Steven Price, Composer Of COYOTE VS ACME, Sits Down With WAMG To Discuss His Latest Movie
Over the final weekend of August, something special happened. A movie that wasn’t supposed to see the light of day did. And what happened next was magical – COYOTE VS ACME “bolstered by an online rescue effort and strong reviews, debuted to $15.4 million.” (Indiewire) It was a huge hit with audiences and the film earned an A CinemaScore.
After enduring years of catastrophic product failures at the hands of ACME, Inc, a tenacious, unemployed coyote (Wile E. Coyote) uncovers a corporate cover-up and spearheads an unhinged battle against the multinational conglomerate that’s been blowing him up in the name of profit. Teaming up with billboard accident lawyer Kevin Avery (Will Forte), he takes on slick corporate counsel Buddy Crane (John Cena) and ACME, Inc., the profit-obsessed conglomerate behind every one of the Coyote’s chaotic catastrophes.
From director Dave Green, Coyote vs. Acme is a movie about a hero who always keeps going, no matter what is thrown in his path. As Jim Batts wrote in his review, the film “really has “heart”.
The thing that unlocked the whole movie for me was this idea that we watch cartoons and we laugh at the cartoon characters in them, and we laugh at their cartoon pain. We always have! So, in some ways, the idea of this movie was of us saying, ‘We’re sorry!’ This idea that Wile E. Coyote has been through 75 years of mistreatment and is totally sick and tired of it!” Green says.
“That then became, ‘Well, what if we treated his problem seriously? What if this whole thing wasn’t just a lark but went deeper and explored themes that we haven’t gotten to explore before?’ That was what excited me. This question: ‘What if we created real, actual empathy for Wile E. Coyote?’”
Producer producer Chris deFaria says ““We all believe that we’re Road Runner, but deep down inside, we know we are actually Wile E. Coyote.”
To help answer that musically, Green turned to the Oscar-winning composer Steven Price. For 30 years Price has been composing soundtracks for lauded movies in diverse genres. From the space opera of Alfonso Cuaron’s Gravity to the war-torn battlefields of the Brad Pitt-starring Fury, not to mention a four-time action-comedy collaboration with Edgar Wright dating back to 2013’s The World’s End, his work has amplified stories, loading them with thrills and emotion.
For Coyote vs. Acme, Price was tasked with creating an original score that pays homage to classic Looney Tunes music by legendary composer Carl Stalling, while musically bringing the cartoon characters into a modern-day story of corporate intrigue and courtroom drama.
I recently spoke with the composer about his brainwave that would define the unmistakable sound of Coyote vs. Acme. In our discussion about the film, we talked about his research on the classic tracks from the Looney Tunes universe, why we should root for the Coyote, and his obsession with composing scores to give films their unique voice.
WAMG: The first time we spoke was on August 21, 2013 and here it is August 21, 2026. And we spoke about your work on Edgar Wright’s THE WORLD’s END
Steven Price: What a coincidence. The first interview I ever did.
WAMG: Coyote vs Acme. Oh, my gosh. I saw it last week. The movie that almost wasn’t is now here. Reviews are fantastic. It’s doing so well on Rotten Tomatoes.
Steven Price: Yeah, it’s been amazing to see it because it’s been quite the journey, shall we say.
WAMG: How were your first approached about composing and how did David Green say, Hey, I think you’d be great on this film?
SP: I just got called in for a meeting they were cutting in London and they called me in for a chat. They sent me the script, first of all, actually. I remember thinking it was incredibly smart. And I had a vague memory of the original article it’s all based on. I think it’s 1990 in the New Yorker. There was the original Coyote versus Acme sort of article. It’s such a great idea, the idea that he would finally sue for all of the terrible inventions that he’d bought over the years. And the script was amazing. The script was really smart and it felt like this is a really interesting way of revisiting these characters. And it’s got the best of all worlds. You get the fun of the chases and all the sort of slapstick stuff. But at the same time, you’ve got an emotional story about these cartoon characters. So that was exciting. And then I went in, they showed me, I think, 2 sequences that weren’t finished animation or anything like that, but you just got a sense of it and you realized that he was just absolutely nailing this idea. And wouldn’t it be fun to get to do music? And we talked about music and seemed to get along. So that was the start. And then it was a great experience writing it really.
WAMG: The musical cues match all the physicality, the edits, the sound effects. And how did you start planning out how you were going to combine the traditional Looney Tune world that we grew up with real life.
SP: I think the film kind of helps you out because it’s the first thing I was tackling was the start of the film, which is these incredible, authentic Looney Tunes kind of action sequences. And I’d obviously grown up with the cartoons, but I went back and rewatched lots and lots of them. And you’re kind of struck by how amazing the music is in those things and how, they didn’t have computers and all that. They were doing it for real back in the day. The first time they heard it was when it was played on the stage.
