🎧 How ‘The Bear’ Sound Team Creates Quiet and Chaos
Emmy nominee Steve ‘Major’ Giammaria, a four-time winner, on building and releasing tension on the FX comedy series
Art & Crafts is our podcast series that brings audiences behind the scenes with the artisans who create the film and TV we love. This conversation is sponsored by FX. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts.
The sound design of the FX comedy series The Bear is often so noisy — heated conversations, shattered plates, clanging pots and pans — that when the Emmy Award-winning show goes quiet, it can feel like a primal scream. Never had the power of silence been more apparent on the series than in the season 3 episode “Doors,” which opens at a funeral service for the mother of pastry chef Marcus (Lionel Boyce).
“It was a real gift that they gave us that nice quiet moment before devolving into even more chaos of this episode,” The Bear supervising sound editor and re-recording mixer Steve “Major” Giammaria, MPSE, tells Ankler Media deputy editor Christopher Rosen during the latest episode of Art & Crafts. “Doors,” directed by Duccio Fabbri, begins as Marcus’ friends and colleagues, including Carmy (Jeremy Allen White), Sydney (Ayo Edebiri) and Richie (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), quietly file into church.
“There’s a real depth to this quiet; there’s a lot actually happening,” Giammaria says. “There are layers of benches creaking and people coughing and all of this stuff to give it that feeling of being in a church at a funeral — something, unfortunately, that people are familiar with. So it’s just sitting in that silence and that heaviness.”
The only dialogue in the opening scene of “Doors” comes courtesy of Marcus, who reads a eulogy for his mother. When he’s through, there’s a beat, and then “Doors” launches into the chaos — a month in the life of the show’s titular restaurant as the chefs and workers get their legs under them after opening night. Scored entirely with classical music — a departure from The Bear’s typical soundtrack of Gen X alternative rock — the episode ebbs and flows, building to various crescendos of emotion before downshifting.
“There were so many spots where we were able to release the tension,” Giammaria says, singling out a moment where the camera flies across Lake Michigan before landing on Sydney as she endures a panic attack.
“That’s going to be a reset so that we can build up to that point,” he says of the sequence. “You can’t just keep getting louder and more chaotic, because that just doesn’t work for the length of an episode. The picture editors do a great job keeping the pace of the show, and all of that is built into this, too. My team can’t do that on our own. We have to follow what they give us, and they give us a great structure to work with. So there’s tension and release.”
The nominations Giammaria received this year for sound editing and sound mixing for The Bear are the fifth and sixth he’s earned for the series in its first three seasons. He’s already won four Emmys for his work as part of the show’s acclaimed sound team.
“I’m very, very grateful to be on this show and for the ride, and everybody seems to like it, and it’s great,” he says. “But we’re not going to just do sound stuff just to be flashy, just as a technical flex. It has to serve the story. So we’re never trying to top ourselves just to top ourselves. It has to ring true to the moment. Otherwise, it’s just cool sound design that has no bearing on the episode. It’s never just sound for sound’s sake.”