Some interesting quotes on the sound of Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales in the June 2017 issue "Post Magazine" from Re-Recording Mixer, Supervising Sound Editor, and Sound Designer Christopher Boyes:
"It's like a sonic dance. You have to keep the momentum going, keep the emotion going with the music, and come in and out with the effects while constantly protecting the dialogue. That is job number one."
"If I'm putting in a sound and it's not propelling the story forward, then it doesn't have a place. Our editorial team supplies me with a tremendous amount of wonderful sonic assets but at the end of the day, more than 60 percent of them don't make it into the mix. Once the effects become part of the entire experience they really get held to a very high standard as to whether or not they raise the track."
"I figure out which components of the ambience are actually complementing the music or the dialogue. The choice is scene specific. If we are out on the ocean we have to have a little bit of wind, a sense of the ocean, a sense of the rigging and the sails, and the creaking ship. You don't need all of that all of the time. It's this constantly evolving landscape of sound effects that are folding in and out. Then for the big action sequences, all of those backgrounds disappear."
For action scenes, "[I will] poke the hard effects in and out, always with the notion of maintaining clarity on the track in an overall sense."
Working in 100-foot increments (about 1 minute), "we go through it an say, 'Do you hear that line?' Are we hearing enough ocean? Are we hearing enough of this or that?' We challenge each other, and that is when we really fine-tune the mix."