And it’s so accurate to the picture. It’s so imaginative. And the way they use the musicians and the orchestra swirling around and people are overblowing instruments to get really sort of pictorial noises out of them and that sort of thing. That was all very inspiring, so I started off doing that. And that was when I kind of established my themes as well. And then you got to take those ideas, but also thread them through into this courtroom kind of drama and this tale of intrigue and corporate espionage and all that stuff. But it was all kind of interlinked and it was kind of fun to work out how you could join the two and make them feel true all the time. It could work for the original Looney Tunes stuff and it would be full of that sort of character. But at the same time, you could slide that in and hopefully make you feel something for cartoon characters that you may not have looked at in that way before.
WAMG: Throughout the whole movie, you can hear the iconic voices of June Foray and Mel Blanc, as well as the traditional Looney Tunes we all grew up with. For many that was their first exposure to classical music like the Minute Waltz from Chopin, the Barber of Seville. Rossini, the William Tell Overture, Richard Wagner’s Tannhauser, and “What’s Opera, Doc” in 1957. So let’s talk about the professional choir singing Roadrunner’s signature Meep Meep, which I thought was so genius.
SP: Oh, it was one of those ideas that came to you and you kind of, you had to work out whether you dare suggest it because it seems so silly. But in my mind, the coyote, Wiley, he’s just an obsessive, right? All he thinks about is the roadrunner. He wants to catch and eat the roadrunner. That’s all he wants in the world. And he keeps trying and every day tries a different way. And the obsession grows and grows and grows. And the idea came. that, maybe he’s haunted by that. Maybe he’s so frustrated after all these years of failure that all he hears in his head is this meep, meep of the thing that keeps getting away from him, you know, all the time it’s going on. And almost felt like it could be like a horror thing, you know, and in his head was this constant sort of mocking him, this meep, meep, meep, meep thing. And so the idea came of doing that with a choir. And I said that to Dave and he was like, that sounds fun. And of course, you can’t demo anything like that because you have to do it for real to know it’s going to work. So then we just had this ridiculous afternoon in Abbey Road, Studio One with a choir, getting them to make that noise. And it was so funny when it first started to happen. You just stood there going, this is good fun. This is great.
WAMG: That’s what I was going to ask you. What was the reaction from the singers, from the choir? When they first get the sheet music, were they, this is great? Were they laughing? Were they like, yeah, this is going to work?
SP: I mean, they’re up for anything, which is great. We had to sit down at the start and have a conversation with them about what the noise was going to be. And I literally had to ask, if you think of the Roadrunner, do you think “beep” or do you think “meep”? And everyone voted for it. And we had to try it both ways because I’ve always thought it’s meep in the cartoon, but if you see it written down, it’s beep. And we tried and it seemed to work that it was meep. So we had that conversation and tried it a few times and then they just seemed to enjoy it, over-enunciating to make it funnier and funnier. And we ended up with the version of the “1812 Overture” with them meeping all over it as well. That was glorious fun.
WAMG: Wasn’t it? When you first hear it, its the Roadrunner, but then you realize, oh, it’s vocals. Oh, my gosh, it’s just mad genius.
SP: There’s something psychotic about it, isn’t there, when you hear it sort of classically like that.
WAMG: And what was the conversation with the film editor or sound editor to have that presence, but for it to be in the background.
SP: We constantly chipped away at it really. I was doing demos from very early on and we all work really closely together. Dave, the director, cast and the editor, myself, we were all constantly trying things and it was kind of fascinating how the comedy would work in these things. You were literally talking about A-frame or two frames would make a massive difference, you know, whether where they cut it or where I placed the music with it. It’s kind of, we had to be really careful to get those moments right because it could make something, feel exciting, feel funny or not, if you got that wrong. So we did a lot of trial and error and Dave was very patient to try a lot of things with me and we’d go a couple of different directions in some places and it gradually started to lock together. And then of course you get the glorious day where you get to record it properly and hear it for real rather than just me sitting in a room pressing keyboards.
WAMG: Since your start, you’ve worked with so many different filmmakers since that first interview. Edgar Wright, you worked on all those films, including The Running Man, which I absolutely loved. It is a great remake.
SP: I was really proud of that one. I enjoyed it.
WAMG: Watch the original, but watch the new version, the updated version, because it’s so good. It really is. You’ve also worked with David Ayer on Fury and Suicide Squad Fury. So with all these collaborations, your scores are not just background noise. It’s always conveying the characters, the feeling, what they’re thinking. So I wanted to ask you about the scene at the end of Coyote vs Acme, where Will Forte’s character is in the courtroom, it’s just so emotional.
SP: It’s one of the things I love to do more than anything really is kind of hopefully find that level of emotion that makes you kind of lean in and not realise it. That feeling of your stomach sort of lurching or just that wave of emotion. And this film sort of had that the performances were so good.
And you know, there was something about him doing the speech about the different way of seeing Wile (E. Coyote), from being this hapless kind of character to being someone who’s resilient and actually really brave and never gives up and that’s sort of admirable, you know, and it was a lovely thing to score because it’s quite a beautifully rousing speech, beautifully written.
So it was so nice to sort of just accompany him really and just build as he built and just follow it along and hopefully the combination moves people.
