‘The Bear’ Emmy Winning Sound Team Unveils “Sleight Of Hand” For Stirring Up Anxiety & The Chaos Of Season 4’s Wedding Table Scene

Compliments to the chef? Perhaps it should be compliments to the sound. From the non-stop whirring of a receipt printer to the soft clinking of cutlery being placed on porcelain plates, each sound–yes, including the incessant yelling–makes The Bear restaurant feel like home. It takes a specific set of special skills to continually deliver the anxiety-inducing highs and the peaceful lows in a moment of self-reflection that make the cast of FX on Hulu’s The Bear sonically shine. 

The two-time Emmy winning sound design team, who are now on the verge of making history if they win their third consecutive Emmy this year for Season 3, run by supervising sound editor Steve “Major” Giammaria, sound mixer Scott D. Smith and dialogue editor Evan Benjamin speak to Deadline about crafting the perfect pressure cooker of sound and dialogue mixing in for one of TV’s most contentious kitchens in Chicago.

DEADLINE: When you receive the script for any given season, what’s the first thing you think about? 

SCOTT D. SMITH: The scripts on The Bear are kind of just a suggestion as to what the scenes are going to be. In fact, a few of them don’t always come out in the episode order, and we don’t necessarily shoot in episode order either, so they might drop a few scripts on us. Though it gives us a rough idea of what’s going to happen, there’s a lot that can change between reading the thing and shooting the thing. Actors can change, locations can change, and all kinds of things can happen. So, we try to prepare ourselves for what we think is going to happen and then try to be ready for what is actually going to happen. 

DEADLINE: Sound plays a major role in distinguishing certain environments. What kinds of themes or references do you keep in mind?  

MAJOR GIAMMARIA: Prior to first starting the show, I was lucky enough to have work experience in a kitchen growing up. But I did go to a couple of restaurants with open kitchens to listen a bit. I talked to my brother-in-law, who used to own a restaurant, about what the vibe is and what sounds would be happening [in certain moments].  But also, there are culinary consultants on the show, and they have a very specific idea of how it should not necessarily sound, but how it should feel. Then through the process of writing, shooting and editing, it comes to us and there’s a structure in place of, “Hey, this is how we think it should sound to give us the emotion we’re trying to get.” Then, after that, we take it to a thousand. You see that, especially in those stylized montages, like somebody cutting fish, for example, there’s a sword [sound] in there and all sorts of layers to just make it The Bear, rather than just making it sound like, “Oh yeah, they’re cutting fish.” But there are hyperreal moments where we’re just sitting with Ebon [Moss-Bachrach] and Olivia Colman peeling mushrooms, and they don’t need to sound crazy. We just need to be in this quiet moment; we can sit in after we’ve just been assaulted by loud noises for a little while. That dynamic really helps punch up the impact of both the quiet and the loud moments. 

DEADLINE: What does collaboration look like between all of you and Christopher Storer or Foley when putting everything together? 

GIAMMARIA: It starts with Scott, who has his own relationship with the showrunner and the production folks. Then, the production sound goes to Evan, our dialogue editor, who prepares the sound for mixing. Then our sound effects team all comes together on the mix stage with me. But before that happens, when they turn everything over, we watch the episode and have a spotting session. So that’s where we talk to the producers and the picture editors, scene by scene, about what’s happening. We go through the nuts-and-bolts technical stuff of things like, “Hey, make sure it’s windy outside because that’s going to pay off later,” or “Oh, there’s an off-screen goat farm we need to hear.” And again, we discuss the emotion of the scene and the intention behind something like, “Hey, we want this to feel stressful,” or “We want this to feel calm.” 

This way, we all get the arc of the story and where it’s headed. By this point in Season 4, everybody knows what everybody brings to the table, so we can have a shorthand of, “This is a The Bear kitchen scene. We know what’s happening here.” 

DEADLINE: Talk a bit more about dialogue editing. What kind of things do you contend with on a shoot? 

EVAN BENJAMIN: I’m responsible for production sound, which is everything that Scott records. It’s not only dialogue but also all the actions that actors make that can be recorded. It’s anything from actors walking across the room to closing a door to sitting down. For example, every actor is wearing a mic, and there are at least two boom mics in a scene. So, that means the mics are held above the actors, which usually sound better than the lavs. However, you need both because the sound can change depending on where the actors move their heads or what happens. You kind of need that backup from the microphones on their person. 

