INTERVIEW: WAMG Checks In With GRAVITY Composer Steven Price

By Michelle McCue | October 8, 2013

You’ve never heard a score quite like this. Director Alfonso Cuaron’s GRAVITY is nothing akin to a sci-fi fantasy world, but rather depicts the stark realities of being marooned in the harshest environment known to mankind. It is a real game changer. Audiences will be given the illusion of being in space in ways that are both totally convincing and utterly visceral.

The film opened at #1, had a record setting $55 million opening weekend in the U.S. and is set for a November debut in the United Kingdom. GRAVITY premiered to critical acclaim at the Venice Film Festival with screenings also held at the Telluride Film Festival and the Toronto International Film Festival. The film will play this week among the highly anticipated Galas at the BFI London Film Festival.

Before it’s release, I spoke with the film’s composer Steven Price from England. The GRAVITY original motion picture soundtrack is available now on digital download and CD from WaterTower Music.

During our half hour conversation days before GRAVITY opened, Price and I discussed everything from his reaction to seeing it and the instruments he chose to use, to what initially drew him to the project.

MM: The last time we spoke was earlier this summer for your work on Edgar Wright’s THE WORLD’S END. Here we are now for your score on GRAVITY – I saw it a few weeks ago.

Steven Price: Oh, you’ve seen it. Well done! At an advance screening?

MM: We did

SP: What did you think?

MM: It’s such an amazing film and so breathtaking.  From the minute it begins, you grab on tight – like a big roller coaster ride.

SP: I went on a Saturday to the friends and family screening and it’s the first time I’ve ever taken my wife to see it. She had not seen a frame of it. It was just hilarious because she grabbed my hand more than once – there were some tense scenes. It was just horrendous.

MM: What was the crowd’s reaction there?

SP: I had not seen it with an audience totally new to it, but there were quite a few there. It was really exciting. There were people there who had worked on it.

I was at the premiere in Venice and there were quite a few people there who were new to it and it was also exciting with a lot of gasps.

It’s been fun hearing feedback from people – getting that sense that they are really in the picture and get carried away with it.

MM:  I’m so pleased to hear that you were at the Venice Film Festival.

SP:  It was a real treat. I got taken out for the premiere – it was really an exciting day. I was wandering around, doing a little bit of sight-seeing afterwards.  The reviews started coming out and you’re never sure, because you can get too close to it.

But the reviews were very nice. Then the whole day and night were very relaxed. It was good fun.

MM: What drew you to this project, initially?

SP: Alfonso Cuaron, basically. It was a strange start for me. At that point I had done my first couple things – feature films wise. But I still had to do other jobs, like music editing, and I got a phone call about coming on board to help for two weeks on this film called GRAVITY.

I didn’t know much about it. I had heard things over the years because it was in development for so long. And I knew various people working on it.  But I really didn’t know much about it and then I came in for a meeting – just assuming it was for a music editing job.  It was a meeting with Alfonso and it was fantastic! He told me all about it.  Within minutes we were talking about the context of how the music could be in a film like this.  He was really clear that he didn’t want it to be a conventional kind of thriller.

There’s no sound in space, so there’s no reason why the score should do conventional jobs.  You’re not competing with a load of sound design, like traditional explosions.  The music could play a different role – an expanded role expressing what would normally be sound in a tonal way.

Plus it could convey in a single way the character of Ryan (Sandra Bullock) who carries the whole film.  The music can really be with her all the way.  Really focus on her feelings and express her journey.  So Alfonso and I got started quickly after one meeting and within a few days I was starting to play with ideas.  We would go back and forth with the sounds.  I would play these ideas and we would talk about them.  The whole thing got massively out of hand really. (laughs)

I ended up working on it for better part of a year.  Trying things out.

MM: GRAVITY is set in a soundless world – what sort of instruments did you use?

SP: A lot of different things.  There was a lot of experimentation.  Some of it was quite instinctive at the start.  As soon as I saw the visuals, it seemed to me very pure tones, very  glassy tones were appropriate.  The intensity of some of the situations made it clear that the characters were dealing with total extremes. It was the most beautiful thing that you’d ever seen, and the shots were so amazingly, strikingly beautiful, but equally it was utterly terrifying. Unimaginably awful things that were going to happen.

So I was trying to convey both extremes and an intensity of feeling. It was a matter of finding ways of expressing the beauty and the tonal side of things… using glass noises and glass harmonicas. Those tones seemed to work greatly with that.

The other side of that was a lot of experimentation. I was finding ways for the score to be aggressive and intense. I wanted it to be overwhelming, without going for those film clichés of lots of drums and percussion.

MM: I noticed that there wasn’t a lot of percussion throughout the score.

SP:  It was a rule – right from the start.  Alfonso was very keen on no percussion.  We talked about it in great detail and he felt it’s sort of a cliché on action films.  I agreed with him on this type of film as there was no need to do that.  We had conversations on how we weren’t going to use percussion and let’s find a different way of doing it.  It was all very exciting.

It would be the next day and I would be sitting in my studio, thinking, right, now what. I had to find ways to do it… to find pulsating sounds.  We used computers and various other effects to manipulate regular sounds that I had recorded.  It started to fit the way the film looked.

MM:  So many non-traditional instruments.

SP:  Yes. Even the traditional ones were manipulated. We recorded a big orchestral section at the end and an executive in the room said, “oh that sounds great,” and I’m thinking, I’m going to go away and trash that now.

