WOJAK: I know you’ve stayed close with one of your former SVA teachers, [three-time Academy Award–winning sound professional] Chris Newman. He once told me that the key to his success was just showing up every day.

The night we won an Academy Award for Titanic, [late director] Stanley Donen received his honorary award, and when talking about his success he used that same phrase: showing up.

But I would broaden it beyond work because there’s great risk in not showing up for the rest of your life. Life on movies is brutal. And if you subjugate your relationships, your children, your health and all of that to your work, sooner or later it erodes the thing that you’re there to be passionate about. That’s the hardest thing for people to get early in their career, because they’re so hungry.

WOJAK: What sort of influence has Newman had on you?

Chris is passionate about his work and teaching, and the idea that you never achieve mastery. You’re always a student. You want to stay relevant, keep learning new aspects. We have tools in sound now that, 10 years ago, would have seemed like science fiction.

I had Ed Gleason as my main instructor at SVA, but Chris was my advisor, and he was accessible. And I was in school but also working, and I would sometimes get a call on a Friday night: “We’re going to be shooting in this church tomorrow morning down on 28th Street, and there’ll be a choir and an orchestra,” and all of that.

And I’m freaking out, and I would call Chris and he’d talk me down off the ledge and say, “It’s okay. Sometimes a profoundly simple approach can achieve a complex and successful outcome.”

And that was a great lesson—to be an island of serenity in a sea of chaos if you can. Stay curious and unflappable about the unexpected because most of the time we have to make shit up.

PETROSINO: What else do you remember from your student days?

My sophomore year in high school was when I went bananas for film. My high school years were when things were exploding in New York. Marty Scorsese and the West Coast guys like Coppola were coming up. It was an amazing time.

My best friend in high school was the late Bruce Hidemi Sakow. He became a screenwriter and ultimately taught at SVA. His parents had met in the Japanese internment camps during World War II and his father, Toshihiko, was a famous industrial designer. Bruce and I would work on each other’s projects when we were teenagers.

When it came time to choose a college, Bruce and I had a conundrum: NYU or SVA. We flipped a coin, and he ended up going to NYU and I went to SVA. We both won. [Laughs.] And we had a conspiracy because when you’re starting out as a film student, access to resources—equipment, personnel—is scarce. So we combined resources, whatever was necessary for either of our projects at that point in time.

The unique aspect of SVA was that the faculty teaching production courses were working practitioners. It was a place where, one, you were already building a network, and two, there wasn’t an academic attitude about your discipline. I knew what a C-stand was. I knew what a sandbag was. I knew how to set a flag and I knew what a 50-millimeter lens did at eight feet.

Sound is the least-taught aspect of film. SVA is one of the rare places that does it. A lot of people think it’s just somebody on set with a microphone on a stick, or sitting at a console trying to create something out of thin air in post-production. It’s a little bit more than that.

Features

The Academy Award-winning sound mixer, whose work can be heard in ‘Killers of the Flower Moon,’ talks about his long career in movies.