WAMG: It was just a lovely part of the movie and the score was absolutely perfect for that scene.
SP: The whole thing, to work on a Looney Tunes film that a lot of people keep saying they found it emotional, that’s new, I think, for that world. So that’s a great thing.
WAMG: So switching gears to Sir David Attenborough. You won the Primetime Emmy for Life on the Planet. You’re nominated again for The Ocean with David Attenborough. Both are just magnificent. And he just turned 100. He’s like the oldest Emmy nominee.
What was it like working with him?
SP: It’s been just a massive honour really to work with him at all. I’ve been working with him sort of since about 2014. We did a show called “The Hunt” for the BBC and all the people around him are amazing storytellers and the camera work is incredible. David has got to this point in his life, he’s making different sorts of films and certainly something like the Ocean film. It’s an amazing sort of message piece, really. And it was very different from anything we’d done before. It wasn’t sort of pure natural history. It was a thing designed to make a difference and to alert people to the damage that’s being done in the ocean and kind of suggest that this is unsustainable and it’s having terrible effects on the whole planet.
And it’s also not making money. It is just ridiculous. I didn’t know about any of that. And it takes someone like Sir David to stand and stare at the camera and say that. We wanted the score for that to be as emotional as he was really, and to support every bit of his message. It starts off showing the wonder of the oceans, but then it shows you just how terrible it is. And it goes really dark, the score in that place, but it sends you away with a lot of optimism. And we wanted it to feel different. So that one is a very choral score. That’s a lot of voices all overlapping and kind of the voice of the ocean was what was running through my head when I was working on it. Everything is very fluid and all the voices overlap and it kind of moves in waves. And within that, I think you could find a lot of emotion in different ways. It was a very lovely thing to work on. We’re all super proud of that one.
WAMG: How do you go from all these various genres and still keep it fresh after all these years?
SP: I think you just keep putting yourself in positions where you don’t know what you’re doing. Now, that’s my key. Just continually look for things that you haven’t done before, that you want to do in a different way. And just sort of keep trying to find the heart of a film. I like nothing more than trying to make a score that sounds like it couldn’t belong to any other film. That’s my obsession with this thing. And just try and make something that feels like it’s utterly bespoke to those characters and the way it’s been filmed, every aspect of it. So it just feels like one thing. And these lovely moments, if you do get it right every now and then, it all becomes more than the sum of its parts.
WAMG: Your score for Gravity was so unusual, as if it wasn’t made for that film, but it was.
SP: I love making things. I enjoy trying to find a new sound that feels particular. I remember when we did Fury, a lot of the percussion in that film arc the tank. we got bits of the tank delivered to a studio and we hit it and we scraped it and we did all these things and that became, so you can’t separate the film from the music, and that’s something I try and do as much as possible, really, just to try and make things that feel. you know, super unique.
With the Coyote vs Acme film, there are sounds in there that were drawn from the original sounds from the Looney Tunes effects library from the cartoons, like little clicking noises that they would have for people running, that they’re part of my rhythm tracks. I spent ages trying to do slide guitars that sounded like the Bugs Bunny. You just try and make it feel like it’s right for that film.
WAMG: I have one final question. In 2013, during the World’s End interview, my last question was, what advice would you give the young musicians considering a career as a film composer? You said, “there are always jobs that need to be done. And if you’re a musically minded person and you’re nice to have around, I think people appreciate that. And there are opportunities out there. It can appear very daunting getting into the industry at times, but I think if you’ve got the right attitude, and you’re keen to get involved, ultimately you love to do it. And there are definitely openings for people.”
What do you think about that over a decade later?
SP: If anything, I think it’s even more true. I think it’s probably even harder to get into this thing now than it used to be. There’s so many people, I think everyone’s got a studio, everyone’s got a computer, you can make scores with anything, so it can be daunting to get anyone to hear anything. To me, the way forward is to meet people and to be useful to people. There’s nothing better than when someone’s enthusiastic and wants to learn every aspect of this. I look back on my early days and I’m so grateful that I’d learned every job in film music because I had a go at all of it at some point, and helped people do it. And so when you do get to write your own, you kind of have an understanding of that and that helps. That means you’re not wasting time, you learn those things. You can just sort of focus on the job at hand. So I think people, I get a lot of letters from people who just want to write. And I’m always trying to say, oh, you should do everything. You know, the writing will come. If you’re going to write, you’re going to write anyway. But you know, learn all these other things. There’s loads of ways to, you know, to influence this stuff and to, you know, enjoy working in film music.
WAMG: Do you have anything coming up that we can look forward to?
SP: There’s a couple of things that are finished and ready to go, there’s a film called The Way of the Warrior Kid, which is coming out of Apple, I believe, in November. And then returning to the Natural History world, there’s a limited series that I did for Netflix earlier this year about the Arctic, which is a very beautiful show and really deals with how things are changing in the Arctic and how it’s affecting the people who live there and all the nature around them.
Jude Hill, Linda Cardellini and Chris Pratt in “Way of the Warrior Kid,” premiering November 25, 2026 on Apple TV.