When I get [the audio], it’s been laid out in a very schematic way. Each take has this in and out that sounds discontinuous. It sounds crazy because when you move the camera around from shot to shot, the sound changes, and everything moves, the actors move, and the microphones move. So, it’s my job to make the whole [production] sound like it was all recorded at once with a single microphone. Then I give it to Major and he completes the illusion of the whole thing being done in one piece, which also goes for sound effects, which is all those little pieces which are pulled from different sources at different times under different conditions–all of that has to sound like it happened all at once. That’s the big sleight of hand that we’re going here, making sure all these different things feel organic in the moment, as if they were done right when you watch these people speaking. 

DEADLINE: You craft all that dissonance and turn it into anxiety for the audience. To the point where there are people who have to take breaks between episodes, or actual restaurateurs who can’t watch the series because it’s too triggering for them. What exactly are your checks and balances? How do you know when you’ve found the right mix to enhance what’s happening onscreen? 

BENJAMIN: That’s so funny and very true. I’ve had people tell me the exact same thing about why they can’t watch it. 

GIAMMARIA: It’s usually when we zoom out because we all kind of throw a lot of ideas around, because we finish this at a pretty frenetic pace. So, Scott’s job is capturing it all. He gives us a bucket of stuff to work with, Evan then gets it together, and then all my effects people throw stuff at me. I’m like a traffic cop. So, I have to make sure to ask myself, “What do we actually need to hear here and feel here? And how can I support that with sound? How can I support the story with sound?” Because that’s what it’s all about. You don’t want just flashy sound, just for the sake of flashy sound, just for a technical flex that’s not doing anything.

I’ll ask myself, “Do we want to feel anxious here? How can we go about that?” Then I’ll think, OK, let’s get a ticket printer going, let’s get some beeps. I may have those layers in other scenes and be like, “You know what? We don’t need that.” Or a scene is playing, and I’ll get a note from a producer or whoever, like, “Hey, this scene needs to be less chaotic or chaotic.” Then, I’ll say, alright, let’s put more pots and pans in. Once you get the whole picture, we can then pull those levers where we need to to make sure we’re supporting the emotional beat we’re supposed to be supporting. 

BENJAMIN: Even then, it’s also just the little things that I’m getting rid of, like breaths from an actor. A lot of stuff I watch and think about is, “Does this help tell a story?”  So, everything is supposed to be in support of that. You ask, “How do you know?” Well, you just feel it based on your sense of what you think the scene needs. 

DEADLINE: Dialogue is so important for you, especially during those yelling matches in the kitchen. How do you decide what viewers hear or who’s a little more muffled and who’s not? 

BENJAMIN: I try to make sure that the words land on the right spot and nobody’s in the way of where the line lands. So, if somebody’s saying something that’s significant and has a funny line, you have to just make room for that line to land. I remember in the beginning of Season 2, Episode 1, where they’re doing all that construction, Sydney says something, and a giant sledgehammer noise happens on her line. Because they were doing that while they were recording the dialogue, I spent a lot of time getting rid of that sound from her line because it didn’t land the same way. That’s an example of making a scene less tense. It’s a push and pull, but I try to make those lines land the right way, if I can. Then, Major has to deal with the majority of the issues that arise while trying to make clear space for those things to hit the right way. 

DEADLINE: Generally speaking, Sydney and Carmy’s panic attacks look different. In Season 3, Sydney’s are more pronounced with whirring noises while Carmy’s are a bit more subdued. Can you talk about formulating the different avenues of sound there? 

GIAMMARIA: I am not going to take credit for all of that. Our sound team, our effects editors —I can’t remember the finale episode specifically, but it’s usually Jonathan Fuhrer and Matt Snedecor, and our lovely Foley team. They bring a lot to the table, but we usually try to take it, panic attack by panic attack, because sometimes with Carmy, he’s often alone when he’s having a panic attack. It’s a panic attack of loneliness. In the Season 3 finale, Sydney is overwhelmed; she’s at a party, she’s trying to make a big decision, then the review comes out, and all this boils over. So, we try to say, “OK, let’s make this busy.” For Jeremy [Allen White], it subsides because something snaps him out of it, or we cut back to reality. I believe it’s in “Forks,” where Jeremy’s having a panic attack, and then, he has a couple of flashes, and then one of them is Sydney, and then he just calms down because Sydney’s there and has his back. 

