Gary Hecker got into the business of making movies sound real after working on The Empire Strikes Back, where he helped sonically define characters like Han Solo and Darth Vader. That was his entrée into Foley art, or the live reproduction of sounds that are added to TV and film scenes after the fact, usually with a creative array of everyday objects. After 40 years in the field, he is nothing short of a veteran of cinematic reverberation, having distinguished himself by practically creating the kinds of sounds that would otherwise be left to sound designers or effects specialists to pluck from prerecorded archives. The layered booms of explosions, the delicate tinkling of shattered glass — Hecker creates them from scratch from his station at the backlot of Sony Pictures Post Productions, where he’s been in residence for the past two decades. His work spans titles like Big Trouble in Little China, The Witches of Eastwick, The Hunger Games, and Justice League, but one of his most recent credits is Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Quentin Tarantino’s ninth film has one of the wildest finale of the year, so Vulture asked him to break down the Foley elements of the ultraviolent climax involving Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt), Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio), three members of the Manson Family, and a well-trined dog.

Gary Hecker: That was an intense scene. I was working with Wylie Satateman, who is the sound supervisor, and he turned me loose on that just to do whatever I wanted. It started with the Manson gang getting out of the car and walking up that long street. Wylie wanted to hear their pants and jeans, that sound it makes when their legs move together. Then they were carrying knives and pulled out a gun. So, there were little nuances, all their feet and their cloth and jeans, and you see a little glimmer in the moonlight hit the blade. I made a little metallic “zshinng” that you hear when they go by the camera. Then the guy was pulling the gun out, so I had to do all his gun movements.

Once they get up to the house, the first thing I had to do, which is crazy with Foley, was the sound [that turned] Brad Pitt’s head [to notice the Manson Family members]. So, I had to nudge a door and jiggle a door knob, and it cued the dog’s head to look over. That was the sound that kind of started everything and triggered a reaction. When they came in, some of the sounds I did were they pulled their knives out and stuff like that, which was a big thing with the “zshinng” as those blades were coming out. There were a couple of different blades, so they all had to sound distinct, and the sound of the “zshinng” were my fingers lightly striking the blade of a machete on its edge. It had to be done softly, delicately and tastefully, to make it sound real, because they really were not scraping against anything. It was just enough sound to make an “essence” of the blade shimmering in the moonlight.

At this point, the Manson Family members have entered Rick’s house, where Cliff is in the kitchen tripping on acid. At first, he fails to properly process the danger he’s in, even after the cultists brandish their weapons. But what the Mansons don’t know about Cliff is that, in addition to being a stuntman, he’s a war veteran trained in combat. The gang members threaten Cliff, but he and his faithful pitbull, Brandy, thwart their plans in extreme fashion.

Hecker: When Brad Pitt makes a little sound [with his mouth], click click, the dog takes off from the couch, so there are all the dog’s footsteps, the dog’s collar, and the dog just shredding that guy’s pants. That’s just tearing different pieces of jeans and thick pants, sweats — big tears and yanking on the cloth. Then the guy was getting bounced against the door, so I bounced against a door. When Brad Pitt is smashing that Manson cult member’s head with a phone, I had to go in my prop room and find the right phone with a really ringy bell. Back in that era, in the late sixties, the phones had the bells in them, so using one of those old-style phones I smashed it into the middle of a wooden desk, just making it really thick and resonant and violent. Just pounding. They wanted everything violent.

Animation is very hard to do… we physically have to break down our preconceived notions of how stuff actually works in the world. — Cat Solen on the mind-boggling difficulties of animation.

What was cool about that one is, Brad Pitt was hallucinating on LSD from that thing that he smoked, so I did that cue and I’m pounding the phone, and you know how that ring echoes? The last hit, the bell would be just resonating out and this machine I was using happened to do some weird thing to that last ring and it made it into a weird flurry, like it wasn’t real. We were actually laughing after, because that’s how this might sound in Brad Pitt’s mind. It was perfect.

After he smashed her head into the phone, he hit her face into the cement mantle, which they played huge, almost comical. It’s gross, but I had to come up with the sound for it. What I did was mic it super close and then I took the palms of my hands, the meaty part, and I smashed them on my stage on a cement slab surface that’s a little hollow underneath for the thunk. I got those face hits so you could hear face and skin. He probably did it like four times or five times, so I did those, and it actually hurt to do it. Then for the skull crunches or teeth, I cracked celery for each one. Then of course there’s the blood that you could see squirting out of her face. So, on another channel I used a shammy soaked with water. I also put water in my mouth to make it so I would squirt the blood out. When you played all those channels, it was out of control. It sounded killer.

When the screaming girl blasted through that sliding glass door to where Leonardo DiCaprio was out in the pool, I blew up a pane of glass for her, which they played giant. Then there was all the glass debris coming out onto the wet patio, and they had closeups of her crawling in glass; I did all that stuff. She ends up landing in the pool and Leonardo is freaking out, so he gets off his little lounge chair and goes into the closet to get the flamethrower. The flame itself, we don’t do fire on the stage. Once in a while we do fire effects, but I don’t like to do it. The fire was done with sound effects. I just had to come up with this sound of him grabbing and moving this metallic flamethrower and the gun that shoots the flame. So, the Foley was the tanks, the movement of the gun, Leonardo’s footsteps. And then sound effects had the flamethrower.

With a lot of the films you work on, the sound and the Foley is recorded at a good level, but then it’s tucked down into the movie, because they’re trying to tell a story. What’s cool about Tarantino is he loves Foley and he loves sound, and he crosses the line. If you listen to all of his movies, they sound awesome. He’s really into signature sounds, and that’s what I do in Foley: try to create signature sounds. He really appreciates it, and he’s really picky. Your sound can’t just be average, ordinary sound. It’s rewarding to me because if you know all that hard work is going to be under the magnifying glass, it’s a challenge. Then I’ve got to make it killer. I’ve been lucky and done Tarantino’s last three movies now — Django, Hateful Eight, Once Upon a Time — and hopefully his next film, whatever it is.

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