‘American Primeval’: Inside the ‘Pulsing, Scraping’ Sound Design

Westerns require a certain snap, crackle and pop: the sound of a boot dragging on gravel, the jolt of a shotgun blast, the clip-clop of horse hooves. To make those noises and more for Netflix’s brutal miniseries “American Primeval,” nine-time Oscar-nominated sound designer Wylie Stateman and Emmy-nominated co-supervising sound editor Anne Jimkes-Root took their cues from director and
exec producer Peter Berg, whom they’ve worked with on previous projects including “Friday Night Lights,” “Lone Survivor” and “Painkiller.”

“Pete said, ‘I need this to feel raw; I need the [characters’] decisions to be immediate and in the moment,’” Stateman said. That sense of the visceral is of a piece with the unrelenting tone of “Primeval,” which tells the story of an East Coast mother, Sara (Betty Gilpin), and son, Devin (Preston Mota), who head west with taciturn mountain man Isaac (Taylor Kitsch) as their guide. They traverse hazardous terrain on horseback and run straight into the 1850s Utah War between Natives and Mormons that led to the Mountain Meadows Massacre, during which Mormon militias murdered some 120 travelers.

Among the many crisp aural details in that nearly seven-minute scene are
a barrage of arrows swooshing through the air, thundering gunshots and a
charging bull that smashes a stagecoach to bits. “Field recording along with our library and Foley effects are combined to create these rich sound-effects palettes in service to the novel, violent sequences,” Stateman said.

Jimkes-Root, who collaborated with Stateman on “The Queen’s Gambit” (winning the sound team an Emmy), noted how unrelenting the action is. The soundtrack had to reflect this, regardless of whether the viewer is watching the show on a large screen TV with surround sound or on their iPhone.

“There was not a moment to just sit back, breathe and enjoy the beautiful vistas or ride up into the sunset,” she said. “It needs to translate to people however they’re watching it, and being bold is the only way to do that.”

Another major element of the massacre sequence is the stampeding horses. Here again, Stateman and his team drew on an extensive library of animal sounds, some of which were recorded as far back as the 1970 Arthur Penn film “Little Big Man.” From there, they broke down the different elements of a terrified horse’s gait.

“The front of a horse informs very different sounds than the rear of the animal,” he said. “Depending on the action and the framing of the shot, the focus may lie on its galloping hooves, the leather and metal of the saddle and other riding gear, the horse’s breath and vocalizations.”

Stateman has worked on Westerns before, like Quentin Tarantino’s “Django Unchained” and “The Hateful Eight,” but “Primeval” posed a different challenge due to the unpredictability of the outdoor shoot during a frigid winter in New Mexico. “This is about extreme conflict, extreme weather, extreme hardship,” Stateman said. “And we wanted an extreme soundtrack. We were never trying to play it safe or to back down on that sense of making it uncomfortable and extreme.”

No one wanted to fall back on the easy tradition of what Stateman called “slick, big-sky Westerns” where every element is impeccably rendered. “We embraced the rough edges of the mix with confidence and curiosity,” Jimkes-Root said. “The dialogue isn’t always perfectly clear but has emotion, gruffness and grit. The music is not a sweeping Hollywood score but a hypnotic blend of pulsing, scraping, wailing guitars and drums.”

Speaking of the score, Jimkes-Root worked closely with the band that wrote
it, Explosions in the Sky, to ensure an overall harmonious soundscape. “We needed to create a pulse, something that represented a sense of this anxiety of living in a time of hardship in a very dangerous world,” she said. Eventually, for a scene in Episode 1 where Sara and Devin stop at an outpost to meet up with
their guide, the team incorporated the pre-score that Explosions had written
based on the scripts before edited footage even existed. “This pulse became a
foundation for the score as a whole, expressed through different instrumenta-
tion and combined with other musical textures,” Jimkes-Root said.

For Stateman, viewer experience is the most crucial element in doing his job
effectively. “If you’re watching at home or on a laptop or a tablet or a telephone, we want the intention of the filmmakers to shine through in the soundtrack,” he said. “Part of the responsibility of good sound design is to make sure that the ideas come in rapid succession but that they’re not so cluttered with density
that you can’t resolve it with your ear or brain tools.”

This story first ran in the Limited Series & TV Movies issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. 

Read more from the Limited Series & TV Movies issue here.