Composers
Composer Alex Belcher Discusses His Work On EXTRACTION 2 – Stars Chris Hemsworth
Chris Hemsworth returns as Tyler Rake in EXTRACTION 2, the sequel to Netflix’s blockbuster action film EXTRACTION. After barely surviving the events of the first movie, Rake is back as the Australian black ops mercenary, tasked with another deadly mission: rescuing the battered family of a ruthless Georgian gangster from the prison where they are being held.
Hemsworth reunites with director Sam Hargrave, with Joe and Anthony Russo’s AGBO producing and Joe Russo writing. Golshifteh Farahani reprises her role from the first film, with Adam Bessa, Olga Kurylenko, Daniel Bernhardt and Tinatin Dalakishvili also co-starring.
The film hits Netflix on June 16.
This is a sequel to the first film that was based on the graphic novel ‘Ciudad’ by Ande Parks, from a story by Ande Parks, Joe Russo & Anthony Russo, with illustrations by Fernando León González. EXTRACTION 2 is produced by Anthony Russo, Joe Russo, Mike Larocca, Angela Russo-Otstot, Chris Hemsworth, Patrick Newall and Sam Hargrave, with Jake Aust, Benjamin Grayson, Steven Scavelli, Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely as executive producers.
The film music is composed by Henry Jackman (Strange World, The Gray Man) and Alex Belcher (The Contractor, Citadel, Made In Italy, 21 Bridges).
We had the opportunity to speak with Alex Belcher prior to the movie’s release.
During our conversation with Belcher, we talked about his favorite scores, his admiration for Alan Silvestri, his score for EXTRACTION 2 and how Folk and Country music influenced his storytelling approach to composing for films.
WAMG: Hi, Alex. This is Michelle from We Are Movie Geeks. How are you?
Alex Belcher: I’m great. Thanks for asking.
WAMG: I was listening to the soundtrack again and it’s another amazing score. It has this old school immediacy about it like it was a film from the 1970s like FRENCH CONNECTION or TAKING OF THE PELHAM ONE TWO THREE. What was it like to return for another chapter?
AB: It’s a lot of fun. Anytime you’re working on a score, you’re always trying to be true to the genre, between the films, the sequel has to be true to the first one and what you did there. And for the second time, putting something new into it. When you’ve got a project like that, it makes the whole sort of process a lot of fun. You get to experiment.
You get to kind of take cues from the old world and then make them your own and modernize them a little bit.
WAMG: The film EXTRACTION 2, it’s another chapter in your life. It’s the continuation of the life of Tyler Rake so with some of your music cues, what made you choose the acoustics to convey that soundscape again?
AB: Well, on the first one we did EXTRACTION there was this idea of the character. I can’t remember if it was Sam or maybe Joe when he was given the script. I can’t remember preliminary conversation, they said something along the line he’s a guy, he’s an assassin and ge can kill someone with anything.
That idea just sort of stuck with me on the first one. So when I approached writing the music, it was like, okay, how would we do that with musical instruments? How can we sort of misappropriate or misuse something to get our end goal? Kind of like Rick would do. And on the first one, it was using a cello. Me playing a cello, which I’m not a cellist and then producing it, making it sound really weird and crazy and massive. For Extraction Two, I knew I wanted to do something similar because he’s still the same character but I didn’t want to basically just recycle or rehash what we’ve already done completely, so we started doing that with The Brothers and their theme, like using a viola and I played it again, not as a violist, but I played it with the wrong hand, like, flipped around again, this eerie sort of sound.
And then we used a bunch of maracas and all sorts of very small, intimate mandolins is another one. Small, intimate acoustic instruments that really put it right on the front of the speaker and made it very close and very sort of this quiet yet terrifying sort of sound which is what we thought the Zoro brothers were. They were quiet. They weren’t a very flamboyantly terrible force. They were just very quiet, very threatening, and we wanted the music sort of reflect that, so we used a lot of acoustic instruments to do it.
WAMG: And then on the flip side, you hear this beautiful, multi note, maybe four or five note piano ostinato through the film score. It’s so simple, but it’s lovely. It’s very ethereal and the adagio “Brave Like Dad” cue breaks the heart. I heard it in the first film. I was happy to hear it in the music cues and the tracks for this film. It’s kind of almost like his theme. Did you want to stick with that again?
AB: Yeah, we knew basically from early on, a lot of first film, it took place in Dhaka, so a lot of the music was buried. It wasn’t like, from that area, so we put the audience there. And we knew we couldn’t do that. Use the same sort of percussion and stuff that we did in the first one, because this one doesn’t take a place there. But that theme, when we originally wrote it, it was Rake’s theme.
And what we immediately found out was it actually doesn’t work as Rake’s theme as much as it works. It just became an idea, a theme for an idea. And so on the first CD, that theme is called Families and Laws, which was the first cue that we used it in, the first thing that we used it in. And so it really became a theme for family, for just the idea of family. And that worked really well because on the first one, we could use it for obi and like his relationship with his father, on this one, we could use it not only for Rake, for some of the other characters as well, and their experience with loss and family.
