There are a few key items UNLV assistant professor Thomas Bjelic doesn’t leave the house without: his keys, his wallet … and his microphone. A sound designer for more than 30 years, Bjelic has built a career on a lifetime of listening. He’s amassed hundreds of credits while working on blockbuster horror franchises like Saw, BBC sci-fi thrillers like Orphan Black and films for the father of body horror, David Cronenberg.
“We are all very sophisticated listeners, especially people who are cinephiles. We have a high bar. We may not know exactly what’s going on in all the minutiae of what it is that we’re hearing, but we’re very sophisticated,” Bjelic tells the Weekly from his home studio. “If there’s a line of dialogue that’s out of sync, we’re on it. You’ll bump on it. You’ll get knocked out of the film bubble. There’s that old expression: The greatest compliment film sound people can ever get is to not be noticed.”
Before Bjelic captured sounds for the silver screen, he lived in Toronto, Canada, where he originally planned to produce music. That all shifted after he enrolled in film school—initially just to use the recording studio—and became immersed in the medium. The award-winning designer eventually became a founding partner of Urban Post, one of Canada’s largest sound and picture post-production studios, before finding his calling in the classroom. Drawn to the “unbridled creative capacity” of student filmmakers, Bjelic joined UNLV’s Department of Film in 2021.
This is our first time meeting, but I’m already a fan. I love everything you’ve worked on—especially BBC’s Orphan Black. Tatiana Maslany is amazing.
She is so insanely talented, and she has been that talented for a long time. For her to do what she was doing in Orphan Black and playing 11 different characters. …She would come into ADR [Automated Dialogue Replacement] to recite lines, and she would just turn into another person, from one after another, which is such a hard thing to do—especially when you start doing accents. It was a fun show to work on.
Looking at your background, you’ve had an incredible career. One of your earliest projects was on David Cronenberg’s M. Butterfly. You can’t get much better than that.
I loved working with David. He’s one of those directors who knows exactly what he wants. It’s really great working with the director on that level, because there’s no outside influences. Sometimes when you work on a feature film, you’ll have network executives, you’ll have producers, you’ll have directors. There’s a lot of people voicing their opinion on what the direction should be. When you work with David, there’s one voice in the room, and it really makes a big difference. He really is an amazing human being. I just don’t know where all those twisted ideas come from. He’s the most soft spoken, gentle human being you’d ever meet. And it’s like, wow! This is a really twisted movie.
That’s what they say, right? People who make horror are usually the happiest because they’re leaving all their darkness out on screen.
They’re absolutely willing to take that journey into themselves and into really dark places. And they’re comfortable with documenting it and then putting it out there for the world.
How did your film journey begin?
I had gotten into film sort of by accident. I was studying economics at university, and one day I just realized I can’t do this. The only reason I went to film school is because, at the time, I was really into producing music, and I loved the studio environment. At that point, which was in the late ‘80s, there was a great recording studio at a college just outside of Toronto. It was a film school, but they had a fantastic recording studio. So I targeted that school to get in and gain access to that recording studio. While I was there, I went from the music world and started discovering this film world.
I was lucky that right after I graduated, I got asked to do sound design, like create sound effects, for this show that I think was originally produced by Lucasfilm called Maniac Mansion. It was a comedy kids show. A lot of the actors on it were from the SCTV (Second City Television) comedy troupe, so it was a really fun show. From that, it was just from one project to the next to the next to the next and I never really stopped working.
Why not compose for films if you already enjoyed producing music? Why sound design?
Something was revealed to me very early on in school. I spent half a year working at a recording studio, and I realized I couldn’t get into it if it wasn’t a genre that I was into. I couldn’t proceed with conviction if it wasn’t music that I really love. That was sort of a light bulb that went off and I thought, Uh oh. You’ve got to be able to adapt. This is one of the reasons why I fell in love with film, because a good story is a good story. I didn’t care about the genre.
That’s what steered me into the sound design world, because this concept of world-building is really unusual. I just finished Youngblood, it’s now in theaters and it’s hockey based. That is one of the most complex worlds to recreate through sound. There is a lot going on, and they’re really specific sounds. When they’re not right, you know it. Just a simple puck hitting a board, hitting the glass, hitting a pad, sliding across the ice, a stick smashing the puck, a wrist shot, the skates, the stopping, the crowds. It is an incredibly complex world to sound design. Almost more complex than something like Saw, just because it’s changing, and it’s so dynamic, yet the sounds have to be absolutely right.
