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Oct 12, 2023

Love & Death Re

Re-recording mixer Nick Offord on working with the suspenseful tone and heavy

Re-recording mixer Nick Offord on working with the suspenseful tone and heavy subject matter of Love & Death and joining The Afterparty season 2.

Warning: This article contains SPOILERS for Love & DeathMax's Love & Death tells the true story of Candy Montgomery, the Texas housewife who was accused of murdering her extramarital lover's wife. The series stars Elizabeth Olsen as Montgomery and Jesse Plemons as her lover Allan Gore, with both actors turning in gripping performances that thrust Love & Death into binge-worthiness (all seven episodes of the show are now streaming). Interestingly, this adaptation is not the first, even in recent memory; Hulu's Candy and Love & Death both tell the story of Montgomery, albeit in their own ways.

Love & Death has a slow-burning nature that welcomes viewers, for better and for worse, into the mind of Montgomery. The series uses all tools at hand to ramp up the emotion and the tension, with a suspenseful score by Jeff Russo and top-notch sound work by a team that included re-recording mixer Nick Offord. Offord has worked across genres and formats, with credits that include The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent and the upcoming The Afterparty season 2.

Related: What Happened To Candy Montgomery's Lawyer Don Crowder

Nick Offord spoke with Screen Rant about setting the tone of Love & Death, working with the show's many needle drops, and more. Note: This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Screen Rant: The first thing I want to know is how you got into the field. My assumption is that a lot of people start out as musicians; was that the case for you?

Nick Offord: I think I aspired to be a musician, but I was a journeyman. I played the drums, but not very well. I didn't want to ever be on that side of the glass in a recording studio. I always thought being on the console side--the mixing side--in the control booth was a little bit more interesting. I loved hearing old studio stories: how someone came up with a sound, or an idea, and stuff like that. That really was always more interesting to me than playing the music side, because I'm not very good at it. When I moved to LA, I originally wanted to mix records. That was what I've always wanted to do, but once I figured out that you could mix music and film together, it was like, "Oh, okay. I want to do that now."

You've done a ton of projects. Was there anything about Love & Death that jumped out at you as being different from previous things you've worked on?

Nick Offord: At first I didn't know how our showrunner, Lesli, wanted to approach it, so I kind of just approached it the way that I approach all the shows. The approach is to take a look at it and see what they've roughed in their guide, and then work through it and go with our gut. Once we met Lesli... she was phenomenal. She's one of the sweetest ladies that I've ever worked with; she was so cool. On one of the very first days, we played her the first episode, and she was really liking what we were doing. She said, "This is a collaborative team effort, so we really want to make sure that everybody is happy with what we're putting out. If you have an idea, and you think it's cool, let's explore it, and let's see how it works." She was very, very collaborative and open to a lot of things that we wanted to do, which was amazing. It was a lot of fun.

What makes a scene fun for you to jump in and work on? And do you have an example from this?

Nick Offord: I love working on everything. I love mixing music; that's my favorite thing to do. When it's just a scene with somebody having a conversation in a room, it's important, and it can be interesting, but from a sound perspective, it's just two people having a conversation in a room. We want to always try to do something creative, or different, or outside the box. With this show, right from the get-go, it was all about tension. We had a lot of conversations about, "How are we going to make it tense?" In the first few episodes, we're establishing Candy, her life, and the community, and it's a little bit more bubbly and a little bit more fun, but once we go into the real drama--right around episode 4 —it's tension.

We were using a lot of design elements to come in and out of those moments of tension, along with the score. The interesting stuff is when we can create a push and a pull; if a high-tension sound is kind of bringing you in, and it cuts off, the silence creates a lot of tension. That makes it fun. That makes it interesting because it's like, "We see what's going on, but how can we enhance that with the environment, or a design element, or the music, or something like that?"

When you're doing those sound design elements that aren't necessarily how things would be in the real world, how do you find the line of what's going to be distracting and what's going to work for the story? The example I wrote down was from episode 4 when she walks out of the house and there's a pinwheel that we hear very loudly.

Nick Offord: We had an amazing sound supervisor, Brett Hinton, who's incredible. I love working with him. He constructed all the sound design for the show, and he did a phenomenal job with all that stuff. With that specific scene, it's about trying to take into context what just happened. She's in this state of mind where she doesn't even want to acknowledge what happened, so I think everything's hyper-realized. We cut to that, it's just hyper-realized, and we're using that as a shock to the outside, just to kind of wake you up. Then, we come into the door, and she walks outside, but there's not a lot playing at that moment. That's really the only thing that's playing, I believe, and then when she drives away, you hear all the world kind of come back as the girl walks across the street.