And so we knew that that could be a through line from the first one, musically, because it’s such a universal, like you said, it’s a pretty simple tune. I hope simple and effective, but it does that thing where it can tie stories and tie characters who might not otherwise be tied together. It can sort of act as a through line for all that.
WAMG: It was really effective, and it’s just one of the softer, quieter moments with both films, so I was really glad to see that again show up in this one. A few of the tracks with the orchestral instruments, as usual, but there’s like, a lot of synthesized sounds. And with those themes, did the director, Sam Hargrave, tell you what he was looking for beforehand, again, since you worked on the first film with him. Did he say, this is what I’m going for in this film?
AB: Yeah, we didn’t get into specific instrumentation things. But one of the things, and this is why Sam is such a great director, he’s got such talent with communicating, sort of his vision, is he didn’t make specific examples. I don’t want to use this instrument; I want to use this instrument. It was more of, you know, that thing we did on the first one. Can we do that but in such and such way? Can we do that for this film? And he would use very expressive sort of work to sort of describe what he was looking for, which was great for me because then I got to act as an artist and go, okay, he wants this feeling, and he’s referencing that feeling that we did on the first one. So how can I creatively give him that while at the same time doing something new? So a lot of the synthesized stuff is actually all born from organic materials that we recorded. A lot of percussion from a junkyard.
Breaking that and then just a lot of it we found the tape. Actually, I’ve got this old, really cheap, Akai reel to reel tape machine from the 70s. We bounced a lot of it to that, then brought it into the computer and then put even more processing on it to give it a little bit of a synth sound. So a lot of that and a lot of the action, what it is, is an organic sound, like an acoustic sound. It’s been so heavily processed, but I like doing it that way because then you still get this, yeah, it sounds like computer made it, but there’s something about it that’s still got a human touch on it, completely synthesized.
WAMG: And that’s why I like the blend of the music with these mechanized kinds of sound. There’s the blending of the orchestral instruments, but there’s an electric sound. Do you feel like that’s your signature sound?
AB: I honestly don’t know.
I think if you listen to something like the scores, like 21 BRIDGES, The Citadel, they sound completely different. I did a film called MADE IN ITALY, and it’s kind of like a family. Not a romantic comedy, but a dramedy. And I think that through line through all of those, my signature sound was it’s more coming from a storytelling perspective. I think if you could pull anything out of my music, it’s more that I try to be another filmmaker in the room to help the director tell the story.
I focus more on story than necessarily having a sound that I get hired to do for film. It’s like what I really like is getting brought onto a project, and the Russo Brothers agree with this and so does Sam Hargrave, and they tell me this is the story I want to tell. These are the emotions that I want the audience to feel. How do you think we should do that? And so it really gives me a lot of leeway to sort of experiment, be an artist, be a storyteller, and come up with different ways to mix and match. A lot of that stuff is born out of finding out what works for that film, and it comes back doing it again on the second one and doing it for another show. So, yeah, I think that’s probably my signature sound is working really closely with the directors to do whatever the film wants.
WAMG: You did some incredible work on The Citadel, which definitely had a different sound. There was a lot of electronic sounds in there. So, do you tend with all your other films do you approach them all the same way, because to me, without a good score, it could make or break a movie. Do you find that you approach it like you were saying, the storytelling aspect the same way, or just does it really depend on the input from the director?
AB: Well, it’s a bit of both. What is the story we’re trying to tell. It’s always early on conversation with the filmmaker. Boil this down. I get that we’ve got 100 page script. I understand there’s always characters, so get it down to me in one sentence or even one word. What’s the story we’re trying to tell? And that’s where it all starts. Then it becomes, okay, well, how are we going to tell that story? What’s the best way to do that?
And that opening conversation is really what sets the tone for all this, depending on what filmmaker wants to do, and in this case, for Sam, it was more of the same, but it’s more personal. This time with Rake, it means more and there’s more on the line. So that was a part of the story that we were telling. We tell the story of him doing all this killing, all this stuff, all this fighting and all these missions.
So how do we do it personal? It’s not easy. It means more to him. So by doing that, it really let me lean into, okay, then we do need to have some of that emotional stuff like we talked about pulling out from the first. But then we also have to make even the action music have something in it that just feels like it means a little bit more.
Not even really putting emotion into it, but not making it just visceral. Still doing some of that storytelling. It really does always start with the conversation on what the director wants, and then from there, it’s experimentation. What instruments do we like? What instruments can work? What instruments can be cool? One of the things we did on this one, which I really had a lot of fun, apart from the percussion, was a lot of the pads. And they sound like a synth pad, but they’re actually wine glasses. We had that idea for sort of thinking, okay, well, he’s a man with a disability, a hearing disability. That ringing in your ear started with that. So how do we kind of turn that? We actually got some Georgian wine, filled up a bunch of wine glasses, created instruments, so a lot of his tunes are doubled with that. And then we started then it was like, okay, that’s really cool, but it’s not enough identifying so then what do we do? Starting to put some of those acoustic instruments over. That just starts with a conversation. And then for me, it goes to experimentation. How do we tell that story, this film and this genre, that sort of thing?
