Willie D. Burton, CAS has an extensive awards history--and has contributed to industry history--in a storied ongoing career.
Burton just earned his eighth career Oscar nomination--for Best Sound as production sound mixer on Oppenheimer (Universal Pictures). He is going for his third Academy Award win, the first two coming for Bird in 1989 and Dreamgirls in 2007.
Actually Dreamgirls had been Burton's most recent Oscar nod until he--in tandem with sound designer/supervising sound editor Richard King, as well as re-recording mixers Gary A. Rizzo and Kevin O’Connell--landed one of the 13 nominations garnered last month by Oppenheimer. Burton's other Oscar noms over the years date back to The Buddy Holly Story in 1979, Altered States in ‘81, WarGames in ‘84, The Shawshank Redemption in ‘95, and The Green Mile in 2000.
The interim between noms for BAFTA Film Awards has been even longer. Burton received his third career BAFTA nod for Oppenheimer. His last BAFTA nod prior to Oppenheimer came in 1989 for Bird, five years after his first BAFTA recognition in 1984 for WarGames.
The stretch of time between his last two Oscar nominations--as well as the BAFTA noms--still contains notable projects for Burton ranging from, among others, The Great Debaters to The Help, Selma, Straight Outta Compton, Fences and 2023 releases such as Air and Origin. The consistently high-caliber body of work underscores how accomplished Burton has been over the decades. In fact, he received the Cinema Audio Society’s Career Achievement Award back in 2005. He recently picked up his fourth career CAS Award nomination for Oppenheimer, adding to nominations for Spider-Man: No Way Home in 2022, Dreamgirls in 2007 and In the Line of Fire in 1994. He won the CAS Award for Dreamgirls.
As for the alluded-to making of industry history, Burton was the first African American to gain membership in IATSE Local 695, breaking new ground for varied sound artists who have since followed. Burton grew up in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, where he first became interested in audio, fueled in part by living in proximity to a radio station. He aspired to a career in audio but hadn’t really seriously considered Hollywood. His first major foray into sound was working in sonar for the U.S. government at the naval shipyard in Long Beach, Calif. Burton began looking to spread his wings beyond the government sector and tried to get into IATSE but without much initial success. His letters to the union went unanswered but he persisted, eventually catching a break when IATSE Local 695 elected a new business agent, Jack Coffey. Burton recalled Coffey taking an interest in him and outlining the steps needed to gain entry into the union. Burton told SHOOT he will “always be grateful” to the late Coffey and his family for their help.
And Coffey no doubt was gratified over Burton’s achievements and longevity--and would have been proud in particular of his role as sound mixer on set for Oppenheimer. Appropriately, Burton--who’s made history for the industry and on the awards show circuit--served as a key contributor to writer-director Christopher Nolan’s historical yet personal epic. Nolan’s script was an adaptation of Martin Sherwin and Kai Bird’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2005 book, “American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer.” The script delves into the life of theoretical physicist Oppenheimer (portrayed by Cillian Murphy) and conveys the thoughts, ideas and concerns within the brilliant mind of the man who served as director of the Manhattan Project’s Los Alamos Laboratory in New Mexico during World War II and became known as “the father of the atomic bomb.”
Oppenheimer marked a return engagement for Burton with Nolan. The two first collaborated on Tenet, a 2020 release on which they developed a creative rapport. Burton noted that upon first meeting Nolan, he wasn’t sure that he would get the Tenet gig. But in retrospect, Burton thought that his self-described orientation of retaining old-school approaches to marry with newer school advances may have struck a chord with Nolan. Then, based on their positive experience on Tenet, Nolan gravitated again to Burton for Oppenheimer.
Burton values his collaborative relationship with Nolan, noting that the director wants his colleagues “to be prepared in every way” for a project. Towards that end, Burton said that Nolan’s norm is to provide considerably more prep time to department heads than directors normally allot on movies. This luxury becomes a necessity given the ambitious nature of Nolan’s work.
As for the major challenges that Oppenheimer posed to him on the sound front, Burton cited the director’s aversion to wireless microphones and wireless booms. Everything is hard wired to cable, meaning that Burton has to go to great lengths, literally, with cables, winding them about to keep out of camera view, carefully planning where the boom needs to be situated at any given time.
And then there’s the considerable noise generated by the high-end IMAX camera. When dialogue is extensive in scenes, Nolan often opts for a quieter Panavision System 65 film camera. But for shorter dialogue sequences, Nolan will deploy the IMAX camera with certain allowances. For example, after shooting a scene, he may go the audio-only route immediately, having the actors repeat their lines and physical actions--even though only the sound is being recorded. The “muscle memory” of skilled actors enables them to re-create their verbal and physical performances on the spot---so that the dialogue and other related audio nuances are captured to mesh seamlessly with what had previously been lensed. “It’s amazing how incredible Chris is with making all this work,” avoiding having to resort to ADR, related Burton. Nolan is expert in both on-set audio and audio postproduction, collaborating with Burton’s Oscar-nominated Oppenheimer compatriots on the post side, including King, Rizzo and O’Connell.
Burton affirmed that Nolan puts “an incredible crew together,” adding that “the creativity that everyone puts into it--from production design to make-up, costume design,” all the disciplines, is tremendous. The mix of such artistry can generate spectacular results--with so much accomplished on a schedule of just some 57 shoot days. And the public response has been overwhelmingly positive--translating into a major critical and commercial success. It’s akin to a Gestalt dynamic where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Everyone comes together on Nolan's team to bring something very special to fruition. “When I was working on this film, I knew it would be good," said Burton, recalling that when he ultimately saw Oppenheimer--and the work done by the audio post ensemble--"it was better than I even imagined.”
(This is the 13th installment of a 16-part series with future installments of The Road To Oscar slated to run in the weekly SHOOT>e.dition, The SHOOT Dailies and on SHOOTonline.com, with select installments also in print/PDF issues. The series will appear weekly through the Academy Awards gala ceremony. The 96th Oscars will be held on Sunday, March 10.)