Interview: Sound Designer Paul Germann and Supervising Sound Editor Matt Chan Discuss ‘The Iron Claw’

The Iron Claw’s sound design is particularly unique, as it shifts throughout the film while telling the rise and tragic fall of the Von Erich wrestling family. Seeing the story (raved about by Joey here) unfold in front of your eyes may be too harrowing for some audiences, with its powerful sound design one of the biggest reasons why people feel this way while watching it.

In discussing with Sound Designer Paul Germann on the movie, one of the bigger challenges in creating an immersive aural experience for the audience was capturing the sounds of the crowds function in several ways to punctuate the drama on screen:

“We needed them to sound big because we’re in these big rooms. But the more voices you add to it, the more they start to blur and wash each other out. You lose the shape and detail of everything. At the beginning of the process, we had this overwhelming crowd sound for these matches. However, we were missing the nuance in the drama that we needed for the actual match. Something we talked about many times was how wrestling, professional wrestling, is really theater. It’s not so much a sport. It’s more like circus acrobats or something like that.

It has this constructed narrative where you usually have a good guy, in this case, a Von Erich, and a bad guy, either Harley Race, Ric Flair, or whoever. They construct these matches so that there are ups, downs, and twists and turns. There are points in which the hero wins, and then the villain does something really despicable and starts to win again. The goal of all of that is to get the crowd to go on this journey that’s cathartic and exciting. They can vent out the frustrations they have in their daily lives by coming to this match and screaming their hearts out for their hero or screaming at the villain that they hate the most. 

It was important to us to understand the psychology of the crowds. For the most part, knowing that they’re fake, although, especially back then, quite a few people didn’t realize they were fake, but would come to these matches to have this cathartic moment, and the wrestlers who were most successful were the ones who got the biggest emotional reaction from the crowds. Zac Efron’s character talks about that with Lily James’s character in a diner at one point: that’s how you get rewarded for how the crowd reacts to you. From a sound perspective, we wanted to help tell that journey the best we could. It was really a balance of getting the largest of the crowd but also trying to focus on the people who were maybe closest to the ring, yelling and screaming, and feeling the emotion of those individual voices and feeling them rise and fall as the match progressed.”

Supervising Sound Editor Matt Chan discussed how the team looked at different sounds of wrestling matches online to capture the look and feel of The Iron Claw: 

“It was interesting to go back to those sounds, and we discussed what we would need to do to get that sound. We both watched matches as kids, but it is pretty fascinating to look at ’80s wrestling now. It’s very cartoonish and kind of unbelievable. We knew that we had to find a way that was suited to the kind of cinema that Sean [Durkin] would be presenting. The one thing we gathered from watching those early matches is that the crowds can just tell the story you don’t really hear because they’re doing the bumps on the mat. You don’t really hear people getting punched, and you can barely hear the dialogue. It’s the wash of the crowd, the waves, and the chairs that are really telling you what’s happening in the match. We thought that was really interesting and were going around trying to find places in Toronto where we could maybe record wrestling matches and wrestling rings. to try and recapture that sound.”

During our audio conversation, seen below, there was far more to unpack in regards to the movie, including their working relationship with director Sean Durkin, capturing the film’s emotional crescendos through sound, how they wanted to distinguish the rise and fall of the Von Erichs from its first and second half, their personal connection to the Von Erich family and the research process that went into the sound design.

You can check out the full conversation below and see The Iron Claw in theatres now:

[Some of the quotes in this article have been edited for length and clarity]