How To Create Movie Sex Sounds

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1:38And I'm Richard Osmond. How are you? Well, I mean, not my most competent, clearly, but other than that. It's because we still haven't got over Toffee Pennygate from the last show. Well, for me, there's nothing to get over. And I'm sorry it's dogging you. Perhaps you're thinking about it too much because you realise you were wrong. Oh, no. I think sometimes when you realise you're in the room with the killer. Do you know what I mean? And you're like, oh, no. Calls coming from inside the studio. Yeah, there's an amazing, we were watching Prime Suspect the other day. It's an amazing thing where Helen Mirren is at the opticians and she knows the optician is a murderer.

2:10Yeah, that's a great one. Oh, my God. That's how I feel at the moment. Okay. Shall we get straight on and do some questions? Let's do it. Go on. Hit me with it. Simon Eltringham has a question for you. He says, you're not serious. I hear about Toffee Pennies. He doesn't say that. He says, Radio 4 was on in the background at the weekend and a saucy bit occurred during The Archers. None more rest is entertainment than this. During the recording of a radio drama, would actors get up close and personal in the same way as a screen stage actor? Or are they simply sat in a chair with a script making lip smacking noises whilst a sound engineer shovels some bedsheets by a microphone?

2:45Beautifully written question. That's a beautiful. Thank you, Simon. First of all, all those kind of sounds are actually made by what's called a Foley artist. It's named after Jack Foley, the person who's a pioneer of all kinds of sound effects. because most things you hear or see in movies or as it began or then on television, they don't make the right sounds. Most props don't make the right sounds. You have to create, and it's often to do with the sort of human element of the soundtrack. And also the actors are the ones who are really closely miked. And so actually something that doesn't, noise doesn't happen in the same way on a film set that it does in real life.

3:15A door closing is sort of closing slightly off mic. It sounds like it's a mistake in the background. And so you have to close the door afterwards in post. Correct. If we can get down to this nitty gritty. so the way that this sex scenes in the archers would this is this is rumpy pumpy nitty gritty yeah that kind of nitty gritty there is actually there are various interviews about how people who've had to record um sex scenes in the archers so you're able to find out that and then i'm going to come on to wider use of sex noises there's a lot of sex in the archers there has been over not much but yeah i mean yes you know the whole of life is there yeah so um jolene who was played by Buffy Davis was with her adulterous landlord Sid Perks in the after sex shower scene.

3:54Now, she once talked about this at the Radio Times and she said, we had 12 minutes to record it. The shower curtain was actually an old plastic raincoat. Somehow even more sleazy. Alan Devereaux, who played Sid Perks, and I stood in baking trays and all the squishy noises were done using baby lotion while I said silly lines of dialogue that led you to believe the soap was in an interesting place okay which i love okay but for on-camera stuff too you have foley artists and actually at the weekend spoke to a producer who's a big producer who does a lot of tv drama and talked to me all about how foley artists will do this skin to skin contact in a sex scene the foley artist really just rubs or slaps their hands together creaking beds and sofas really help so they always make those kind of noises lips you're just kissing the back of your hand for the kissing noises because even when an actress kissing on screen that is not the noise of your kiss you're hearing you're hearing like a teenage girl kissing her hand in her bedroom you're hearing a foley artist kiss their own hand um and they one of them said quite often they will put a sort of dress shirt a kind of stiff cotton shirt on their arm so that they can make the noise of sheets against skin okay but you know you know when like things win like the best screen kiss of all time yeah there'll be a foley artist somewhere going that was me got quite literally licking their lips Me and the back of my hand.

5:12Yes, so sometimes they do it afterwards, but quite often, if they're doing a sex scene, they will record it with a mic in the studio where that scene is being shot. Always a guy called Mike, always. And they'll be doing it on a slight delay, almost as if they were signing. So you're watching what the actor's doing and then you're creating those noises on a slight delay. So the Foley artist. Yeah, it's the Foley artist who's doing this, okay. Now, some sounds are literally enough to change the rating of your film or show. So you have to be very, very careful. If it's too squelchy, you could honestly bump yourself up a rating, which you probably don't want.

5:46So it's exactly the same with your Uber rating. Yeah. Same thing. Yeah. If you've ever squeezed a grapefruit in the back of an Uber, which is one of the techniques they use. Yeah. Is that right? One of the things the Foley artists say is that you want it to sound appealing. It's not trying to recreate the exact sound because in lots of ways, like maybe sex is messy and it makes stupid sounds. You want it to be appealing and seductive in the way that the things we see on screen, we want to, you know, they're telling a story really with sound. Now, the biggest thing that they have in their kit always, and it doesn't have to be just for sex scenes, this is for everything, the foliarist, is chamois leather, chamois leather.

