#297 Monique Reymond’s Foley Artistry: The Hidden Symphony of Film and TV

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Jeff Dwoskin 0:28

All right, Ruthie, thank you so much for that amazing introduction. You get the show going each and every weekend as week was no exception. Welcome, everybody to Episode 297 of classic conversations. As always, I am your host, Jeff Dwoskin. Great to have you back for what's sure to be the squishiest episode ever. This is a classic one. My guest today is Monique Ray Mone foley artists. What is Foley? It's a unique sound effect technique that involves creating and performing everyday sounds for movies and television shows. It brings those visuals to life. Monique is a fully expert, and she's got a million stories to share. And that's coming up in just a few seconds. And in these few seconds. If you're hungry or feel you may be about to become hungry. Listen to my conversation with Chef Mike Haracz, former executive chef of McDonald's he's spilling all the McDonald's secrets. What is a remake rib? Why is that ice cream machine? Oh, he's broken. I tell you but I need you to listen. Before you go. Listen to Chef Mike. We're diving in to Foley with Foley expert Monique Reymond. That's coming up right now. All right, everyone. I'm excited to introduce my next guest three time Emmy Award winner CEO of channel 1111 that Isaiah 11111

Monique Reymond 1:52

You can say it that way you can say it 1111 However, it's it's a series of ones

Jeff Dwoskin 1:56

1111 That's good too. Yoga instructor foley artists master for television and film so much so much. Welcome to the show, Monique Reymond. Hello.

Monique Reymond 2:08

Thank you. You even said my name correctly. That's so exciting. It's so rare. Your

Jeff Dwoskin 2:13

last name is how I would hope it would sound like i would go REYMOND it sounds that would

Monique Reymond 2:19

be of hope but by leave my name. You know as a reservation at a restaurant. I'll say Monique Reymond and they say Oh, you mean Raymond. Thanks for letting me know. Oh, I should have thought of that years ago.

Jeff Dwoskin 2:32

I love they're correcting you on your own name. i My name is difficult to because it's it's DW Oskin. But it's pronounced dua like so. It's like Dwoskin but it's an Oh, not an A so no one ever gets my name right. And sometimes they throw in our in there. Everyone knows better than us, Monique.

Monique Reymond 2:52

There we go. I've never tried Dwoskin I feel like I say it funny. Dwoskin

Jeff Dwoskin 2:56

now you you say it was such flair and confidence. I

Monique Reymond 3:01

was going to show you a prop that was funny, but I'm gonna wait on that. Let me get let me go get it real quick. I'll put an ordinary person the prop that I just went to retrieve from Mr. Dwoskin is styrofoam container from a very fine sushi dinner I had last night. And there's no sushi to be found. But it parlays into the story of Foley. So when it comes up, I'm gonna remember to grab it. It'll be relevant. I

Jeff Dwoskin 3:26

am looking forward to it. I watched a whole video of you doing Foley, why don't we explain real quick what a foley artist is does.

Monique Reymond 3:37

All right, fully has a rich history. I don't know all of it. What it is for film or TV or video games, I fill in sounds will say Oh, you do sound effects. And it's like well, we do them tactfully. So instead of going from a library of sounds that were pre recorded. We custom create sounds so you got somebody like me with a room full of organized clutter. And I have a bunch of pair of shoes maybe 100 and a bunch of props. And so you know like in a scary movie when you see a close up of the murders feet going down an alley and they maybe step on some you know backhoe of asphalt or broken glass or stump out a cigarette right before they pull out a knife to swing to kill. I make all of those rather human sounds. You know, if it's a car crash, I don't do the brake squealing but I'll do not the full force of the impact because they'll cut that in they'll help out with the fact but I will do something like take a car door and smash it on the ground. You know, and then we'd have the shattering of the broken debris. No hits the ground. So it's that's what I do, or that's what I've done.

Jeff Dwoskin 4:52

It's fascinating. I watched a video like fear factor. There was a lot of stuff we're doing for Fairfax. Sir, it was like they were eating cockroaches or something. And you were making a noise of their chopping, I guess it was like you said tactile, which is interesting, because it's like, you kind of feel the sounds that you're making. It's not like a squeak of the floor or something like that. It's like, kind of like, kind of like, when you hear a chalkboard thing, go and you go, Oh, because it's like, with the fear factor stuff was like boring, like, I don't know, worms are so overwhelming. And it's like the sound, you had to make up the sound that that makes, because it really doesn't make a sound. And like the Wipeout stuff was hilarious, like getting punched in the face with like these things, and you're making sounds and it's like,

Monique Reymond 5:42

it's such a silly, fun, and sometimes tedious way, living like anything, you know, it's a lot of work. It's fun work, but it's a lot of it. And it's very intense. Because if we're either making the sound, or we're gathering the prop to make the sound, so it's never like, you know, how you can kind of zone out at some jobs, you know, stare into the space, check your phone? No, there's none of that you can check your phone, but it's not going to do is go to work. Did you know about fully before, I mean of the year in the industry. So I'm sure you're familiar.

