different from live action, is that it’s a completely blank palette. There is no sound. So, all the way from the voice recordings that they do, but then it’s your world to build. And on this particular show, they wanted to approach it like a live-action. They did not want it to sound like your typical animation. To achieve this, we built the show just like a fully filled live action production, with FX, backgrounds, atmospheres and Foley.
The sound editorial that creates things like atmospheres of winds and tones and various natural elements to give it that real-life feel, and Foley would add even the subtle movements of characters like the feeling of how cloth would move and textures of skin and surfaces. The more attention to these elements that are given really give it a sense that it was actually shot on a set. Each scene has challenges, too. There’s like eight challenges in this episode, and each scene has its own dynamic pacing in regard to getting through the challenge. We’d start out with a real calm [sound] and then the sound of just footsteps in the snow and the ocean maybe in the distance. Then Mizu hits the first grate, and it gets a little more intense than you probably expect in real life of the actual sound. We would keep increasing the intensity of the design and mix to build a peak of a challenge then do a “hard stop” of everyting and bring us back to simple textures of reality.
DEADLINE: How did you come on board Blue Eye Samurai?
NETTINGA: David Farley from Netflix reached out to us. They needed for us to come in and help see the show to its end, so we inherited it, and our job was to take it to this next level.
LIFTON: This is our third animated series with Netflix. Myron’s specialty is that he worked on the Kill Bill movies. And like that movie, the sword is a character in this TV series as well. So that was one of the things that was attractive to the team as well, and Netflix knew how well Myron could navigate challenging material. But he’s always up for the challenge because he always delivers what clients want.
NETTINGA: We love a challenge, and we love animation.
DEADLINE: What does the collaboration process look like between you and Amie Doherty, the composer, and the series creators Amber Noizumi and Michael Green?
NETTINGA: It was unique. The way we approach doing shows is probably a little more unique than most people are used to. Usually, what happens is you hire a sound team that you’re comfortable with; they get your cut of the film or TV show, and then they go off and do the editing. They do their thing and show up and you get whatever you get at the end. While Amie is working on the score the sound design team is working on the sound build as usual, I’ll start working the dialogue premix first and getting all the treatments done. It sounds very basic, but you want little treatments here and there of different things like a cave versus outside echoes and stuff. We get all that dialed in, and then I get the materials and backgrounds from our sound team. I work it all into where I got a mix dialed in without music. So I’ll know every element of sound design we have before adding any music.
I’ll start working MX and FX design all together, and I’ll find elements in the music that gives us a good momentum and see how I can use certain elements together. So, as I mix, I haven’t sat with Michael at all yet, but I’ll send him a preview mix when I finish. He’ll send me notes back, and then I’ll go through and do another version and send it back to him again until he says, “Great.” Then we go on a mix stage for three days with him and everything is dialed in, so now we get to play and because of that, it’s so fun. I mean, it’s a lot of work, but we are very intense about shaping every little thing so that there’s no stone that goes unturned.
LIFTON: I’ll add a little something about the music, too, because I really feel that using these elements that blend this hardcore rock and culturally appropriate music, and I love the fact they give so much respect to the Japanese culture of this program. I really think it elevates it. You always feel like even if you bring this modern music in, you’re still feeling like they’re really doing everything as an homage.
NETTINGA: What was also really fantastic about the music is that Amie and the music editor Iko Kagasoff, I’d be in a mix or doing pre-mix stuff, and ask, “Hey, that sound, can I take that and put it here [in the music]” or, “Let me lose this drum hit right here because it’s kind of interfering.” They’re so collaborative with that.
LIFTON: It was really truly unique in how collaborative the music is in this show because I think we just made a really great cohesive team, and everybody had their eye on the prize, and no one was like, “I have to be the boss.” Everybody really was like, “Let’s just make the best thing we can possibly make.”
DEADLINE: You mention textures throughout this interview. Can you shed a little more light on what that means for the aspect of the show?