There’s a little story to each panic attack, and we try to navigate the arc of that like, “OK, is the world falling away? Are you just focusing on them breathing? Or is this the height of anxiety, and we throw the kitchen sink at it?” Then we snap back to reality. It’s usually the opposite of whatever environment they’re in. But yeah, that’s a good point on Sydney’s versus Carmy’s panic attacks there.

DEADLINE: Scott, since you deal with mic placement, I am dying to know about the mechanics of Season 4’s “Bears.” That wedding table scene where all the actors gather underneath is wild. What went into that? You have to hide so much equipment in such a confined space. 

SMITH: That was an interesting challenge. Evan and Major got the brunt of that in some ways. We had 32 microphones on that shoot and two sound mixers – me and another mixer. Occasionally, we could get a boom in for closeups if there wasn’t another camera running [in the shot], but there was really no place to go. And when I looked at it, I was like “OK, well, I don’t know how we’re going to do this thing.” And then I thought about it a little more, so we did this thing called “Zone Mic-ing,” where we literally drilled holes into the table. We had 16 mics rigged so that the front end of the mic was at table level, and they were in foam to isolate them from the table so that if someone runs into the table, it’s not immediately apparent. Everything had to be angled down because the camera sees the underside of the table. 

There was a lot of work that went into it, and I wasn’t holding my breath because the actors were always moving around underneath there; it’s not like they’re parked in one spot. But it worked a lot better than I thought it was going to. It was a good thing we did it that way, as there was no other viable alternative. 

BENJAMIN: That’s a good example of the overkill that’s inherent in this process, which is kind of interesting. If you don’t know how this stuff works, and there’s a tremendous amount of work that goes into supplying me with what you might almost call too much data, because you never know if, in the middle of that scene, we don’t know what the actors are going to do. There’s 15 or 16 [mics] under this table. One of [the actors] might turn and say something that’s kind of crucial to the scene, and you’re not going to capture it. So, if you have a microphone everywhere and a microphone on the actor and a microphone on the actor next to the actor, well, you don’t need all those, but you might in a five-minute scene. I might use one of those microphones once, but I really needed it that one time. And that’s kind of an idea of the way this stuff works, is that you have these people in the moment. You don’t want to ruin any of that. So, you kind of overbuild, making sure there are microphones everywhere that cover everything. We don’t know what they’re going to do. But that worked out well, because he did these mics in the table thing when less experienced recordists would’ve tried to get a boom under the table or something. 

For reference, on average, in The Bear, there are six, eight, 10 microphones. So, 32 microphones in this one scene is a gigantic amount of material that he had to prepare for and that we had to go through. 

SMITH: We maxed out our channel count. We had two mixing consoles, and we used every channel. 

BENJAMIN: They’re just all to guarantee that you get everything and that you are never going to be caught short. That’s the whole point.

SMITH: There are other situations along the same lines where we do things that I might not normally do for a scene because I don’t know that’s going to happen. In Season 4, Episode 8, where Sydney is having a nightmare sequence on the fake soundstage… I knew what was going on when we did the rehearsal for it, but then I was looking at it afterwards, I went to Chris [Storer] and I said, “Chris, this is a TV set. Wouldn’t we have a boom microphone in there?” And he goes, “Oh yeah, let’s do it.” So, we literally had a studio boom mic, and we just put the whole thing in the shot. I think you only see it once, but if they were going to do a wide shot of the entire set, you would’ve seen the whole thing in there. And it plays because the scene is a TV set. 

In addition to that, though, we still had four other mics and a lavalier on [Ayo Edebiri]. We had two mics up above and a mic that was also, once again, put into the table surface. So again, we drilled a hole. And so, there was a mic right below her. So only one actor, but we literally had five microphones going on her, and there’s all this stuff happening. There’s a Ritter fan off to the side that’s blowing stuff all over. There are water effects. There’s hydraulics slapping the cabinet doors open and closed. There’s a lot going on.

[This interview has been edited for length and clarity]