Jeff Dwoskin 6:19

I know sound effects. And I was at a thing, one set, one of the Disney things, I used to have a thing where you went there, and they would show you the sound effects. But like you said, I think this is a little different. So if you're doing like the fear factor video that I saw, I'll reference that real quick. So anyone wants to see it? And I'll put a link to in the show notes because it's fascinating. So do you know they're like, all right. Oh, Naik are crunching on some cockroaches, and we got some worms falling into a bucket or whatever, into a talkative person or whatever you like, all right, and then you like, you walk into the room with like, this is my props that I have to work with for this fear factor

Monique Reymond 6:58

was It was early enough in my career. And even now, if you were to give me something abstract like that, you know, you got to sort of build that we did a lot of trial and error, because nobody really knows what it sounds like to chomp down on a cockroach or most people don't you know what you would imagine it to be, and you want to create that reality for people in a more hyper real way than perhaps it would be but I don't know, I've smashed those things in the kitchen. And there's a little crunch that does happen. So you imagine, you know how when you're chewing, you hear you're chewing because it's within your own head. So I would go with sort of a hyperreality. So you'd get the feeling from the that the contestant is experiencing as they're having to choose that Roach as opposed to what the outside observer sees, but it can't cross a certain line, because then it sounds fake. And then people don't buy it. And then it's all a waste.

Jeff Dwoskin 7:58

So after they film it, they give it to you. So you're putting it in post.

Monique Reymond 8:02

Yes. So after the film is shot and or TV show is shot and edited, and hopefully pictures locked in, they're not going to add anything or take anything away, then we're given the task. So it's myself and sometimes a partner. But mostly for most of my career. I've worked alone, fully back in the day when there was budget, there used to always be two people. And now it's only two people at the Union houses. And a lot of my work even though it was on Union projects, somehow they were all done at these, you know, boutique places, which I prefer when I've worked at the Union houses and it's sort of like factory work in the sky. So anyway, with a show like fear factor, you've got myself and I've got a bunch of props. At that point. We were doing that show across from Universal City Nissan next to the Bourne place, we were in a glass, a glass building that now looks like Darth Vader called the Centrum building. And we were indexed to where the where all the foreign was being produced across from Universal City Nissan, and there was a cafe downstairs that had a very limited offering. I go God Alright, so fear factor, I know that we're going to have to do worms and cockroaches. What are we going to do for cockroaches? And so I'll buy like, something for the shell shell, you know, pasta shells? No, no, it's too high end maybe. So that I think about Brazil nuts and different nuts. So I combine these different things between what I have on hand what I can get at the cafe downstairs, or if I have to, I'll go to raw and then we experiment with does this do we buy this and so the record is that's mixing me will tell me like too squishy to this, we need more because he's I'm not hearing the sound as he is hearing it with the way the mic picks it up. So that's another consideration. It's a very collaborative effort. And so my friend Glenn, who I worked with for years, I worked with him on survivor and I don't talk about survivor on that video because I sat in India Yay. And for some reason I signed NDA with fear factor people too, but I just don't feel like they would sue me. I don't know about survivor.

Jeff Dwoskin 10:08

No, that's fine. So okay, so you're you do a crunch. Oh, that's and then like how many times you cycle through? I go, Okay, that wasn't right. All right, we need to add some Brazil nuts, you know? And then you guys are going. Okay, that was good. But you went too long. His mouth stop moving. And you are so

Monique Reymond 10:28

right. Yeah. So it's it's a combination of like with a podcast, you know, when edits. So this does go through an editing process. But basically, they don't want to edit each chunk. Nobody has the budget of the time to have an editor sit there. So I basically have to get it between 1/10 of a second accurate so they could bump an entire region three frames. So if I fully artificer always, boasts don't have perfect sake. I mean, I guess there might be some, but usually people are either a couple frames early or a couple frames late, which is like a 10th of the tech second, two tenths of a second. And so that way the editor knows to just bump everything and it pretty much is gonna lay in. So if you mess up beyond that, yeah, you got to rerecord it. If the sound if Glenn is saying I'm not buying it, we need more of this, we need more this than I have. I have to keep doing it until we do the clients. They're paying for us to be professionals and and to know how to make this work. And when you first start a show, like Survivor Fear Factor, when you start it, you don't have any basis of what the show is supposed to sound like. Maybe it's never been fully before. So then you get to build it and figure out what it is. And then after you've done a few seasons, it's like a little bit more like clockwork, we've got the cockroaches here we got the worms here we got you know, we got the different things we use. So

Jeff Dwoskin 11:46

is there a certain tools that you're always using and then it sounds like though you bring in like oh, those boots over there that I haven't worn in three years might be good. Or like hey, grab me. Grab me that pasta, I need that or whatever it is right? I need this rice? Yes.