I don't know what somebody would be thinking at that point, but we're taking our best stab--no pun intended--at what would be going on at that moment in somebody's head. It's little things: she comes out of there, gets into the car, says nothing happened, turns on the key, and drives away. At that point, we're back in the world. She's driving down the street, and she starts to go back in her head, she hits the radio on to try to get back into her Candy world where she always listens to the radio, and she just can't do it. She turns the radio off, and then we go back into her mind. The car horns take her back out. That's what I was saying about using design to get us in and out of these moments.

I noticed that with the needle drops as well; you'll sometimes ramp into them with sound design. With a show that has as many needle drops as this one did, did you have to kind of develop a system, like, "Okay, this is how we're going to generally lean into and get out of these."?

Nick Offord: The needle drops were a big topic of discussion, because there are so many, especially in the first three or four episodes. I didn't want it to feel repetitive, like, "Okay, we're just going right into another needle drop." I wanted to have different variations of how we got into them, keeping in mind different things like, "What are they playing on? Do we go full? Do we stay in the car? Does it start full and end up on the radio in her house?" Those kinds of things. We didn't want to have a set playbook on how to use them, but we want them to be fun, because she's bopping along with them the whole time. They're a really big part of the show, like with "Stayin' Alive", the Bee Gees song, where we're coming out of the claps. The claps played a big part in getting us in and out of the transitions from the song to what's happening when they're getting married and stuff.

There's another transition, I think when she's driving to the lawyer's house. She's kind of hyping herself up; she starts singing songs. What we did is we let her sing, and then on the downbeat of the song, it kicks in. She belts out the big chorus, and the song kicks in. It was a really powerful moment and a different way to use the song, rather than just kind of having it come in, be a song, and come out. We were trying to make it a little bit more fun.

You have all of that, and you have scenes with the church choir where there are a lot of voices happening t once. What scene or moment was the hardest for you, or took the longest to figure out?

Nick Offord: The choir scenes weren't too hard. There was one scene with a choir playing when it's the montage of her and Allan in the hotel showing time passing; we spent a lot of time trying to get that right. But a scene that we really wanted to get right was the attack at the end. We had a big talk about how we wanted that to be as raw and brutal as possible, and so there was a conscious decision to have no music and no design. It was just trying to get the screams placed right, and the hits right. She bangs the refrigerator with the axe; we were making sure that pops, and overall we worked just to really sell that this was a brutal, brutal event.

That sounds like it'd be heavy to work on.

Yeah. When you do something like that you have to watch it over and over again. It's rough, especially knowing that this was a true story. I can't imagine what it's like to do that on set, but for us, it's just like, "Oh, my gosh. This is crazy."

And was there a favorite moment on the series for you in terms of your work?

Nick Offord: I'm really proud of this show; I think it's one of the best things that we've done. We had Lesli from the top down. She's the best. She was so great about being collaborative and everything. I had my partner Ryan Collins, we had Kyle O'Neal and Brett Hinton, and with everybody working on this thing--it was just an A team. We left the show wanting to do more, which is rare. Usually you're kind of burnt out, but we were all like, "Man, we want to keep going," because we were so happy with the way this thing turned out. So, I don't know if I have one moment, but I'm extremely proud of the way this show turned out.

I'm a big fan of The Afterparty and I'm very excited for season 2. Is there anything you can say in terms of what you're excited about for this coming season?

Nick Offord: Well, I don't know what I can say, but it's awesome. This was my first time working with Chris Miller, who's a genius. That guy just doesn't miss, so that was really cool. I was a huge fan of season one. I, unfortunately, didn't do season one, but now during season two, they go way more into the stylized stuff, which is really fun. I don't know if I can go too deep into what happens yet, but when they go into the stylized version of whatever they're doing for that episode, they really go into it. They really lean into whatever's happening, and there's all the goofiness that goes on with the show and the characters. The cast is amazing, there are Easter eggs, and it's a lot of fun. I wish I could say more.

Is it hard coming onto a project where it's a sequel or second season and someone has already established how things are going to work?

Nick Offord: Yeah, it can be. Sometimes it's a little strange. The great part about The Afterparty is that every episode is a different movie. The style is completely changed, so you're basically resetting every single time. For the most part, I mean. There's also the stuff that carries over when we're not in the stylized stuff. But that's kind of a good thing, coming into the second season, that it's kind of a blank slate. We don't really know what we're getting into, and it's different from the season before.

It's cool. The way the characters take on these different roles, and the way that the composer--it's a different style score every single episode, to match what's happening. It's so cool. The sound team designed some really cool stuff to take us into the periods that we're in, and my mixing partner Ryan Collins did the effects on it. We really dove in and did some fun stuff to make sure we're in that timeframe.

About Love & Death

This riveting drama, written by David E. Kelley and directed by Lesli Linka Glatter, tells the true story of Candy and Pat Montgomery and Betty and Allan Gore – two churchgoing couples enjoying their smalltown Texas life… until an extramarital affair leads somebody to pick up an axe.

Also check out our interviews from the Love & Death SXSW premiere.

All episodes of Love & Death are streaming now on Max.