TORONTO – Craig Mann’s road to the Academy Awards started with a risky career move, one that the southern Ontario-bred sound mixer says nearly ended his Hollywood career.
Now that Mann is bound for the Oscars for his work on the drumming film Whiplash, he admits he’s finally starting to feel like he’s arrived in the highly competitive field.
“It’s definitely coming along,” says Mann, nevertheless stunned by the success of the film, about an ambitious young drummer pushed to his limit by a demanding teacher.
Mann and his colleagues collected a British Academy of Film and Television Arts award earlier this year, and are a favourite to take home an Oscar this weekend despite working with a budget much smaller than those of their studio rivals.
“This is a tiny film,” Mann notes in a recent interview from his home in Los Angeles.
“And usually these are not the kind of films that get shine from the sound branch — usually it’s the big action kind of Interstellar or American Sniper or Gravity, you know, Transformers-kind of shows that get the consideration…. It’s frankly kind of a miracle that this is getting the recognition that it’s getting.”
In addition to American Sniper and Interstellar, Whiplash competes for best sound mixing against Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) and Unbroken.
So far, Mann’s awards season run has included a pre-BAFTA party at Kensington Palace and a fair bit of celebrity hob-nobbing with stars including actresses Julianne Moore and Amy Adams and director Richard Linklater. But he says he gets most excited about meeting picture editors he’d like to work with.
“It’s kind of a geek-out situation of, ‘Wow, he’s a picture editor on Nightcrawler,” says Mann, born in Oakville, Ont., and raised in the Toronto-area cities of Pickering and Burlington.
The Oscar nomination catapults Mann into a new sphere of success, but he says it hasn’t been easy.
He spent years assisting the industry’s top sound mixers before deciding to become a mixer himself years ago. There were dry spells as he tried to drum up a steady stream of clients.
“There’s been some years where it’s been like, ‘Man, I’m not sure if we’re going to make it or not,'” says Mann, who has a three-year-old daughter and is married to a Montrealer. “There’ve been some near comebacks (to Canada).”
Transitioning from assisting to mixing is very rare, says the 38-year-old.
“I am way on the young scale, even as old as I am … I’m still at a pretty junior level, overall. There’s a lot of cats that have been at it for 20, 25, 30 years and they have credit lists since I was in diapers, pretty much, so it’s hard to go up against those guys.”
Meanwhile, Whiplash director Damien Chazelle set the bar very high, he says.
“The music sequences were pretty complicated, it was a massively high track count for this budget of show,” notes Mann, adding they had just five weeks to complete everything.
And while an outer-space spectacle or a high-octane action flick might seem like the trickier sound gig, making a low-budget music film has its own challenges.
“With a drumming film, pretty much everybody has a pretty good idea of what drums sound like. It’s not like a dinosaur movie or an alien movie where you can kind of dream up the sound of that and people will be like, ‘Oh yeah, that sounds like a spaceship, what I imagine a spaceship could be,'” he says.
“Everybody knows what a snare sounds like, everybody knows what a kick drum sounds like, for the most part. So you can’t sort of fudge it, or say, ‘Oh, that’s good enough.’ You know, it’s either good or it’s not good.”
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