Sound supervisor Richard King describes Speilberg's War of the Worlds as “an action movie with heart, soul and great special effects.” When King and I spoke in mid-May, the final mix — with the team of Anna Behlmer and Andy Nelson presiding — had just begun, and Potter and Fasal were still delivering new effects to the stage, nine months after their work on the film began.

“We did quite a lot of recording during the production of the film, which is not entirely unusual but not often in this quantity,” Potter says. “For one scene, they took over an entire town in upstate New York to film these scenes of people panicking. At some point, they had up to a thousand extras running through the streets in panic mode, so that's an example of an opportunity you really can't re-create in post-production. So we set up our mics and tried to capture as much as we could along with the production [sound]. After a few days of getting that stuff, they were able to cut loose about 300 extras that we took into a quiet neighborhood a few blocks away and had them running around and screaming.”

Both Potter and Fasal ran Devas for those shots: “For some, I would be among the crowd with a boom pole going straight up to get above people's heads, a general overall stereo shot, and John would often be forward of the crowd or off to the side, getting various medium and medium-long shots.”

Another trip east took the duo to the Red Hook shipyards in Brooklyn to capture sounds and ambiences connected to Tom Cruise's character in the film. “The shipyard was really a fantastic opportunity because there was quite a bit going on — they were arranging these giant cargo containers and we practically had free run of the place,” Fasal says. “I'm pretty sure we destroyed every OSHA rule that's ever been written. [Laughs] We were in there booming up within maybe six inches of these containers, and Eric's directing these trucks that are taking away the containers. We even got to get up on the gantry and crawl out on these catwalks to record various exterior perspectives. The wind was blowing about 30 miles per hour and it was really cold. It was another OSHA nightmare. Once, when the shipyard guy who brought us up there saw that we were happily recording, he said, ‘You guys okay? I'm outta here! It's too cold,’ so we had another hour of unsupervised recording.”

A while later, Potter and Fasal went on an expedition to record a military convoy down in the Blue Ridge Mountains region of Virginia. “We went up the Maury River to a picturesque rural farm area where military vehicles were staging a convoy to approach the big battle in the film,” Potter recalls. “It was quite an assortment of Humvees, troop carriers and tanks, and they had a minimum of three cameras rolling at all times. These vehicles just kept coming by; it seems like miles and miles of them. I think they actually only had about 20, but they cut them together and it seems like it will never end.

“Due to the many, many takes they shot, we were able to run down or up from where the scene was shooting and capture the vehicles coming by close and medium and long shot. At the end of the day, we figured we'd shot way too much material on this, but now that we've seen it cut together, it's a good thing we did. All those takes could be laid together and they could maintain the continuity of the flow of the convoy without the same sound passing by over and over.”

“And interestingly,” Fasal continues, “even with all the material we shot, we still had to shoot more for some specific moments we didn't know about until it was cut together.”

According to Fasal, “Almost without fail, the military is very cooperative. When you're trying to get their cooperation, they need to see a script or at the very least an outline because they want to see how they're portrayed. And if they like it, they'll really help you a lot because they see it as a great advertisement. Of course, working on a film by Steven Spielberg will open a few doors, too. They were happy to help.”

Do Fasal and Potter always get everything they want from the military? “We've gotten pretty good at gauging what you can ask for and how to phrase it in a way that doesn't make you seem like a jerk,” Potter says. “‘Can you think of some way we could…?’ And we've found that if you cue them with headphones it sometimes helps. They hear M-1 tanks firing every day and they hear F-18s flying over all the time and it's nothing special to them. But you pass them the headphones after getting a few good takes and they're usually quite amazed, and they often get newly enthusiastic about helping you get more sounds in different ways.”

How often, I wonder, are Potter and Fasal actually in danger? “A lot,” Potter says. “The danger comes from being in unusual or novel situations where you don't have complete control, so you have to really stay on your toes.” Adds Fasal, “I think the most dangerous ones are when we have to trust someone else's skills. A lot of times with recording cars, planes, trains — anything that moves fast — you're trusting that the tires aren't going to blow and this suspension arm isn't going to break. We do things with cars at super-high speeds and ridiculous maneuvers — full-on power slides and doughnuts and sessions with cars crashing and sideswiping each other.”

For War of the Worlds, one recording session had the duo in a wrecking yard dropping cars from a forklift to get crashing metal sounds for some of the battle mayhem in the film. And they traveled to the Twentynine Palms marine base in Southern California's desert to capture the new M1A2 Abrams tanks. Then there was that tough assignment back East getting a bar ambience at a place called the Anchor Tavern: The Irish bartender “made sure our glasses weren't empty all night,” Fasal says with a chuckle. “There were eight or nine regulars and they had plenty to say and plenty to drink. It took us eight hours — we took the time to meticulously capture this ambience by ingratiating ourselves with the locals, complete with arm wrestling the bartender.”

Just as the final mix on War of the Worlds was starting, Potter spent an afternoon capturing a new engine sound for a Shelby Mustang that appears in the film, and Fasal had a day of recording metal groans and noises in a swimming pool for a scene in which a ferry capsizes, spilling cars and people into the water. Says Fasal, “I had these DPA underwater mics, and also the traditional condom mics, and unfortunately I had a leaker, so I lost a nice AKG Blue Dot mic. We'd used that on Lemony in the condom and it worked real well, but it developed a little tear and then it was snap, crackle and pop. We had two different sound sources: We had speakers actually floating on the surface of the pool on rafts and then we also had an underwater speaker. The problem with recording underwater is getting the low end, so we tried various things, including a subwoofer, which wasn't effective. But the 15-inch powered monitors worked quite well, and then it became a question of trying different mics and keeping them from getting fried.”