6:22And that is always used for skin, but they also use it in fight scenes. So when you hear people being smacked, that chamois leather. In horror, they wrap it round carrots. if you have to get broken bones. Wet it, wrap it around carrots, and then you snap it, and that's the sound of bones snapping. And again, as we always say, most props are not recordable, and particularly human props like this. But there's some funny ones of all the different amazing Foley artists. And you can see, if you go online, you can watch wonderful videos of Foley artists. The Foley artists who did Raiders of the Lost Ark, when they actually opened the Ark of the Covenant, the actual Ark of the Covenant that they used was obviously made of plastic, so it doesn't in any way make the right sound.

7:01and he thought for ages about how he could make that sort of, you know, sound of something being sort of, this lid being scraped and prized off. And in the end, what he did was he got the lid of his loo cistern and he dragged it across some garden stones. So when you hear that noise of the Ark of the Covenant being open, you can just go and watch the YouTube clip. He said, and actually long ago he got rid of the loo, or maybe it's in that big warehouse that they have at the end of Lost Ark, but he has kept the lid of the cistern because he sort of feels like it's part of film history. Must be worth a lot of money.

7:33Yeah. That is literally the closest we have to the Ark of the Covenant. Yeah, definitely. And all the snakes, you know, obviously Indiana Jones hates snakes. That was his wife's macaroni cheese and him just sort of pushing his hands through the macaroni cheese. Her macaroni cheese recipe is the noise of those snakes. Wow. Yeah. That's amazing. Foley artists are incredible. I bet we'll go back to talking about them and how they created some other sounds another time because every single one you hear about, you're like, oh, that's fascinating. And that all came from Sex on the Archers. Thank you so much, Simon.

8:01Richard, let me do this one for you because it's about Spotify wrapped. Okay, Joe Grant says, Spotify wrapped season is upon us. It is now, it's like the Red Cups at Starbucks. Yes. Is it a thing? I know. What were your top artists? How does Spotify come up with these genre matchups? For example, February for me was Surf Crush Permanent Wave Britpop and September Academic American Football Wrap. Sounds very AI gym playlist to me. Thank you for that callback to a previous. question yeah i love spotify wrapped it is one of those things that sort of crept up on us and people are genuinely kind of looking forward to it it's like like the darts you think christmas is about to begin because spotify wrapped is with us an incredible marketing tool and i imagine enormously complicated to do i think it's someone's job like the whole year round to do it but yeah this year one of the big um uh new things is they've got all these incredible different genres and funnily enough looking at um joe's one there which is surf crush permanent wave brit pop My June was surf crush Beatles-esque Britpop.

8:59So there you go, very, very close, just putting Beatles-esque instead of Permanent Wave. So, Joe, we have similarities there. Yeah, the former chief data alchemist at Spotify is called Glenn MacDonald. He categorized all of them. There's over 6 ,000 categories, millions of, you know, all these genres that didn't exist before. But we sort of know what they mean, if that makes sense. He has a website called everynoise.com, and you can show a map of all of these different genres. Technical black metal, there's Icelandic experimental, Gothenburg hip-hop, which I quite like the sound of. CharlieXCX, for example, is now a recession pop blingcore.

9:40That's actually perfect. But great names, so good for people to come up with those names. And yeah, it goes month by month. It's funny because you can sort of tell who you were in certain months. That's the fun of it. A lot of my writing is between January and March. So actually, between January and March, all I'm listening to really is classical music, soundtracks, things like that. So January was my, according to Spotify, was my light academia fantasy soundtrack phase. Do you always listen when you're writing? Yes, I do. I either have complete silence or I have classical music or soundtracks.

10:13The second there's lyrics, I can't help but listen to it. so March was your Victorian soft piano classical season and it says you were all about artists like Camille Sanson and Joanne Sebastian Bach yeah I was all about them uh so yeah sometimes it can tell where your year is but it's such a brilliant marketing tool and it tells us about ourselves and then you have your kind of most played songs and stuff like that do you want to play guess my biggest band of the year which bands I listen to most that's hard right yeah it's really when I hear things like that it's throwing everything off I don't know tell me forget that it was Vampire Weekend oh was it okay yeah which I'd take yeah listen I think I think that's sort of fine my number two is John Williams but because of the amount of soundtracks I'm having to listen to it's so weird isn't it yeah I think both of those do you great credit but also I just love everybody of a certain age it just goes I mean this is literally exactly the same as it would have been 25 years ago I mean it's like okay it's Springsteen right it's the Stones it's Madonna okay We really don't change much.