Monique Reymond 12:05

No, we have we literally, you know, on the stage, literally, there's a room full of props, you know, and there's like sporting goods and different types of balls. There's dishes, there's sticks, there's breakable wood, there's different pits for different surfaces. You know, sand, gravel, concrete, wood, creaky wood, hollow wood different so that we literally recreate and this you know, this is back in the old radio days, they would have, you know, remember they would have the guy with the coconut shells, that would be right. In fact, radios really hard. I once got a I think it was like NPR or some sort of public radio PBS something something good. I had to do an Edgar Allan Poe radio show, it's a lot easier. When you're watching picture as the audience, you buy it more the sounds than necessarily if it's just audio, for example, a cigarette burn. I don't know if any else smoke, but it doesn't really make any sound but think about a movie where you hear that. Right? That's right lash. Yes. And so how we do that, there's a bunch of different ways to do that I used to because I kind of had to train myself. I've had I had a couple of mentors for short periods of time. But for the most part, I had to just figure it out. And so it was very creative for me. But it was a very, it was difficult. There was no book to go tune in. If you happen to meet another foley artist back then they certainly weren't telling you what they use. Because back then nobody wanted to train anybody because they don't want people working for cheap that they train.

Jeff Dwoskin 13:33

So there's no like specific like tools of the trade other than your imagination and pretty much anything pending on what the task at hand is

Monique Reymond 13:43

correct. And so you have to be careful. I remember one time when I was first starting, I was trying to build up my personal for a while I had a personal kit, meaning I could go because I worked at a number of different boutique studios. And I know that they all have different props and different things and I'm certainly not going to bring a whole studio with me, but I had, you know, like a makeup artist or a construction worker, you know, you've got your toolkit of things you bring. So I would bring things like keys, handcuffs, dog, paw gloves, police belts, you know the things that one least caution tape. Zippo lighter, a bit lighter. I had a favorite pine cone I use that was really trashed. And whenever I would manipulate my fingers along the spiny parts of the pine cone, it sounded it could sound like like critters walking like cockroaches. But you can go I don't know, how did I figure that out? I don't know. It's just trial and error. Sorry

Jeff Dwoskin 14:41

to interrupt. We Squish Squish. This is me doing some of my own Foley can't afford to hire Monique. I did. I do want to thank everyone for their support of the sponsors. When you support the sponsors. You're supporting us here at class and conversations and that's how we keep the lights on and now back with Monix. So then are there something He's like the pine cone that might work great when paired with the visual but not work when it's just radio audio only.

Monique Reymond 15:07

Yeah, you know, I don't know, for example, like I just got a call from, from a guy I met that works for Sirius XM. And he said, what he was interested in hearing my work for something, he wanted some really, really gory blood dripping like beaker bending blood. And so if you had a picture, and I took a wet Shami like you wash your car with, and I got it nice and wet and I just kept massaging it after a while it starts making this like Gooshie sound that could sound like when you're watching a scene where there's like blood and slosh. Like blood has a different viscosity than water, it's thicker. But if you use more viscous fluids in a fully session, you don't get as much sound and then you hear the slap of whatever the surface is with that's holding the liquid. So it's like a weird trip, like you're trying to. And if you have pictures to watch to sell about blood, it's going to be a little easier. I think then for me, I'm going to be sending this guy from serious samples of the goopy blood. Well, all you're going to hear us like you know, and it's like, well, that was terrible. I don't have to but you know, I'm saying all you're going to hear is the end if you don't have the visual, hopefully what he's talking about, or, you know, hopefully he sets it up to where the audience can go, oh, that's blood. Other than that, there'll be going What's the weird shakes? And how do we stop it?

Jeff Dwoskin 16:33

What was your biggest Foley when like where you're like, Oh, I nailed that one.