WAMG: What kind of music influenced you as you were growing up, as you were in school that you think has carried over to today with composing?
AB: Well, it’s probably… I was just thinking about this for the first time. I grew up in Kentucky, and obviously country music and folk music was a big part of my childhood when I was very young. And when I was a kid, I started studying classical and jazz. But having that folk music, really growing up and listening to that, it’s all about storytelling. So that’s probably why I approach films in that sort of storytelling sort of way.
Music kind of comes second because that’s a lot of what folk, country music was when I grew up and listening to that. But like I said, I shifted over to classical and to jazz music and studied that for years and really sort of found that I loved being able to do that and sort of tell stories with music. It’s an incredible tool to be able to use.
WAMG: Who are your favorite film score composers? What are your favorite scores?
AB: My favorite score. I don’t know if it wasn’t the first film I saw, obviously, but the first time hearing a score and being like, oh, wow, this is incredible was Alan Silvestri’s score for BACK TO THE FUTURE.
Being a little kid (hums the melody) incredible. And that really is probably the first film that piqued my interest in film scoring. I’d already been studying music as a kid, but that was the first one that made me sort of put my head up and go, oh, hang on, there’s an avenue I might be interested in. I think Bernard Hermann is probably one of the greatest film composers to ever live.
I should say my mentors Henry and Hans (Zimmer) for sure. But yeah, Bernard Hermann for me is, just in case they read this, but yeah, Bernard Hermann is such an incredible, again, he’s an incredible storyteller with music. The score for VERTIGO, the score for NORTH BY NORTHWEST, FAHRENHEIT 451 – all just truly incredible scores and definitely ones that I look to a lot for inspiration. I have fun listening to music.
WAMG: That’s really funny because when I interviewed Henry Jackman, who you worked with and work with, when I spoke with him about Captain America, we spoke about Civil War. We also did another interview about Winter Soldier. I asked him, as I love to ask composers, who do you like? What’s your favorite? And he said, Alan Silvestri, but he said for PREDATOR, the original Predator movie. And then a few years later, I spoke with him, and he was doing the film THE PREDATOR in 2018. It’s interesting that you should both say the same thing.
AB: The fact that he’s never won an Academy Award, it baffles me. Alan is truly, he’s a once in a generation. I got to help Henry out on that Predator score and what we had, we just nerded out and truly had so much fun.
WAMG: Henry said he felt like, “I need to go and ask for his permission to do a Predator movie with his score.” And he said, Alan Silvestri said, “I had no clue what I was doing for that movie. I needed it to sound very militaristic, I needed it to sound very otherworldly, but I didn’t know what I was doing, I had no clue.” It’s such an iconic score and it sounds so genius now.
AB: Well, leave it up to a true genius to stumble into a genius score as well. That only happens when you’re thinking about. I remember working with Henry on that project, and it was almost as if you’re dealing with someone that iconic and that you look up to that much like both of us did and still do.
And then you’re using some of his themes and motifs. It’s like someone walking up to you and handing you, like, the crown jewels just in the middle of the street, like, okay, we need to be very careful here. We cannot mess this up. This means alot and this is a perfect score. The first couple of weeks, we were very nervous, but then we got to writing and working on that project and it was good.
WAMG: You guys did a great score. So lastly, what other projects have you now that EXTRACTION 2 is going to be released in a few weeks on Netflix? What do you have coming up?
AB: Well, the only big thing next is season two for Citadel, which will probably be the next thing started, d own the road a little bit. Taking a little bit of a break after wrapping these two projects up and trying to enjoy a nice little summer. After that, we’ll have to see.
WAMG: Thank you for taking the time to speak with me. It was a real pleasure. And the score for EXTRACTION 2 is very good and really well done.
AB: Thank you very much. That means a lot. I really appreciate it.
The soundtrack album is now available for listening/purchasing on Amazon and Apple Music stores
Album track list:
1. Starting Over (3:47)
2. The Brothers (3:24)
3. Rebuilding Rake (1:14)
4. Prison Mission (3:52)
5. Code Red (3:16)
6. Born Into War (1:12)
7. Davit & Goliath (1:27)
8. Riot in the Square (1:11)
9. Prison Escape (1:56)
10. Forest Chase (2:27)
11. All Aboard (1:41)
12. Something Else (1:36)
13. The Morgue (1:25)
14. A Second Chance (0:50)
15. Sandro Makes Contact (3:47)
16. Two Families (0:57)
17. Garage Escape (3:14)
18. Zurab vs. Chopper (2:17)
19. Storm the Tower (2:54)
20. Mahem Montage (2:09)
21. Rooftop Ruckus (2:15)
22. Tower Escape (1:14)
23. Yaz (1:39)
24. Cry Uncle (0:59)
25. No Time for Negotiation (2:11)
26. Rake Unleashes (2:21)
27. Avenge Him (1:34)
28. It’s Over (2:28)
29. Brave Like Dad (1:41)
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