11:17And however much I like to think, no, I've listened to quite a lot of new stuff this year. I'm listening to a lot of experimental stuff. And then, you know, you look on this, you go, ah, crowded house. Maybe I don't listen to what I think I listen to. But I genuinely think it's an absolutely extraordinary piece of technology. It's really good fun for everybody involved. It obviously takes a huge amount of work, and it's an incredibly good marketing tool. And I like lots of other brands sort of try and copy it. I remember like Trainline do your Trainline Wrapped now which is places you've been let me remind you about the train journeys you've had this year no thank you I think to their credit they do it ironically but it's quite and it's not their fault and it's not their fault whatever happened on those trains and a lot of bad things happened on trains to me this year it wasn't the Trainline's fault Spotify Wrapped if you haven't checked so you haven't checked yours yet no I haven't because did it come on the day of the Albert Hall show or the day so I was in such a sort of yeah yeah yeah crazy bubble that I haven't and I will do and I will report back and next week we'll reveal your number one artist unless it's someone if you had to guess now who do you think it would be?

12:24Taylor Swift okay I think probably it was Bruce Springsteen yeah like everyone else oh I love this question Kevin G Conroy I love someone with a middle initial as well yeah Kevin G Conroy asks what are your top three worst best English accents done by American actors? Dick Van Dyke is not allowed. Ah, okay, so you vetoed the classic Mary Poppins performance of Dick Van Dyke, which I find very charming. Okay, hang on a second. I think they're dividing into all the bad ones are men and all the good ones are women, but I don't know what that means. Yeah, listen. We just, listen, we don't make the news, we just report it.

13:02Okay, the worst, and I'm having to put him at number three, but I'm not sure he quite deserves to be... Sorry, he's the worst, but you're putting him at number three? No, the list of worst, thingies no don't do this to me so he's the third worst he's the third worst yeah so he's not the worst he probably should be hired but he's keanu reeves so i'm giving him a break okay keanu reeves in uh in in the drac in bramstoker's dracula that's not great no hang on actually i don't think it is actually worse at number two we've got don cheadle's cockney in oceans in the oceans movies i mean that that's bad that's extremely bad and should potentially have even been dubbed over by Dick Van Dyke who was I know what my number one is I wonder if it'd be the same as yours I wonder big rusty crow in Robin Hood because that is an English okay his accent in that is he's walked out of interviews when questioned about it he listened to a lot of audio of Michael Parkinson someone we were talking about yeah yeah um who is obviously famously from Barnsley and not Nottingham he listened to a lot of audio of that what I'd say it was Irish New New Zealand and maybe some Yorkshire.

14:06Okay. There's nothing Nottingham about it and it's terrible and also because he walked out of interviews when asked about it. I'm going to put it back up there at number one. Well, actually, hang on. In theatres, I once heard a terrible one, which was Frank Langella. I saw on Broadway a Noel Coward play, so already I'm making a big mistake. Someone gave me the tickets. And it was a Noel Coward play. It was Present Laughter and Gary Essendine, he's the main character and he's basically a sort of avatar of Noel Coward himself. Frank Langella doing the sort of English, clipped 1930s English accent was a big mistake.

14:39Oh, was it? Yeah, it was. I'm going to do top three, but none of my people, they're all terrible English accents, but none of them are Americans. Oh, okay. But they're all three from the same episode of the same show. And they are, of course, Daphne's brothers from Frasier. they are Anthony La Paglia Simon who kind of talks like it's awful but then two of our greatest actors doing terrible British accents Richard E. Grant and Robbie Coltrane both just come on and absolutely the three of them it must have been a dare Frasier can do almost no wrong yeah okay it has some of the greatest writing in history some of the greatest performances in history some of the greatest farces in history some of the great story character arcs you know every time a new guest comes on it's extraordinary but their treatment of the british accent is it's sort of the grit in the oyster that makes fraser so beautiful because you think oh you can do stuff wrong uh so but anthony the paglia richard e grant and robbie coltrane in fraser i'd say are the worst three british accents ever committed to film and two of those people are british okay best a special mention i'll give to scarlett hansson in the prestige third best is gwyneth paltrow in emma very good second emma stone is very good she's in the favorite in cruella in all of anything she does in english accent and she's very good but undisputed is renee zelweger in bridget jones it is so good and she so sounds exactly like girls like that who work in publishing in the UK in that particular era.