You worked with David Cronenberg on films like Crash and Crimes of the Future. And you developed sound for the Saw series. How do you approach building that sense of horror and dread through the medium?
When a locked picture comes to me, it’s a new film, the sound is virtually non-existent. We have to build that entire world. It could be anything from a war film, to a horror film, to a science fiction. Nothing exists originally, and you have to sort of world-build in your head, what is this going to sound like? With David, you get some really challenging world-building. When you look at Crimes of the Future, when you look at the pods where there’s these robotic, yet bone-like organic structures doing surgery on Viggo Mortensen and tattooing his inner organs, and the cameras all in there, you see it visually. You think, Okay, what kind of world-building? Where do I have to go here? You’re not really sure what it’s going to be that’s going to give you that seed of moving forward. You find a sound, and then you just start building upon those sounds, until you find and create something that glues itself to what you’re seeing on screen.
I remember having the spotting sessions with David. We’re talking about the pods where they control the machines on their chest. …And I just said, let’s not even discuss this. Let me send you some ideas I have just so we have a place to start from. …I like to present something first and say, Am I on the right track here? Is this working for you? And David will tell you immediately, No, it’s not organic enough. Or yes, that’s exactly it. Don’t change a thing.
At what stage in the film process does the sound design come into play?
On Saw, Kevin Greutert, who went on to become one of the Saw directors, he’s a master of editing. Everything about the Saw sort of feel comes from his mind, and usually we’ll be collaborating during that picture editing process, because he’s constructing the scenes. He also needs some temp sound effects to put all this together so he can present it to who he needs to present it to. At a certain point, they call it picture lock. It’s like, we’ve got it. Not much is going to change. This is what we’ve got. At that point then all of the sound team kicks into high gear. We want to work with something that’s as close to the completed version as possible.
Everything is isolated, from a foot step to a breath to a sound effect, to all the different layers of the music. Each one can be played at a different level and combined at a different level. I’ve had many directors tell me, the best part of making a film is that final mix, because that’s really the first time they see their film come to life visually. They’re seeing now all the special effects and the color grading. They’re seeing that all there, and then they’re hearing perfect sound. They’re hearing the score. They’re hearing the sound effects. They’re hearing clean dialogue, all the foley. And for a director, that’s an epiphany because they might be working on a film for five years, from the script, to the financing, to the pre-production, to the production, to the post-production. And it’s not until they hit that final mix, where they’re seeing their film.
That’s my favorite part of the process, when we’ve all done the design work and created all the sounds, then it’s up to us to sort of mix it all together. Very much think of mixing a song. You have your guitars and your bass and your drums, your vocal tracks, backup harmonies, your piano, your keys, your brass. And you have to determine the levels at which they all sit at for that song to be most impactful. Films are the same way, except things change every second.
You worked on two films that are in theaters this year—the hockey drama Youngblood and the queer romance Maya and Samar. How did you work between such drastically different genres?
That’s what I love, is the fact that you never know what you’re gonna get when you work on the film. And that’s why it is not even for an instant, ever boring. It never feels tired because one day I’m working on trying to figure out the sound of center ice in an intense hockey game where it’s gladiatorial, they’re ripping each other apart. And you want to try and build that world on ice. And then the next part, you’re trying to figure out that you’re world-building for the alternative underground dance scene in Greece. It’s a completely different kind of a world. You’re painting with sound like it’s colors, and you’re trying to figure out all the different layers and tones in your palette to try and make that feel legit.
In Greece, you have the crowds. Even things like the traffic ambiance are all different in Europe than they are here. You’re building that world, and it changes with every film. When I was doing Everest, suddenly you’re in Kathmandu, and you’re trying to build the world of Kathmandu, or you’re on the Kumba glacier with the sound of the climbers, and all of their movements with their ice axes. They’re very different worlds. Every film is a completely different set of principles.
What’s the research process like for a sound designer?
You have to spend a lifetime listening and collecting sounds. I’ve been doing it now for three and a half decades. I have a vast library of just sounds I’ve collected over the years so that I always have some sort of place to start. …We talked about the climbers on Everest right? Of course, I get the film delivered to me, and it’s mid-summer. It’s 95 degrees in Toronto. So, I needed to find a way of recording all that human movement, because, again, it’s a very specific sound. They have their crampons. They have their ice axes. They’re covered in climbing gear, and they have a jangle when they walk. It’s a completely different sort of sound.
