'X-Men: Apocalypse': Bryan Singer Addresses Backlash Over The Villain's Voice

When the first teaser trailer arrived for X-Men: Apocalypse, some fans weren't happy with the way the title villain, played by Oscar Isaac, actually sounded. Apocalypse is essentially a god, and his voice is not supposed to sound like any other person. It's meant to be booming, inhuman and threatening.

Thankfully, Apocalypse's voice has been modified in the most recent trailer, and it's something that director Bryan Singer has been perfecting in post-production. In fact, Singer specifically addressed the evolution of Apocalypse's voice in a recent edit bay visit that some members of the press attended, and he explained why the villain sounded so normal in early marketing materials and what fans can expect in the final cut of the movie.

Find out what Bryan Singer had to say about the X-Men: Apocalypse voice evolution after the jump.

Speaking to IGN, Bryan Singer explained why Apocalypse didn't have a modified voice in the first teaser trailer:

[The first X-Men: Apocalypse trailer] was simply Oscar using his normal voice — which is wonderful; his performance is fantastic — but that was never the intention. We just needed those words to govern the first teaser. So people thought, 'Oh, wait, is that going to be his voice during the whole movie?' It's like, no, but to tell the story of the first teaser, we needed the voice, and I hadn't recreated the voice yet.

Singer went on to explain that what we'll hear in the final cut of X-Men: Apocalypse will be a vocal performance that was entirely recreated after filming, and part of it was due to some audio intrusions on set thanks to the villain's suit:

What I'm doing is something very unique. It hasn't been done before. We're rerecording his entire performance because the suit's creaky and makes all kinds of noise, you can't really use any of it anyway. But I want his performance. So he's being recorded in ADR using a standard Sennheiser microphone, but also with a bass mic to his right cheek and a bass drum mic to his left cheek. These two microphones have the ability to pull vocal range out of his voice that the human ear cannot hear. And I can take that vocal range that I've now recorded, and I can pull it and use it to augment his voice — and that with a little digital magic can create a voice that's both completely governed by his performance but is not natural.

ADR is something that's done on each and every movie in some capacity. Sometimes when a crew is on a set, especially one that's on location where nature and outside noise can't be controlled, the conditions for picking up clean audio are less than optimal. So actors go into a recording booth and replicate their lines that were performed on set. So that's what's happening with Apocalypse's entire vocal performance. But that doesn't mean it will sound the same throughout the whole movie. Singer elaborated:

It ebbs and flows and moves through the movie, and changes, so he doesn't just have one single voice. He speaks with different voices depending on different moments in the film. So it's really kind of cool. It's the first time I've ever had the tools to sculpt a performance in post-production, that was already given to me on set and chosen in the cutting room.

So we've only gotten a taste of what Apocalypse will sound like in the final cut. Here's hoping that the presentation of Apocalypse in the final cut is something that makes the iconic Marvel villain truly intimidating. Beyond that, I just hope the movie delivers a compelling chapter in the continuing X-Men franchise.