16:23And funny enough, one of my sister's friends who was a girl like that who worked in publishing in that particular era, when Renny Selwager was rehearsing that role, I can't remember which publishing house it was, but they found her a job and she came into the office to get the accent. She worked around all those people. And my sister's friend, Kate, said to her at one point, this is my middle sister, said to her, there's someone in our office who looks so like the girl in Jerry Maguire. And yes. No, she was in her office. Yeah. Wow. And she was, you know, that accent is completely, completely faultless.

16:56Yes, it is amazing. Okay, I'll go for the best three. And again, I'm going to go all from the same production. Three Americans, Hank Azaria, Mike McKean and Christopher Guest in This Is Spinal Tap. How did I not say? Yeah. Christopher Guest has got a whole English connection. Yes. In fact, yeah, he eventually became a hereditary peer for about five minutes. He's Lord Hayden Guest, isn't he? Yeah. But Nigel, I mean, those three accents are amazing. And exactly, for that particular type of person who would have been in one of those bands, and yes, you're right, okay. So there's some brilliant ones out there.

17:30By the way, if anyone wants to ask me the worst Brits doing American accents, I will think about that for next week. Oh, that'll be fun. The best one, by the way, is when people had absolutely no idea that Idris Elba was a British actor when he was a stringer bell. Oh, sorry, I should have put him in because that isn't actually, okay. I put all the girls in. I was about to say chicks, but never mind. I put all the chicks in. Where did that come from? I don't know. Okay, can I make him equal with Renee Zellweger? Yeah, so you've got three chicks and a hunk. Yeah, three chicks and a hunk. Yeah, that's a Christmas movie.

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19:51Welcome back, everybody. Right, let's keep control of myself in this second half. I'm going to go straight to a question about TV Chef Kitchens, Richard. Charlie O 'Reilly says... Do you think that's a man Charlie or a chick Charlie? I was just thinking... Which one? I was just thinking that. We have always wondered what the deal is with sets in cooking shows. Are these the TV chef's kitchens, or do they find an amazing kitchen in a posh house? It depends on the people, really. The idea is that certainly when you have, like, if you've got Nigella or something like that, and the brand is built around cooking at home and friends coming around and things like that, the idea is that you do do that at a house.

20:31So Nigella, she did used to do it at a house. now they're in a studio in park royal i think because the whole point is with it's a tv set is quite hard because you do need quite a lot of cameras and they need to be able to move and also uh if you're cooking food you want to light it beautifully and a normal domestic kitchen you can't hang the sort of lights that you want from the ceiling because the ceiling is not high enough and also you want to be able to see the ceiling so usually you'll find yourself in a set that can be lit from above and lit from the side and cameras can be all over the place and cameras can go behind the cooker hood and shoot from all sorts of different angles.

21:05So it's one of those TV trickery things where actually you think, it's funny, isn't it? Because if you actually were in Nigella's house for a dinner party and it was being filmed, it would look cramped because of the way the cameras have to film. And you don't want it to look. You want it to look beautiful and inviting and you want it to look glamorous. And to do that, you have to make it unbelievably unglamorous around the outskirts of it. There are obvious shows like Saturday Kitchen and Sunday Brunch where you can see that the kitchen is inbuilt. But there are certain chefs who will just film at home.

21:37James Martin often films at home, Mary Berry, where you can tell they've got a really massive kitchen because they live in the country. And so, you know, you can film through the windows there. But almost always kitchens are sets because it's just very hard to film inside someone's house. It's also very hard to get insurance for fire and things like that when you're inside someone's actual house. but yeah it's that beautiful thing of you can make a kitchen look so stunning and you can make food look so amazing if you have industrial studio lights yeah and it's always going to look better than if we were to cook in our own kitchens at home it's a little nest of homespunness in the middle of quite a big yes exactly like that and also you can have side kitchens and you can you know you can have food prep areas like kim does kim kardashian's got the actual kitchen yeah The front of house kitchen and the actual kitchen.