Monique Reymond 16:39

It's so funny because it's easier to track one's losses than one's wins. But I'd have to say my big aha moment was when I stopped taking things so literally, like even if we're in a room with hundreds of props, you don't have everything in the world, but it's going to be in a movie world right? And remembering that the mixer can really have an impact by E queuing like I could move a 30 pound Boulder and scrape it along concrete and the person mixing me can bump up the bass and do some tricks to make it sound like Indiana Jones This cave is being you know moved like a huge boulder there so it's part me part the skill of the mixer and the equipment and the tools at hand. So my biggest win that was a long roundabout like say my biggest win was and I realized that I was working on the gray man it's a Ryan Gosling. tentpole thing that came out a year and a half ago. And it's got Chris Adams, Billy Bob, or it's got good people. And it's I liked the film a lot. And I was working with a really great mixer, whom I've worked with, you know, often known for many years named Darren man, he's an incredible dancer worked on some of the biggest movies. He's on Batman. But anyway, Darren is a fantastic mixer. And we were doing the scene where Gosling was trying to release himself from some sort of, I don't know if it was a tough a chain or whatever. But it was something and he was using scissors, which is completely unrealistic. But whatever he was doing, he was doing it with scissors. And I was like, it couldn't have been a chain. But he was doing something with scissors that shouldn't be done with scissors. And I was like, that sounds so is it it doesn't it doesn't work. And so I used a machete and I held it in a way that it wasn't ringing out like a big machete was tight. So the wood believe it was scissors. So it was it was really my big win is when I learned that you don't have to be so literal and you can get whack creative. And then you come up with cool stuff.

Jeff Dwoskin 18:41

That's awesome. So like for the gray man, like who who hires you? Is it the directors? Or is it the Russo brothers?

Monique Reymond 18:49

That would be nice. No. back early in my career I used to meet the directors, I used to be able to go to spotting sessions and ask them questions about is that a wood floor is that you know, or they would tell me to focus on things that I might not have thought of, but that sort of went away. So basically, for me, I'm a independent contractor and I have different studios that hire me and some I was their main person. But I always like to have eggs in many baskets. You never know what could happen. I've seen people by I remember a long time ago. There's one girl she really wanted to work for Sony itself. She wanted to work for Sony and she would dump everything else to work for Sony. And then she finally got into Sony all Staller you know little indie guys. And then after a year something happened politically she got let go. She couldn't go get back and get all those little jobs back because somebody else was you know, doing them. So to answer your question, a post supervisor I might have an interaction with and the post supervisor handles the sound effects the backgrounds the dialogue, the ADR or the fully I'm just one of the things sometimes the you know, sometimes the supervisor talks to the person, the mixer the Recordist and other times we just just they just hand it to us and they just Just let go. Because they know that we're good. And every once in a while there's notes, but you know, to focus on a certain thing, or I one time I did a whole movie, it was really it was a B movie at best. It was like a D movie. And it was like a sniper kind of thing. Sniper knock off movie. And I remember that was military guys. And they had military gear. And they were running around for the whole movie, The sniper, the military guys. And so I was jangling that, you know, the gun, the cuffs, whatever the baton, whatever they've gotten, I'm sort of, and you have to do that in the entire it's like, it's like a theme throughout the entire film, you have to jiggle this stuff that people are wearing it. And so you want to get it right, because that's a lot of work. And it takes a long time. And you have to time it right, everything. And so, you know, we got the sound approved by the supervisor did the whole film that way. And then the CO supervisor listened and played it for the director and said, Oh, no, we want it way more exaggerated. So I had to go back to the whole thing on the Fourth of July for free.

Jeff Dwoskin 21:01

It'd be interesting to hear to watch a movie without fully because it must be visually boring, right? I mean, it might it must. There's some sense of surreal illness to be like watching a home movie. Well, you know, something happened, but it's not you're not feeling it. You

Monique Reymond 21:18

know, a lot of times, what they'll do is they'll take for example, my fully from years of working on a project, you know, say I worked on a cartoon for a few years. And then one day, they just said, oh, you know what, we don't really have the budget for full anymore. So thanks very much money, we're not going to be needing you because then it saves them the money, it saves them the money for the stage, myself and the mixer. And they're just going to cut in from the years of work I'd already given them. So you know, there's a lot of that kind of thing going on. I feel like it's really on its way out, to be honest, fully here in the in the US in Canada, because that video that you mentioned that insider video about fear factor and wipe out after that, you know, brought on maybe it was happening before, but I know for sure after that video went viral on Tiktok it got 9 million views in a week, 9 million views and wow, I didn't even know they were putting it on Tik Tok. You know, I just knew about YouTube thing they featured fully before, uh, some of the ones they've featured before really, really, really very, very good, you know, with different artists and mine, the Tick Tock thing kind of sort of caused certain other foley artists to be like, I want to be tick tock famous. And so it's almost like David Copperfield going I want to be tick tock famous, and showing how everything's done to the world. Because I'm not just competing with Toronto, Atlanta, Austin, New Mexico, they all have big tax breaks compared to Los Angeles. But now I'm competing with Bollywood, Argentina, Thailand, where people make pennies on the dollar. And now with technology being such as it is, they don't need somebody I worked on a Netflix film a couple of years ago, and it had a horse, a lot of horse equine stuff in it, you know, in their saddle tack hooves, you have to do the guy who on the studio said, yeah, don't worry about the horse. I farm that out to Argentina. And the thing is, is that I can't compete with Argentina. The one thing that we had the one thing we had was we had our secrets. And I'm not saying you know, because I had some people you know, some foley artists along the way is telling me how to do bone breaks or something you know what to use, eventually? Because they said just because we tell you how to do it doesn't mean we shouldn't do you have the years we have of doing it? Because there's a finesse, there's a way you handle things. But guess what, if you show people on tick tock how you do everything? It's only a matter of time before they're that good? That's a downer, isn't it?

