Meet Me at Crafty

Method acting—it’s every trade publication’s favorite clickbait!

Sorry to this man Jeremy Strong, but the foremost practitioner of Method acting, Daniel Day-Lewis, is back in the metaphorical saddle (wait, are there metaphors in Method?) with Anemone. And in sound mixer Steve Haywood, Day-Lewis found someone who was more delighted than annoyed by the on-set requirements that accompany that style of acting.

 “The first week, [the crew was told] we’ve gotta be really quiet. And it’s great for [the sound team]!” Haywood said. “Every other department—when they’re doing their job, they’re making my life harder. It doesn’t matter which department it is, they’re always making noise and it’s always a compromise, trying to get what you need while they’re doing what they need to do. But when you’ve got Daniel Day-Lewis on set, everyone has to be as quiet as a mouse. It’s all about focus.”

That dedication to staying in character went to extremes at one point during the making of Ronan Day-Lewis’ intimate drama about estranged brothers Ray (Day-Lewis) and Jem (Sean Bean), when an injury landed Day-Lewis in a medical clinic—still in character.  “No one knew he was out of retirement yet,” Haywood says, laughing. “It was all super secret. So they took him to the specialist, and the specialist was like, ‘Oh, wow! I’m a big movie fan. How should I refer to him? Is it Daniel or is it Mr. Day-Lewis?’ And they said, ‘Just call him Ray.’ He stayed as Ray the whole time. And apparently, he’s getting pushed into an MRI scanner, saying in a Sheffield accent to the nurse, ‘I think I’ve buggered my leg up. I think I’ve buggered it up.!”

That dedication to living fully in the moment led to the inclusion of the sound designer on the set, as well. “ Steve Fanagan, the sound designer, we got introduced during prep and we continued a regular conversation, which is very unusual,” Hawyood says. You don’t normally get a post person brought on in pre-production like that.” The two collaborated to ensure that if, say, the script demanded a phone to ring, a phone really did ring on set. “So Steve was heavily involved in making sure that we had a nice selection of sounds.

That kind of precision was a far cry from Haywood’s previous project, Steve, now streaming on Netflix. Steve is also a small drama, but one with a rowdy cast of teenage boys and a complex central performance from Cillian Murphy. Set in the ‘90s at a reform school over the course of a single, terrible, awful, no-good, very bad day, the movie’s production was “controlled chaos,” as Haywood puts it.

 “Day one was the [long sequence when Steve] arrives at school,” Haywood says. “We shot it as a oner, so it was about six or seven pages of dialogue of Steve driving up to the school, getting out, and then walking around the entire ground floor of the school and breaking up a fight and meeting all these people along the way.”

While all of that was going on, Haywood was hidden under a tent of black fabric, worrying about radio mic ranges on 20 cast members and mixing blindly. Yes, on the first day of filming, Haywood couldn’t get video. “I had to mix those pages blind,” he says. “And they were improvising as well. It was just absolute bedlam.  Everyone is shouting and screaming. There were about six and a half pages of dialogue that needed to be got in one form or another, and then there’s a lot of improvising around it. I think we ended up running about 26 tracks that day.”

Day one was easily the most difficult for Haywood of the entire shoot, but for the cast members, it was just the beginning as he colluded with director Tim Mielants to keep them unsettled.  “My team was the only people who knew [what was going to happen],” Haywood says. “We’d have this quiet little private conversation on one side, and he would say, ‘I need the [fictional on-camera] documentary crew all to be mic’d up.’ One of the bits that made it into the film is that the soundman is always having to put his batteries on charge. And so during this heavy meeting that they’re having, he’s coming in and starts plugging things in and charging up, and the actors had to try and improvise around whatever he was throwing at them. And that I found really fascinating and really exciting.”

Another trick that Mielants employed was to pull the fire alarm without warning anyone.  “Completely improvised,” Haywood says. “No one knew it was gonna happen. And Cillian’s reaction… When he started walking down the hall with his hands over his ears, that was a completely natural reaction  to this godawful siren going off.”

And of course, Haywood was there to capture every piercing wail of it.

Stevie Haywood’s sound mixer credits include All of Us Strangers, Sense8, and My Lady Jane. (As always, this list is indicative of nothing but my own idiosyncratic taste.) His go-to at craft services? Well, it recently got fancy. “On Steve, we did have fantastic craft services thanks to Cillian. He paid for it, apparently. It was very nice of him. And at the moment, my craft obsession is a spinach and cheese omelet. With a flat white.”