22:30By and large, the last thing ever you want is a film crew in your house. I mean, God bless them. I've worked with many film crews and I love them. But there's a reason that studios are massive. It's because, you know, film crews should not be in a small room. Whereas, you know, a huge rash of amazing cooking things on TikTok and Instagram, they by and large are in people's kitchens because you want it to look lo-fi and low-tech. And you want to be sort of banging drawers and sort of losing things. And, you know, the lighting aesthetic is very, very different. so for TV things like that it'll be a set plus your phone doesn't take up much space on a little tripod yeah a phone takes up less space than eight camera operators yeah for sure and talking of kitchens Lorenzo Gomez good name Lorenzo asks how do actors prepare for eating scenes what if they don't like the food I always think that because there's loads of foods I don't like I'm like I couldn't be in this film or do they have a say do they starve themselves beforehand do they spit it out rather than swallowing Lorenzo finishes okay often if there's food they will also need to talk in the scene so you basically can't have any food in your mouth for that bit so they're really good at faking it they have a tiny piece in their mouth and there's a there's a funny video actually somewhere which i remember once seeing i don't know if it's still available on her instagram jenna fisher explaining herself eating a taco jenna fisher from the office pam from the office the u.s office and she's got this teeny little piece of something in her mouth and she looks like she's taking an enormous bite of a taco but you're not taking it at all.

23:54And then you have this tiny thing that you can sort of masticate while you're talking and it doesn't cause a huge thing. But the reason they don't eat as a rule is that you could have to eat 30 mouthfuls of this thing, if not more. Because once you've done the scene from every angle and everyone's coverage and you've still got to eat this thing in it. So what they do have, and this is the standard procedure, is a spit bucket. So you'll notice that when you ever see someone eat in a scene, the camera cuts away to the other person or whatever it is straight after and always look because you'll see and then they're spitting it out.

24:28But very occasionally an actor will sort of commit to the bit to get a laugh. And there's an episode of, I think, of Parks and Recreation where Chris Pratt, this is, by the way, before Chris Pratt, honed himself into an action-adventure leading man. And when he was the sort of kind of goofy, schlubby boyfriend, I don't think they gave him any lines in it. And he had to eat a rack of ribs. and he eats 12 racks of ribs. He was just trying to make all the cast laugh. And during the filming of that scene, he ate 12 racks of ribs. But he didn't need to. Julia Roberts, actually, I've just remembered this, in Eat, Pray, Love, when she was filming Eat, Pray, Love, they did the Italian eat bit first.

25:09And the character does put on weight in order for her to... So she would just eat all the things. And so there was one day where she said she ate many, many, many, many slices of pizza in the recording of one thing because she thought, oh, well, I'll just put the weight on doing this particular section. And when we get to windier for the next bit, I will be ready to go. See, that's the other difficult thing is if you are eating, the continuity also has a big job because if you're doing the same scene eight times and you're taking a bite of something, you can't then shoot the scene again in a mid shot and have a bite out of the piece of food.

25:41So the food has to look like it looked before you took the first bite out of it. So you constantly have to replace the food with uneaten versions of exactly the same food. which can take an enormously long time. You even do it sometimes on a panel show with water, levels of water. If you do a pickup at the end and there's no water in your cup, you go, just fill up your water cup because your water cup was full at the beginning. Because the idea that somebody looking in will see an edit where someone's water goes from full to empty to full again and will have their evening ruined. And also viewers love this.

26:14Now you can pause everything the whole time. You're like, they always want to see the joins. so it's better if you just keep the thing exactly at this and you have this tiny thing in your mouth that you're chewing and also you've got to get the lines out. So they're really good at making it look like the most enormous mouthful and it's actually a tiny little thing in their mouth. But also actors always, lots of actors have to have a thing and lots of actors are food actors. If you let an actor have something in their hand they are never happier because they're like, oh yeah I've got like a donut, I'm not eating it but I sort of look like a mite and I've got coffee in my other hand and occasionally I'll sort of go like that.

26:46It's like dance players. You've got to stop your brain talking to your hands. That's what you've got to do. And actors, if you give them something to keep them busy, it just really relaxes their brain and they can become their character far more. And you'll see it time and time again, certain actors who will always, cup of coffee actors, who are like, if they can have a cup of coffee in their hands at any given time, they will. They don't want to drink it. They just have the idea of, yeah, me, I'm just a guy with a cup of coffee in the morning. I've got it. I found the character. Yeah, that's who I am.

27:10Right, Richard, for you from Jennifer Green. I'm curious, says Jennifer, that how do tv presenters and hosts have the time to read and watch all of the books films etc that their guests are plugging on the show like they state love the book etc etc surely the likes of graham norton don't have that much time on their hands are they just briefed ahead of time or do they really put in the time and effort shows like this morning have a revolving door of guests promoting things it just doesn't seem possible yes it is um and you can always tell as an author if they have read the book or if they haven't read the book which which i always find fascinating If you do something like Between the Covers, which is the book show that Sarah Cox does, everyone has read all the books because it is a show about books.