Jeff Dwoskin 23:40

What kind of caught me also is that they are allowed to use your work product that you already got paid for and reuse it. Yeah,

Monique Reymond 23:47

cuz I'm a work for hire. See, you know, so these studios hire me. I don't even know who owns the sound. I don't know if it's who owns the studio, or I don't know if it's the quiet. But what I know is that is not me. Do

Jeff Dwoskin 23:59

you prefer animation over live action, you've done a lot of superhero stuff. You've done a lot of animation, live action,

Monique Reymond 24:07

I prefer getting paid in a fashion at a very good rate. And unfortunately, that doesn't happen anymore, either. You know, I make the same amount now basically, as I did 20 years ago, when gas was $1.17 a gallon and you could rent a nice two bedroom apartment in Silver Lake. I actually was a homeowner before. Now I have a nice apartment. And when I first started, we were reporting onto one or two inch tape. And as the technology improves, when we switch to being able to record digitally, we then you didn't need all the equipment to have a studio and you could open up these little boutique operations affordably and you could even do this in your garage or you know, make a home studio if you built it out. Right. And so that drove the price down because people were willing to work for less I think to answer your question In a less sarcastic way, I love animation. I love live action, whatever is good. I really have a hard time working on bad things. Even if I'm getting paid. Well, I've turned downward, literally, if something is gonna bum me out, or if I have a moral objection to it a moral objection. Yeah, I there's certain like, I don't do torture porn.

Jeff Dwoskin 25:21

You don't report? Yeah.

Monique Reymond 25:23

I mean, I have a friend who worked on one of the saws, you know, and I've done

Jeff Dwoskin 25:29

you mentioned earlier. Oh, yeah.

Monique Reymond 25:31

Oh, early on. I had to do softcore remember when they had those late night cable things that was like these channels like at night they would have these sorts of softcore porn. It wasn't HBO. Yeah, so I used to work on those. Well, that was awkward. Having to imagine what having to do like below John Foley. You know, when you're working with somebody you don't know it's not my friend Glenn. It's like some strange man that I've never met before. And there's Yeah, anyway, it's just

Jeff Dwoskin 26:06

some stranger, but you've you've won three Emmys? Yes, I do the Oscars cover to the Academy Awards cover Foley or just TV bastards.

Monique Reymond 26:14

No, I don't know what it is or why it is but the Academy does not recognize fully as see in television. We are part of the editors guild. So when we get an Emmy, it's a group award. It's for the entire editorial team. Oddly enough, the Recordist is a different category. It's like they're part of the mixer team. But anyhow, it's group awards. And for whatever reason, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences only gives it to the post supervisor does not give it to any of the departments underneath. They don't get the option of a statute. They just get to say they worked on that wonderful movie.

Jeff Dwoskin 26:55

So what are the challenges faced when doing Foley for a SpongeBob SquarePants

Monique Reymond 27:01

Spongebob Squarepants one of the challenges for that was that I didn't create the original sounds so there was a there was a foley artist that did and her name was mo net. Oddly, I owe some of my career to mo net because when I first started people thought that I was mo net because I am unique in our names are so similar. So they'd hire me expecting me to be much better than I was because I was new and she added a longtime monad started Spongebob and built the sounds with whatever props it was she used. And when she left the show, I don't know what under what circumstance but she was no longer on the show after a few seasons. Then another artist picked up the show and he had to try to replicate what she did without knowing what she was using so that's really tricky and and then when that guy was doing Passion of the Christ or something at Sony I would fill in and do and then I would do have to do sponge up so I'd have to figure out not only what her thing and his the all of it, and the hardest part was getting Squidward right Squidward has not only footsteps, which I think I use kind of like be those big black rubber gloves not the little yellow Playtex ones but those big industrial like for chemicals gloves. I think I just you know, slapped on those for the steps but they also wanted to sound just for his movement kind of much like I was saying with the with the jangly guys the military people will animation characters might have a squeak as they walk or it and Squidward did and we always would get into this thing of like, no money. That sounds too much like a creek it needs to sound like a squeak and then like that must

Jeff Dwoskin 28:39

drive you crazy. Oh my goodness. What is it like when you're working on? Do you enjoy I say rather working on a show like Gossip Girl or madman where you've done 35 Plus episodes of each and like do you get a kind of a feel for it? You're like, Oh, he's you know, he's drinking scotch again, just use that clink or whatever.

