Challenge of ‘Shogun’: Making the Modern World as Quiet as Feudal Japan

Emmy-nominated Shogun rerecording mixers Steve Pederson and Greg P. Russell teamed up, alongside sound supervisor Brian Armstrong and mix technician Greg Ortiz, to transport audiences back to 1600s Japan. Pederson handled the dialogue and the music, while Russell worked on the sound effects and environmental background sounds. The series was filmed not in Japan but in Vancouver, which offered very different environmental sounds to work with than what would be expected in Japan during that time period.

“The focus was consistently on authenticity, and that was our sounding bell throughout our entire process,” Russell tells THR. “To transport an audience to rural, feudal Japan in the 1600s, it’s one of those things where being true to their culture and respectful of their culture was a big deal in itself, but it’s such a rich, bold soundscape. There are wonderful, big dynamics throughout this show, with the weaponry and swords and arrows and cannons, but there’s incredible quiet and really interesting nuance throughout this show. It really is having all these textures and wonderful sounds to emulate all these city sounds and keeping movement and a sense of spatial size and scale. But, man, there’s a tremendous amount of intimacy in this show, in the drama of this show, and staying true to the soul of those characters was key.”

Rain plays its own character in the show, acting as a backdrop to many conversations between the characters. But that proved challenging for Pederson and Russell, who worked together in those scenes to strike a balance. They give credit to the premixing and production teams on set.

“Greg and I both have very similar taste in making dialogue a priority,” explains Pederson. “A lot of times when I’m working on dialogue and music, the effects mixer’s ears are weighted to the effects. He’s thinking about the Foley or the rain or whatever it is, but what I liked about our mixing together is that we’re hearing everything. 

“And going back to what Greg said earlier about 1600 feudal Japan, is that unlike the modern world, there’s always a din of something around us. What we aimed for in this show was quiet, because it’s a natural world. There are no motors or planes or anything like that, so it starts with dialogue cleanup. I give kudos to our sound editorial crew for cleaning out a little bit of that modern stuff that was happening on the set. And then, when it came to me, mixed in with the backgrounds that could give me cover, I would clean up a little bit more. I think we succeeded in extracting the modern world that allowed them quiet and the delicate backgrounds to support what it must have been like back then.”

The series has been lauded for its authenticity by Japanese historians, and the sound of the show was no exception. “I don’t know that I’ve ever been on a project that was scrutinized to the degree that this was, [from] ‘Those aren’t the right crickets,’ all the way down to the way the swords sound. We continually got the note that it’s too Western,” adds Russell. “It’s not thick enough. The metal sounds are too Western civilization. And so respecting their culture and their astute ear to this time and place and what it was … it was pretty incredible.”

Adds Pederson: “There was even a comment at one point, it clued both Greg and I, like, ‘OK, we’ve got to really sit up and pay attention.’ We were outdoors and we had birds, and this particular location was near water, and one of our film editors, who’s Japanese, questioned, because she’s been in Japan, ‘Are those waterfowl? That seems like it’s a bird that’s more country.’ And we just thought, ‘We’ve got to really put our ears on this carefully.’ ”

Another added challenge for the sound team was the earthquake scene, which Russell says evolved quite a bit. Originally, there was music to accompany the scene, but then they pivoted and decided to “get as quiet as we could get, prior to this flock of birds reacting in a very strange way. That’s the quiet before the storm, but having the movement and hearing the smaller sounds, like the tree breaks and the gravel on the surface just moving before the bigger dynamics of the entire sequence — it was one of my favorite sequences of the show.” 

The duo worked together to capture the environmental sounds of the earth moving and the screams of injured people and the devastation offscreen.

“On set, we are lucky just to get the words, but everything else is added, from every rock movement to footstep,” says Russell. “You hear all the ambience, and birds, and horses, and people and so forth, and every bit of those sounds are added after the fact. It’s truly a creation.” 

This story first appeared in an August stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.