Paula Fairfield

Paula Fairfield, Hollywood supervising sound editor and former general manager of CSV, is a busy woman, so we schedule an interview for a Sunday morning. But when I make the call at the appointed time, she's not there. She calls back later to apologize: it seems that the star of a film she's working on had "stomped out" of an ADR session on Friday afternoon, and as a result she's been forced to work all weekend.

"We deal with a lot of big egos," she comments. "It's just one of the problems you can encounter when you work with some of these high-profile people." Dealing with temperamental celebrities is only part of Paula's job description, but it comes with the territory. Over the past eight years, she's worked as a sound effects editor, sound designer and supervising sound editor on some 85 feature films, more than half of them while based in L.A.

She's cut horse sounds for All the Pretty Horses (starring Matt Damon), swordfights for the The Count of Monte Cristo, and fight scenes and car chases for five of the seven Jean-Claude Van Damme movies. For The Scorpion King, the action flick currently in theatres, she spent months layering horse steps, explosions and fire sounds, right down to the flame-pops of the torches. She even invented a special language, using pre-recorded camel sounds, for the white camel that plays the leading character The Rock's sidekick.

Prior to becoming a professional sound editor, Paula had another career as a video artist whose taut, ironic works explored the relationship between women and the media. She was also co-manager, with director and editor Su Rynard, of CSV between 1988 and 1993. Together they were responsible for completely redesigning the facility and ushering it into a new era. "It was an exciting time because we were building this new place and coming up with new programs and ideas," she recalls. "We were trying to make it the most progressive artist-run centre in Canada and open it up as much as we could to everybody."

Paula has acquired a slight American accent from living south of the border for the past four years, but she actually grew up in Halifax, studying at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in the early '80s. A summer apprenticeship with NFB editor Les Halman determined the course of her future career. "When I watched him work with sound, I was mesmerized because he did some pretty amazing things just using mags and a moviola and a Steenbeck," she says. "He was kind of like my mentor and I credit him with getting me into the mess that I'm in today."

Back in Nova Scotia, Paula made Relative Activities (1984), a short film juxtaposing a soundtrack of Harlequin romance excerpts and maudlin love songs with close-ups of a bride before and after her wedding. Then, in 1985 (International Youth Year), she was one of 25 women under the age of 25 selected to collaborate on a series of short films sponsored by NFB's Studio D.

Shortly afterwards, Paula moved to Toronto and joined CSV. "What drew me to CSV was the technical aspect, because I've always been sort of a techno-slut," she laughs. After freelancing for a while at CSV, she was hired onto the technical staff. And then in 1988, when Rodney Werden stepped down as general manager, she and Su Rynard took over. "Rodney and Ed Mowbray and Michael Brooks were really into providing a great facility, but to me it felt like this funny island, set apart from the rest of the community," explains Paula. "Some of these guys were brilliant and were into creating odd machines. We used to joke about it as the Charles Street Museum of Technology because they built these weird things which the artist would come in and manipulate."

In the early 1990s, Paula and Su decided to completely redesign CSV in order to make it more accessible to artists, expecially those with limited technical experience. "We started researching what kind of funding was out there, and we did an incredible amount of fundraising and planning," Paula says. "Then we gutted the place and rebuilt it from the ground up, creating this new place which is close to what it is now."

When the dust cleared, CSV had an audio suite that hadn't existed before, a new office (it used to be where the equipment room is now), three revamped video suites, and a central machine room with a patch bay that connected the machines to the suites. This last feature was crucial in making the facility easier to use for artists.

Meanwhile, Paula had continued making her own videos (they were actually shot on film, then transferred to video), doing post-production work on them at CSV. Fragments (1989) was a mock movie trailer intercutting a televangelist's rant with scenes from two women's lives, and Mirage (1993) was a 19-minute video whose soundtrack at times resembles an electronic music composition. Another video, Live Wires (1990), was completed during a residency at Banff. All the works displayed a keen interest in sound.

Paula left her post at CSV in 1993, discouraged by a collapse in arts funding and political problems at the centre. Collaborating with cinematographer and longtime friend Kim Derko, she produced some music videos, one of which won a MuchMusic award. She also completed her video Screamers (1994), for which she rented a ProTools system with the goal of learning the software and then looking for work as a sound editor.

When the piece was finished, she did just that. "It was very weird. I literally walked in off the street to Deluxe Toronto and approached the head of Sound Dogs there and asked him for a job," she says. "His partner, the head guy in sound effects, had just left and had been looking for someone."

Paula's first gig as a sound effects editor was on the TV series Due South, for which she won a Gemini in 1996. She also was a sound editor on the series Nikita, a slew of American features, and the Canadian film Regeneration (1997), about shell-shocked WWI soldiers. Regeneration and another Canadian film, House (1998), led to Genie nominations. But by 1998, Paula again felt like moving on. "I was doing a whole lot of "B" movies, lots of bad action movies, and I'm just not a button pusher," she says. "I didn't feel like I was being creative and I felt I either had to get a new career or I needed to get right in the middle of it."

Getting in the middle of things meant L.A., so Paula used her savings and equipment two ProTools systems and a massive sound library to qualify for an E-2 (investors) visa. Setting up a company in L.A., she went on to do effects editing, sound design and supervising sound editing for 50 American features in four years.

Paula runs her company MHz Sound Design with her business and domestic partner Carla Murray, an artist from Toronto. She and Carla live and work in the San Fernando Valley ("You've heard of Valley Girls - that's us," quips Paula). Their studio is located in Toluca Lake, right around the corner from Bob Hope's house.

"We have three edit suites and a machine room, which Carla and I set up ourselves," says Paula, adding that she does all the technical support herself. "We pulled thousands of feet of wire, for which my years of wiring at Charles Street came in handy." In addition to a multitude of action films, dramas and horror films, MHz has also done sound work for several comedies, including some starring Adam Sandler. Projects that will hit the screens this year include Mr. Deeds (with Adam Sandler) and the performance film Run Tel Dat, starring comedian Martin Lawrence.

"I have worked on more interesting films here from a sound point of view than I ever would have worked on in Canada in five times the length of time," says Paula. Despite what appears to be a successful career, Paula says there have been hard times. "It's terrible to say, but what you get from people here is a lot of empty promises, and very few people follow through." Last year, the threat of industry strikes and the events of September 11th left Paula's company struggling for five months. Recent acquisitions of smaller sound studios by two major corporations have made the future even more uncertain. Paula also finds it difficult getting used to life in L.A. "Hollywood is just a strange, strange place," she says. It's very competitive, people are very suspicious of one another and it's hard to meet people here because it's a car culture. I'm just a little over the Hollywood thing."

Despite this, she plans to renew her five-year visa when it expires next year. And she's also hoping to get back to making her own art, as she did in her CSV days. "It was a really fun time in a lot of ways and there was a really cool community of people working together," she says. "Here it's pretty culturally vapid and you miss that kind of exchange of ideas." Meanwhile, Paula must get back to work on her latest film. The mix is just days away and there's a moody star lurking in the wings. Her art will have to wait for another, less stressful, day.

Paula Fairfield's videos can be viewed at V-Tape, 401 Richmond St. W. , Suite 452, Tel: (416) 351-1317. Her filmography can be obtained on the Internet through IMDb (the Internet Movie Database).

 23 September 2003