Monique Reymond 28:58

It's fun if it's a to work on a bunch of something. If you're a fan of it, like to get paid to watch admin. Awesome, right? There's some other shows on there that I don't want to mention. There's something that I've done a lot of that I wasn't a fan of, but then I would have fun with whoever I was working making fun of the show. You know we would just like laugh

Jeff Dwoskin 29:22

let's just say madman for a second is you're doing mad man. You do 42 episodes over four years or so. But you're not really you don't know anyone there Right? I mean, like,

Monique Reymond 29:33

no, no, we don't get any swag. We don't get invited to the parties. Any of it. No post is like the bastard stepchild. Especially fully I mean, maybe the post supervisor they'll remember because the post supervisor interfaces with the client very easy to forget about the people that you don't even know about. There's no relationship is

Jeff Dwoskin 29:55

it weird that like has it like you must have especially if it's something you love like madman you You're watching it over and over again. Right? So you've spent 42 episodes, you've spent hours upon hours upon hours watching this, you know them intimately when they don't know you. It's

Monique Reymond 30:10

very true. And you know, it's very sad. The reason that I stopped working on Mad Men was that well, first of all, the supervisors that worked on the show, they never told the show's creator, they never told him that they would fold because he was only wanted to use production sound and he was a control freak. And so they would sneak it in so not only did I not know anybody it's like I almost like they want to bury me they don't want to add Jeff probes from survivor wanted to feature me in a behind the scenes thing and the rest of the producers like Nana, we don't want them to know that this not reality. Yeah, it's a little odd.

Jeff Dwoskin 30:48

With survivor, you did 241 episodes or so you do a lot. That's my daughter's favorite show, by the way.

Monique Reymond 30:55

It's a good show. You know, I remember watching I started on season three, they do 20 episodes a season or something or No, something like that. And they do two seasons a year. So you can there's a lot of Survivor happening. And it was so funny, because people are like, Oh, how was it to go to like, I went to Universal City, Nissan across the street, a glass building next to the foreign place. That's like, I have not gotten to go to any of these exotic locations. But I get less mosquito bites here. Sorry

Jeff Dwoskin 31:25

to interrupt had to take a quick break. And we're back. Yeah, sometimes knowing that behind the scenes, like I remember, like I was I watched the original survivor. So and I think that was sort of like the beginning of this whole reality world like this, where then they would show clips and they'd be like, Oh, no, no, no, we we reshot them swimming across this channel, because we needed it to look better. That's not to say Foley, but they would do things they were it was like, oh, what you were seeing wasn't the reality that you thought you were seeing. It was a version of that reality that they made sure looks good on camera.

Monique Reymond 32:02

And those things, they can't possibly get the sound. So for those competitions, if it weren't for us, they would be so dry, we would get survivor and it wouldn't have the music, the music track wasn't married to pictures, we would play it without the music so we could hear as much the production sound as possible. And that show is literally so dry without music and the effects and the Foley because that's what builds like imagine those competitions. They can't have somebody running around with a boom mic chasing people, you know, through the jungle in any competitions. And when they're out in the ocean, and think about it they're you know, lavalier mic packs those sound awful for this so we're building all of that. So it was a good run survivor was a good run paid my mortgage.

Jeff Dwoskin 32:48

You worked with Adam Sandler a couple times at least Little Nicky, I can blame you for Little Nicky

Monique Reymond 32:53

i Oh my god, you can't blame me for the content ever done. Anger management was a better film. I did an animated Sandler film too. And I did that at this place. Guaranteed media I it's no longer there. But Elmo Weber still works with Adam and Sandler. I gotta say, the nicest guy like whenever he would, he would remember the post people he would do nice things like buy a basketball hoop for the parking lot or a ping pong table for the studio. And he you know, when I met him, sweetheart of a guy but God, those movies some of those were just Little Nicky was just terrible. Some of

Jeff Dwoskin 33:29

Adam Sandler's movies are my favorite. Like I can watch water boy on repeat. I love water boy. Big Daddy are some really good ones. And then little Nike they

