Despite the star-spangled title, the Lions Gate Entertainment feature American Psycho was shot in Toronto and helmed by an Ontario-born director. Consistent with this Canadian content, audio editing was performed at Toronto’s Tattersall Sound.

Director Mary Harron had some initial reservations about using a Canadian audio post house, if only because of its remove from her current home outside of New York, the city which provides the setting for the controversial satire about a 1980s yuppie serial murderer.

According to Jane Tattersall, president of Tattersall Sound, Harron is a ‘method director,’ meaning, ‘she needed to know that the sounds she was getting were recorded in New York by New York people.’

But to Tattersall, recreating the aural makeup of the Big Apple in her Toronto studio ‘wasn’t all that difficult.’ She adds, ‘I’ve been recording in New York I don’t know how many times, so I’ve got lots of sounds. This is my area of expertise – I know what places sound like.’

Tattersall functioned as the sound effects supervisor on the project, while David McCallum was the sound effects editor, Fred Brennan the dialogue supervisor, and Garrett Kerr the dialogue editor.

The geographical distance between director and audio post house made for an awkward situation. Tattersall’s team sent some sound tapes to Harron, but this wasn’t entirely effective because, as Tattersall says, ‘it sort of required being talked through it, to explain for what reason you’ve got this sound here and that sound there.’

Tattersall feels few filmmakers can guide the audio process out of thin air – they usually need to hear something for reference. Some directors, however, know precisely what they want. Case in point is Istvan Szabo, with whom Tattersall Sound collaborated on the Alliance Atlantis Communications/Serendipity Point Films copro Sunshine, which garnered Tattersall and her colleagues a Genie Award for sound editing.

Fencing is a major activity of one of three characters Ralph Fiennes plays in Sunshine, and the foley sounds of the sport, performed by freelancer Andy Malcolm, had to be just right.

‘The director was a fencer, so he knew what it should sound like,’ Tattersall explains. ‘[The fencers] are always on a raised dais, so the feet, when they’re running back and forth, have to sound hollow. The feet that were originally done for foley were just feet running up and down, so it had to be redone.’

To facilitate Harron’s involvement in the audio post process for American Psycho, a compromise was reached whereby Tattersall Sound did some of the work, and a couple of New York-based freelancers, with whom Harron could meet more readily, did some as well.

‘We talked to them extensively and sent sound back and forth between us,’ Tattersall recalls. Despite this fragmentation of labor, she feels ‘it worked out really well in the end.’

This type of long-distance partnership is made possible by the compatibility of different audio editing systems. Tattersall Sound employs both Pro Tools by Digidesign, a division of Avid Technology, and WaveFrame systems. Since the two can be integrated, any two studios that have either one can do business together.

‘WaveFrame speaks to Pro Tools,’ Tattersall says. ‘They read the same files and [the designers] have done that deliberately, because they’ve realized that some people like one system, and some people like the other, and it’s hard to convert users. They get very attached to their little setups.’

Similarly, being able to work with various systems can open up job opportunities in unlikely places.

‘I got a call recently from someone in Copenhagen – they needed a WaveFrame user to go there because they had WaveFrames and there aren’t many users [in that part of the world],’ Tattersall says. ‘That’s a good example of the technology being the key ingredient for hiring someone.’

Tattersall feels the digital domain – on the consumer end as well as production – has made the sound editor’s job more involved.

‘When people take home movies on dvd, they can hear a lot more,’ she says. ‘[The audio] is not just blended into a mass of music. With all the separate speaker systems – like five-channel speakers – if you’ve got a sound coming out of one of the back speakers, then [the sound] has to be where it’s meant to be. And when that sound fades out, it has to fade out gently. If you have it isolated, you have to make sure there’s something else that it fades into. [Digital separation] doesn’t hide your mistakes or sloppiness. More time needs to be taken.’

Despite this increased workload, Tattersall remains positive about digital advances. ‘The sound quality is superb, and the ability to get bad sound out, like little ticks and pops, is improved all the time,’ she insists.

She also points to a greater ability to separate dialogue from unwanted background noise on location tapes. ‘That means you don’t have to go to the adr (automatic dialogue replacement) theatre – quite often there’s a bit of performance lost when you do that.’

While Tattersall always wishes there was more time to perfect a project’s soundtrack, she certainly has no complaints about the equipment.

‘Every new piece of software and hardware that comes out is another tool for our job, and it makes the audio sound better and better,’ she says.