Once, for a television pilot I wrote and produced, we needed to shoot up a car.
The show was about three young men trying to live a bolder, more consequential life. Part of their journey involved one of them — the married guy, the guy who suffers under the thumb of his domineering wife — realizing that all of his meekness and lack of courage is wrapped up in the car his wife made him buy.
It’s an electric car, a Prius, and he hates it. Electric cars don’t emit a throaty, manful roar when you hit the accelerator, so what’s fun about them? And so, egged on by his friends, he takes a bat to it.
The police arrive — someone called them to say, “Hey, there’s three guys beating up a Prius!” — and he tells them that it’s OK, it’s his emasculating car, and the police see his point and hand over their weapons, and they all take turns shooting at the Prius.
The way you film a sequence like that is dizzying: You get a bunch of angles of the guys pulling out the guns and pointing at the car. And then you rig the car’s side panels and passenger window with tiny explosives, called squibs, which will make it look like bullets are hitting the car when in fact they’re doing no such thing.
Because there are no bullets in the guns. Because the guns aren’t real. The goal in show business is not to make things seem realistic. It’s to make things seem real.
The sound a real gun makes on film is tinny and flat and undramatic, much like the sound a real gun makes in real life. A real gun sounds more like a toy cap gun than it does the full-throated, heavy bass drum sound you hear in movies such as John Wick. And to make a gun sound like that, you put the noise in later. You take out the way the gun really sounded, and you replace it with the way the audience expects it to sound.
If you look at the production schedule of any movie or television show, you’ll notice an awful lot of stuff that comes under the heading of “post-production.”
All sorts of little adjustments to the sound and the picture are described in a blizzard of jargon. There are color corrections, transfers, dirt fixes, mastering, on-lining, sound mixes — so many processes and so much effort that it’s hard to remember that, in the end, the thing you’ve touched up and fussed over is probably going to be watched on someone’s phone with tiny little earbuds.
Or, worse, in a living room with people talking and phones ringing and children arguing about whether they’ve done their homework.
It’s one of the rules of film and television production: Most of the hard work that goes into a production won’t even be noticed. Noisy, distracting life will drown out the carefully mixed sound cues and the delicately reframed master shot.
Fumbling around for the corn chip that fell somewhere between the sofa cushions will make you miss that subtle look the lead actress gives to her cop partner with whom she doesn’t realize she’s in love. It took a dozen takes to get that moment right, and you missed it for a Cool Ranch Dorito.
If you watch the Prius attack scene 10 or 11 times — and you can’t, because the network decided not to go forward with the project — you’ll notice that some of the squibs misfire or fire at the wrong moment. You’ll notice a briefly visible wire running from the door to the front tire. You’ll notice, maybe, that when the actors pull the “triggers” isn’t quite in sync with the sparks that fly from the car itself.
But you won’t notice any of those things the first nine times you watch the scene. You’ll see the delight on the faces of the characters, the demented glee of the main character as he destroys his electric car, the whoops and hollers of the police as they cheer him on. And the guns will make a deep, roaring bang noise each time they “fire” because we put that noise in later, during post-production.
Because you don’t need a gun on a set.
Rob Long is a television writer and producer and the co-founder of Ricochet.com.
