184 - The Oscar-Nominated Sound Team Behind Bradley Cooper's Maestro

Continuing our coverage of the 2024 Academy Awards®, we have another all-star team of sound artists whose work on “Maestro” is nominated in the Best Sound category.

Today’s panel includes:

- Richard King, Sound Designer & Supervising Sound Editor.

- Tom Ozanich, Re-recording Mixer.

- Dean A. Zupancic, Re-recording Mixer.

- Steven Morrow, Production Sound Mixer.

“Maestro” is a highly stylized yet intimate film about Leonard Bernstein: his fraught marriage, his affairs, his family, and - of course - his storied career. This gave director Bradley Cooper an amazing opportunity to conduct extensive recreations of some of the composer’s famous concerts, all recorded live on set — including that unforgettable concert at Ely Cathedral:

“We shot for the first day and, in Bradley's words, he was saying he wasn't really feeling it. He was just nervous about the whole thing. Because it's decades of building up to this moment, in front of the best orchestra in the world, and you're pretending to be the conductor. And the pressure that you're putting on yourself to be perfect and you're just not hitting it. And so he came in the next day and said, ‘let me do it one more time, and let's just do this one shot where the camera goes around… Our film is really just this big wide shot. Let's shoot this shot with a crane. Come all the way around, come back around, by the end of the song, be over Felicia's shoulder, and that's it.’ We shot that on the last day, the last take. And that was it. I mean, that was done. As soon as that take was over, everybody knew we had it.”

—Steven Morrow, Sound Mixer, “Maestro”

Be sure to check out “Maestro,” now streaming on Netflix in Dolby Vision® and Dolby Atmos®, ahead of the Academy Awards, live from the Dolby Theatre® on March 10th!

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