NETTINGA: First, I’d like to say, a key part of this is the sensibilities we have gained over the years. If I had done this project five years into my career, there is no way it would have come out like this. And what’s really key in making textures or sounds isn’t so much the exact, “Hey, what is this specific thing you want?” It’s more of, “OK, what is the feeling you want, and what is this?” And so, we learned to interpret. I have to say that the last movie I did before I went full-time mixing for these last 15 years was a movie I did with Robert Towne. For this movie, he would describe everything as something grand, like fish feeding underwater is what he wanted runners running around the track to sound like. And I had to interpret what I was going to do for that. I told the supervisor at the time, “Don’t worry, I got it. I know what to do here.” And so, you come up with these ideas, and it’s like, for example, the sword in Blue Eye Samurai was described as a character. It was a character, and it was a Kill Bill reference. There was this great vocabulary of the sword. We inherited some of this language already, but we wanted to give it intent. The sword had to have intent on what Mizu was doing. She’s on a quest, and that sword is an extension of her intent. At times it was just a, “I’m here” type of presence, and it’s got a more harmonic kind of gel to it. And at other times, it was like we’re about to go into attack mode, and what does that sword do? And then, in a fight, what do you do with it? There were all different little approaches, and what we did with those sounds to highlight that intent of what Michael wanted, we were able to hone that in bringing all those elements into this texture and harmonics that really brought that home.
DEADLINE: Sound plays a major role in distinguishing and identifying certain environments. What kind of themes or other references do you keep in mind?
NETTINGA: Sam Hayward, our sound designer, Andrew Miller, Jared Dwyer and Johanna Turner completed a great sound team. They really did some heavy lifting on episode 6 especially.
LIFTON: So, we would do a spotting session and take notes with Michael, and sometimes Amber would be there as well. And we get what their intention was and what they wanted [an environment] to feel like. I think they were more in what they wanted it to sound like as opposed to what they didn’t want it to sound like. They were good at describing a lot of emotional [beats]. To me, theme in sound means more like the emotional feeling of what a [filmmaker] is wanting. For example, in the episode, there are zombies. You don’t know the zombies are there at first, there’s that trepidatious feeling like a horror film.
NETTINGA: Exactly, that’s a great example. It’s like impressions. That scene brings on this whole dynamic pacing we talked about earlier when Mizu first hits that scene because she’s in a psychedelic state. And then she hits the ground, and everything seems like she’s in a normal space, but she isn’t. There are some eerie tones. Then she walks, and there’s a couple of characters in prison cells and all that and then things get a little weird, like the eyes flow or something like that. And then the giant comes in, things get intense, and then the doors open and all of it goes hog wild. And Micheal was like, “You know what to do, this is what I want to achieve. .”
With regards to environment, every sound of the background never sits still. Everything always has a constant movement to it that’s moving around you to either give off uneasiness at times in this episode. Other times, when Mizu goes out into the courtyard with the trap doors before she battles all these soldiers in the court, it’s just a nice silent wind. It’s all based in reality and it’s quiet before the storm hits. Then, that first trap door goes on its own, things get a little more intense, and then she decides to take off. Music kicks in gear, but the atmosphere is in everything. So, things in that episode never sat still, it was always a kind of undulation of the atmosphere around you.
DEADLINE: That sounds like incredibly challenging work to think up all those sounds and apply them.
NETTINGA: OK, one thing I have to say, since we’re talking about a lot of things here that are very time-consuming and we have to experiment, it takes time to get things right. I have to say that what Netflix gave us in support was truly important to be able to achieve it because budgets are always a key part of the game, especially episode six, I was like, “Oh hey, this is quite an undertaking. This is what we need.” And Netflix gave me what I needed and we were able to achieve this because of that. So many times, there’s this short-sightedness of, “Oh, we only have this much left in the budget.” And that’s all you get. But Netflix was not that way. They didn’t take that approach with us, Michael, Amber, or Jane [Wu, director-producer], they helped us with what we needed to do. If I needed two hours to work on a battle scene or something, they gave it to me, and that’s really special. Everyone involved really was allowed to do their thing.
LIFTON: You know what’s interesting? I have a couple of Emmys for animation sound. But those are Daytime Emmys, because that’s what’s normal. So now there’s so much adult animation. Our category includes live-action shows. We are the only animated show in this category. So, the amount of work, and I’m not disparaging anybody’s work on any of the other shows because they’re all amazing shows, and everybody is so talented. But the amount of work involved to create the sound in this show is, by far—
NETTINGA: A dream project, but it’s also a lot of heavy lifting.
LIFTON: It’s a lot of heavy lifting. But if we look at the reason the show was made, the origin story behind it, and how it broke a lot of different barriers, I think on many different levels, it made our editing and the things that we did and the stuff that we put into it even more important for us as well. So, it’s not just another show for us.
[This interview has been edited for length and clarity]