After the premiere at the Bleecker Street Cinema, I overheard someone wondering how "the dialogue was out of sync but the rest of sound was in sync?"
The entire film was shot without sync sound, except for the "witnesses" scenes that were added during post-production, because Eric Mitchell didn't have the budget to rent a Nagra sync tape recorder. A bold decision to "fix it in post" ;-)
Producer Dan Sales (my classmate at Brown University) screened the rough cut for me with dialogue (very) loosely dubbed - Eric accepted the inexperienced actors' clueless attempts to lip-sync as an "artistic" decision, he once told me like the French New Wave films. Dan asked me, "You're a sound guy, what do I do now?"
I recorded Foley sound effects for Scarface, Silkwood, and many other films, notably Rumblefish which had several scenes where the sound was entirely added in post-production. I wanted to transition to sound editing, and I had been the sole editor for an independent film A Shade of Gray.
I told Dan we needed to add layers of sound: the specific SFX, the SFX in the background of the scenes, roomtones, and Foleys. I was in between jobs collecting unemployment, so I accepted the challenge of becoming the Sound Designer and Supervising Sound Editor - and Eric didn't have any budget to pay me.
I walked around the locations in the film with Eric recording sound on a professional cassette machine we borrowed from Times Square director Allan Moyle. I had access to the SFX library at Sound One where I had worked, they let me transfer SFX to our 16mm mag stock after hours for free. A High School classmate owned a video studio where we recorded the Foleys. The cinematographer's Liza Minelli look-alike girlfriend was the Foley Walker.
Then I started the daunting task of layering the sounds to bring the film to life. I also added the music composed by Vince Gallo. I spent an afternoon in his Chinese-taking-over-Little-Italy tenement walk-up selecting music.
I also remember thinking that Steve Buscemi and Vince Gallo in their debut feature film roles were mad talented.
This is the first time Steve Buscemi and Mark Boone Junior worked together.