Monique Reymond 33:40

might Oh, I know Little Nicky. I anger management was a

Jeff Dwoskin 33:42

big guy. Yeah. That's the one with Jack Nicholson. Yeah,

Monique Reymond 33:46

but here's the thing, that gig I lost that gig because Elmo, the owner of the facility and the post, you know, the mixer of everything, the big guy. He started dating a foley artist, and then they got married. So it's like, there went my my Sandler jobs. That's

Jeff Dwoskin 34:03

a bummer. What about working with Sam Raimi dragged me to how that

Monique Reymond 34:07

was so hard. Paul, the supervisor had just won the Oscar for The Hurt Locker. And I met Paul and it was a disaster because there's normal things that one does in Foley that are just kind of Givens. Like when a character walks and they come to a stop. There's kind of a scuff, it's not like you just all of a sudden abruptly go heel, toe, heel, toe, heel toe. It's usually like, heel, toe, heel toe. You know, there's just a something to your stoppage. I explain it very well, but there is but Paul was like, I don't like scuffed stops. Okay. And there are all these things, you know, and he wanted to hear interior throat phlegm. You know, there was a character of a woman that had like phlegm throat and you can't just squish a shammy like you do for worms for fear factor. Yeah, it needs to sound like it's inside a cavernous space and it At time, I didn't know about the trick that I could have learned from another foley artist but had I not had to teach myself so much. But you can get a lavalier mic and stick it in the cavity of the chicken like a raw chicken or a roasted chicken from the store and record in that sounds like you're inside of a thing, but I didn't know that. So trying to do that for him was really, really, really it wasn't he was he was picky. It was hard. And we had technical problems and the sounds that he was needing. Some of them were very abstract. Like, there was a woman that drove a Prius, and he wanted interior car rattle. You and I all know that a Prius makes no rattle. And so how do you do something that makes sense? That doesn't seem stupid. That's still following with this Oscar winning. I was.

Jeff Dwoskin 35:47

This is a Prius people then called you get one day you're like, we got Prius people on the phone and they want to know why they were making their car rattle inside the previous lawyers are on the phone. We need to talk to her anyway. sue you for rattled noises. Like

Monique Reymond 36:02

God, I mean, they go out of their way. I mean, the only reason those cars make any noise in the exterior is because pedestrians were getting hurt. You know? Because people didn't see that hear them then now they have that little whirring sound like Tesla has a sound and Toyota has a sound it's quiet but it's a sound. There's no interior Colorado. Do

Jeff Dwoskin 36:20

you like working on like Teen Titans Go and you did a lot of Avengers assemble those animation? Do you like superhero? Because there's a sort of a surreal ness to it. Yeah,

Monique Reymond 36:29

I mean, all of its really cool animations cool. Because you're building it all from the ground up. There's no production sound. So for for something like Mad Men, something like that the production sound was excellent. You know, sometimes we will be like, that sounds really good when you put on Betty's boots, and I'm like, that was production. But I. But with something like animation, there is nothing, there is nothing. So you build every single day. It feels to me the most creative and

Jeff Dwoskin 36:53

then Star Girl which isn't on anymore. But like that's a live action superhero. Can you use some of that animation knowledge and reuse some of those things? Or is it a different world when you can see it more? It's realistic,

Monique Reymond 37:05

it's a little bit of a different world with live action. They didn't you can bring it up just a tad. But basically, it was fully it's like if you know where there were, it's being mixed wrong or it was recorded wrong or it was just wrong. If you're aware of the fully and you go God that fully because it should blend it should accentuates what's happening. You know, and you could do a very stylistic thing, I guess. And in fact, I actually wrote a project that's about psychological thriller about a foley artist and I have this fantasy of not doing the fully on it myself and having else do it. Is that weird? It's weird.

Jeff Dwoskin 37:41

I'm not gonna judge you. I'm not here to judge you, I think, oh, god do the following for you. I'll do like, oh, no, here comes.

Monique Reymond 37:49

There we go. And that's it's so weird. Like, for example, like that simple action of crinkling the paper or moving the printer paper, printer paper is of a different thickness than like legal pad paper. So like in Foley size matters. You know, it's like everything sounds very specific to it's like, you can't make that piece of paper you had I mean, I guess they could equalize it and try to thin it out. And it's like you have to

Jeff Dwoskin 38:13

I hear you there's there's a science and an art to it, which you are a master nominated a million times winner many, many awards. You're like God a Foley.

Monique Reymond 38:27

And God goddess goddesses of

Jeff Dwoskin 38:29

Goddess of vote a goddess, talk to me about channel 1111. As they say, She's not one.