So late at night, when the city is really quiet, I’d go to hockey arenas and where the Zambonis clean the ice, they’d pile big piles of snow and ice out in their parking lots. And I thought, This is it. So I would go out there, set up microphones in the middle of the night with my laptop and my recorders, get the crampons on and record all these sounds. Of course, the security or a cop car always drives up, and it’s one of these, what the hell are you doing moments. I have to sort of explain what it is that I’m doing. And a lot of the time, they’ll join me in the recording.
What’s the weirdest way you’ve captured a sound?
I know one where I’ve had to recreate someone having a vision and a dream sequence of being born. The birthing canal, the whole thing. It was a surrealistic moment. So one day, I took apart a microphone, took the capsule, put it in a condom, and wrapped it up and flushed it down the toilet, and pulled it back up in the mic cable, and went and listened to it. It is the most insane sound that I’ve used so much for spaceships launching and all kinds of stuff. You just have to do a lot of experimentation, a lot of recording. I’ve recorded a lot of vehicles. I’ve accidentally blown up vehicles. Lots of mistakes have been made, but a lot of it is part of that trial and error. Every time I go on vacation, I’m always bringing a microphone.
Do you have a preference for working with analog or digital gear for capturing your sounds?
I will work in any gear that gives me the results that I’m hearing in my head. I don’t care if it’s digital. I don’t care if it’s analog. Sometimes it’s as simple as a really cheap microphone that no one would think you’d ever want to use. Like getting a good bullet ricochet sound ... I found a very cheap way of doing that, using really cheap microphones that I wouldn’t mind if I destroyed. I’d go to the junkyard, and I’d set up microphones against a piece of glass or metal or an old car or something, put old microphones around it, and I’d take high-powered sling shots with lead shots used for fishing, stand back, and I would record the impacts on all these different surfaces. I would use cheap microphones, because there’s a good chance that those microphones are going to get destroyed. Would I use those microphones anywhere else? No, but you know what? It got me incredible sound, and that’s all I care about.
What’s the first step for aspiring sound designers to get started?
Start building a library. Catalog the world around you. Because a lot of that will show up in a lot of films. Nowadays you can get a really good recorder, a really good set of headphones and a good mic for a pretty reasonable price. Just never let it leave your side. If the weather kicks up and suddenly a monsoon blows through Downtown, you could take your mic out and record this incredible weather event, and you never know what you’re going to get. You’re going to need a lot of sound. Or you’re going to need to know how to get it. And you’re going to need to develop your ear.
How do you feel about films where sound becomes the central character? A Quiet Place had such a heavy emphasis on sound, and that new podcast horror film Undertone, too.
There’s something really cerebral about how a human being reacts to sound. We react to visual media differently than we react to sound. I remember cutting a very gruesome scene of Saw one day in my home studio. It was one of the pretty crazy, full-on body horror scenes. While I was working on it, I heard a stir in the back of the room. I saw my two young kids standing at the door in shock. And I thought, uh-oh! [Laughs.]
So I sat them down. I got rid of the horror, and we started doing silly things like putting burps in and putting farts in and weird stuff like that. They started howling and laughing, but the visual media didn’t change. It’s like, wow, sound really does take it into the realm of our psyche in ways that visually might not get there.
You mention A Quiet Place. Like, how great is that? Even just a bare foot walking on sand suddenly becomes the loudest thing in the film, and how much tension you derive from that. When we strip things away, and suddenly things that we normally expect to be really quiet … we’re hearing in great detail, takes on another level of our experience to it.
You look at a film like No Country for Old Men, which was originally scored in its entirety. They, during the final mix, decided they would lose pretty much all of the score, and they took all the realistic sounds that they created, all the foley and made that the loudest thing to drive a scene. It’s palpable. It’s a different sort of experience. We keep uncovering these little secrets of how our psyche reacts to sounds, and we play on those and push on those elements.
That makes me think about Alex Garland’s film Warfare. It’s one of the pinnacles of sound design; it just drops you straight into a war-torn Iraq. The sound alone rattles you.
Yeah, I had the same experience. I recall distinctly when I sat in the theater and watched Saving Private Ryan for the first time. The first 30 minutes of the film has virtually no dialogue, and we get into that war sequence. I remember after that scene ended, I think my knuckles were white on the seat arm rails. I was just in shock and awe at what I just experienced. That really pushed the frontier, for me, for film sound forever … because I realized the potential that sound can have on a theatrical experience—and how we were so immersed in it. We push the frontiers of surround sound. Our ability to present a soundtrack and at most Dolby Digital can put a viewer in a place that is so impactful to how we experience cinema. And we just keep getting better and better and better. We’re always looking for ways to mess with your head.