We always wanted it to feel like a real merging.  I didn’t want the organic instruments to feel like they had an electronic edge and I didn’t want the electronic ones to feel like they were organic – so many of the sounds have weird origins.  There’s a lot of drone like sounds where we used human voices that were processed and then tuned down or played at half speed. So there’s a lot of human noises that come across as electronic.  Hopefully it always feels human.

MM: Did I hear vocals and choirs in the background?

SP:  Traditional choir was only at the very, very end of the film. There’s literally only 30-40 seconds of that, but there’s a huge amount of textures that were derived from vocals. Very early on in the process I got a friend of mine called Haley Glennie-Smith. She’s got a beautifully, pure voice. I recorded a lot of very early ideas with her and they would become part of the palette. I would build instruments out of her voice and synthesize her almost. A starting point for the film cues would be a voice manipulated and pulsing slightly. It came from her but it became an ethereal thing.

Later on in the process, a singer called Lisa Hannigan, who I’ve always been a huge, huge fan of, came in and she sang a lot of the solo lines when I was writing, to me, a “Ryan’s theme.”  The voice was associated with Ryan and her thinking of her daughter.  The voice was hugely important to it.

There are other voices in there as well.  There was one session where it was me, the music editor and the orchestra all around the microphone in the studio and sang as low as we possibly could.  We slowed it down and that became a ‘doomy’ section.  Hopefully no one will recognize the voices.

MM:  There are so many gorgeous moments tied to your score – all with a very emotional connection to Bullock’s character and the backstory.  I’m glad I had tissues with me.

SP:  Oh good.  It’s so rare nowadays because so often directors don’t want to go for that.  It’s all about the emotions with Alfonso… it’s all about the feeling and the moments. Sandra’s performance is so incredible. It was all there to accompany her and to go with her.

For a film set in a soundless world, sound became one of the filmmakers’ most challenging design elements. Cuarón attests, “There is no sound in space, and we wanted to honor that as much as possible. There are certain sequences when we strip away the sound, but we felt to sustain it for the whole film would alienate the audience.”

Sudden silence was also an integral part of the sound design. Cuarón carefully chose those moments, unexpectedly cutting away that aural link to remind the audience that the characters are in a void where nothing exists to sustain life.

Cuarón also utilized music to, as he says, “take the role of sound or give a tonal suggestion of sound.”

MM: How closely did you work with the sound editor/designer?

SP: I’ve worked with Glenn Freemantle and his team before.  It was an easy thing from the word ‘go’.  He was incredibly supportive. He’s done some incredible stuff with vibrations and low frequency. In space, you’re not getting the sound through your ears – it’s through vibrations.  He was doing all this interesting low frequency work.

I would keep him in the loop with what I was doing and the work I was coming up with – especially with what Alfonso and I were talking about.  They would get the cue in very early.  Off and on in films you have test music, but because we were on the film for so long, Glenn and I swapped things back and forth, so we could see how things and sounds were shaping up.

Even things like heartbeats are amazing alongside music and the whole thing fits together. The frequency ranges that we were dealing in were complimentary, so we were working together to hopefully make you feel like you’re up there with them in space and in the experience.

MM:  You feel as if you’re in the spacesuit.

SP:  Some of the amazing shots of how the camera moves within the helmet – that’s another instance of how sound and music come together.  We tried to make those moments where the perspective changes so you’re really in the suit and you’re seeing it through Ryan’s point of view.  It was fun working with Glenn’s team because they’re very open to trying things in different ways.  Alfonso would hear them all and have some great input – really a creative type to building the sound and score.

MM: You’ve done so many different types of films. (THE WORLD’S END, ATTACK THE BLOCK) Are you leaning towards a favorite genre?

SP:  The great thing about doing film music is that you can do lots of different things. There are so many films that I enjoy watching and you start imagining what you could do with that. I have young kids, so the idea of scoring a kid film would be an amazing thing.

Maybe a strict drama for the next film… something not in space.  The last few things I’ve done have been in space or an alien invasion from space. It would be exciting to try different styles.

MM: Do you plan to see it with an audience when GRAVITY opens in the UK in November?

SP: I’d like to sneak in to see what that feels like opening weekend. It’s kind of odd because there’s such a gap between viewings. I feel like if you see it too often you start picking holes in it – maybe that’s a half decibel too loud or I got that wrong.  I’d like to see it with an audience to look around and see what the reactions are. Hopefully people keep connecting with it.

MM: One last question. If you were an astronaut would you want to be a pilot, engineer or commander?

SP: (laughs) Oh dear. That’s a really interesting question. Wow!

I think pilot would be fun, wouldn’t it?

Engineer? If it was engineering with flying and being an astronaut – like my engineering when I’m recording music – I would end up with whatever the equivalent of distortion is and with strange sounds. That might be a bit risky for the other people on the mission.

Commander? I think would probably need someone who’s a little calmer.  A little less excitable than me, so I think pilot is quite important as well.  I think, yeah. 

But let’s face it, pilot is probably not a good idea at all. (laughs).

GRAVITY was written by Alfonso Cuarón & Jonás Cuarón, and produced by Alfonso Cuarón and David Heyman (the “Harry Potter” films). Chris deFaria, Nikki Penny and Stephen Jones served as executive producers.

The behind-the-scenes team includes multiple Oscar®-nominated director of photography Emmanuel Lubezki (“Children of Men,” “The New World”); production designer Andy Nicholson (art director “Alice in Wonderland”); editors Alfonso Cuarón and Mark Sanger (VFX editor “Children of Men”); and costume designer Jany Temime (the “Harry Potter” films). The visual effects were handled by Oscar®-nominated visual effects supervisor Tim Webber (“The Dark Knight”).

GRAVITY is in theaters now.