Monique Reymond 38:37

Let me know, channel 1111 Is my foundation that I started to do enlightening conscious, raising events and PSAs and filmed entertainment. In order to make the world a better place. I have a superhero complex myself. And I guess I'm probably more of a, I just want to help elevate, I think there's a lot of darkness, especially now in our political climate and a lot of division. And I think humor, you know, it's sort of just breaks everything down. Like you can't be mad at somebody if you're laughing. And so that was the mission behind that. And because I think for a while I've thought Foley is kind of people used to ask, you know, don't you worry that computers are going to take over and, you know, there's libraries of Foley, where you could literally cut in footsteps with a keyboard left, right, left, right, but it's tedious and it doesn't sound right and better to just have a person do it, right. Next thing is going to be AI. So it's like, what can we do to I'm not getting any younger and working at all those boutique studios. I didn't get a pension. So I'm sort of I'm transitioning and this is the problem, the sushi thing. The first day that I went to work at the place where I did survivor, Glen, the record is set, grabbed one of these, he said, This sounds like a bowl of dog and I was like oh Hold on your mind if you do it right and you're doing it to picture it really does. And I just thought it was funny. I hadn't thought about it in years and I was thinking about you. And then I got the sushi last night it came in that I hate Styrofoam, but like,

Jeff Dwoskin 40:11

you're killing the environment.

Monique Reymond 40:15

True, true, true, true, true that I've been doing the series of talk, Marry, Kill videos through not the nonprofit part of channel 1111. But the other part, which is just the production part of it, I finally decided you know what, I've only done hundreds of these and I started with Fuck, Marry kill Amazon Prime, HBO and Netflix. And I posted them on Vimeo and nobody goes to Vimeo. So I've been, you know, sort of moving them over. But now there is no HBO. It's like I found with this project. If I don't post things like immediately, things become irrelevant. I did one that was Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin Queen Elizabeth while she was alive. It's like it changed his tone when she's dead. You know, it's like, there's a difference. I decided I go, You know what, I'm just gonna give up. I'm putting it on YouTube. I'd put some on tick tock, but then I got taken down for hate speech on one of them. And then I tried to do an ad with YouTube, you know, like, don't like that. But I just thought you know what, it'll get more people seeing them. And then I got rejected for hate speech. I got like a we're sorry, we cannot because you cannot. In the land of YouTube, you can say fuck, but not within the first 30 seconds. And the first thing and all of mine is Fuck, Marry, Kill. It's the very first thing, but I have a disclaimer that it's a game and that we don't advocate killing anyone. But that wasn't enough for you, too. So hopefully, people listening to this will check out my fucking kill series because it's really quite funny.

Jeff Dwoskin 41:42

I'll put links to that and your Foley video that we talked about and everything channel 11111

Monique Reymond 41:51

We didn't even get to the yoga cult or Russell Brand or Ron Jeremy. There's so many things that

Jeff Dwoskin 41:58

we could talk about. Ron Jeremy.

Monique Reymond 42:02

So Ron, Jeremy's in one of my PSAs I knew him from after a really bad relationship ended nine and a half year relationship and in betrayal really bad. I was sort of like in a very vulnerable position. And that's when I, Glenn, the one that I was working survivor and fear factor on he taught me to take a stand up class with him. And that sort of started my whole stand up thing. But at the same time, I was very broken. And somebody invited me to a yoga class. And I remember the first day I went, there was Russell Brand and Demi Moore. It was like a whole scene. It was the weirdest thing I ever saw in my life. And I've lived in LA a long time. And I'm like, What the hell is this? There's like over 100 people in this big studio like that. What? And it was through that experience that I joined this kind of pen of yoga. It didn't call itself a cult, but it had some culty elements. And I met a lot of celebrities there. One was Ron Jeremy. And Ron used to come to yoga and he I remember he he found out I was a comedian and he said, Hey, I want to come over and show you some of my movies. And he's like my comedy stuff. Not Not that I'm like, All right. So I let Ron come to my house to show me and he would show you know how he had this like a reel of all the clips of all the like the light the night talk show hosts, you know, referencing him some of his funny music video things he did like wrecking ball and stuff. That's funny, but it's kind of sad. The whole Ron Jeremy thing.

Jeff Dwoskin 43:27

Wow, Monique, this was awesome. I loved hanging out with you. Thanks for hanging out with me. All right. How amazing was Monique Reymond I know. Will you ever watch any of these shows the same again? I don't think so. crunch crunch crunch crunch. That was actually me. Who do they fool? All right. Well, with the interview over it can only mean one thing I know the episode has come to an end. Can't believe it flew by one more huge thank you to Monique Rambo. for sharing all the Foley secrets with us check out channel 1111. Check out her website, check out F Marry, Kill all the good stuff. All the links are in the show notes. So huge thank you to Monique and of course a huge thank you to all of you for coming back week after week. It means the world to me, and I'll see you next time.

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