Ludwig Goransson attends the Governors Ball following the 98th Oscars® at the Dolby® Theatre at Ovation Hollywood in Los Angeles, CA, on Sunday, March 15, 2026.
“The music is definitely a very very unique world and I hope people are able to be part of it and fully immerse themselves in this world.”
3-time Academy Award winning composer Ludwig Göransson is composing the film score for Christopher Nolan’s next film, The Odyssey, a mythic action epic bringing Homer’s foundational saga to the big screen. The two previously teamed up on TENET and Best Picture winner OPPENHEIMER.
In this new featurette ‘IN STUDIO: LUDWIG GÖRANSSON’, listen as Nolan says that “even though it was going to be ancient Greece, we don’t want it to look and feel like previous movies that take on this kind of classical world.”
When we first interviewed the Swedish composer for director Ryan Coogler’s CREED more than 10 years ago, neither he nor the filmmaker had any thoughts of Oscars. Now between the two of them, they have 4 combined. Coogler and Göransson collaborated on FRUITVALE STATION, BLACK PANTHER, CREED and SINNERS.
I asked Göransson in 2015 about CREED and it’s lasting legacy, he said, “What I got to do for CREED is something that I love and something that means a lot to me in such a special way. I don’t think I’ve ever worked as hard on a movie as I have on this one. I will definitely look back on this and feel that this was one of those special times in my life.”
Zinzi Evans, Ludwig Göransson and Ryan Coogler attend as UNIVERSAL PICTURES presents OPPENHEIMER LIVE IN CONCERT with composer Ludwig Göransson featuring a 53 piece orchestra at Royce Hall in Los Angeles, CA on Wednesday, January 10th, 2024 (photo: Benjamin Shmikler/ABImages)
Göransson is also known for his western-infused theme and score for Disney’s The Mandalorian, taking home two Primetime Emmy Awards.
THE ODYSSEY opens in theaters everywhere on July 17, 2026.
Stars Matt Damon, Tom Holland, Anne Hathaway, Robert Pattinson and Lupita Nyong’o, with Zendaya and Charlize Theron.
Soundtrack available to pre-order on Vinyl & CD by Made by Mutant and pre-save on digital streaming platforms:
The Odyssey is produced by Emma Thomas and Christopher Nolan for their company, Syncopy. The executive producer is Thomas Hayslip.
Ludwig Göransson poses backstage with the Oscar® for Original Score during the live ABC telecast of the 96th Oscars® at Dolby® Theatre at Ovation Hollywood on Sunday, March 10, 2024.
Prime Video’s global hit series, THE BOYS, concluded its final and fifth season with an explosive final chapter. Season Five of the multi-Emmy Award-winning series premiered on April 8, culminating in the unforgettable series finale on May 20.
In the final season, it’s Homelander’s world, completely subject to his erratic, egomaniacal whims. Hughie, Mother’s Milk, and Frenchie are imprisoned in a “Freedom Camp.” Annie struggles to mount a resistance against the overwhelming Supe force. Kimiko is nowhere to be found. But when Butcher reappears, ready and willing to use a virus that will wipe all Supes off the map, he sets in motion a chain of events that will forever change the world and everyone in it. It’s the climax, people. Big stuff’s gonna happen.
THE BOYS reunites composer Christopher Lennertz with the series’ creator Eric Kripke, creator and producer of CW’s Supernatural, which Lennertz scored since the show’s inception in 2005, and for which he received an Emmy nomination. The duo also worked together on the NBC series Revolution.
The Emmy-winning composer and I have been having conversations about his various projects since 2014, starting with THINK LIKE A MAN, the TV show “Galavant” and in 2015 with THE WEDDING RINGER, RIDE ALONG 2 and the TV show “Marvel’s Agent Carter” and in 2019 when THE BOYS first came on the scene.
Prior to the airing of THE BOYS series finale, Lennertz and I discussed what’s been happening since we last spoke, the Emmy win, working in the Vought Cinematic Universe (VCU) world and his latest movie Tim Story’s latest comedy 72 HOURS (2026).
SPOILERS AHEAD – – – SPOILERS AHEAD
Antony Starr (Homelander)
We Are Movie Geeks: We’ve spoken 3 times previously. One time you’re doing Agent Carter, and then you’re composing for Gallivant, and then you’re doing movies with Tim Story, and THE BOYS during this whole time.
I gotta say. I watched last night’s episode of THE BOYS. How cool was it that you got that brilliant shout-out in the episode?
Christopher Lennertz: That was awesome. I didn’t even know they were doing it until we first spotted the episode. I knew it last night, but when we first started working on the music, they didn’t tell me, and it came up, I was like, oh my god, so great, so fun. And to have Daveed Diggs say it was so fun and great.
We Are Movie Geeks: I know, right? And I had the closed captioning on, and there it is! And secondly, congratulations on that Emmy win last year for “Let’s Put the Christ Back in Christmas.”
Christopher Lennertz: Thank you. It was amazing. It was so fun and silly. It really was.
We Are Movie Geeks: It was great, and then they posted it on YouTube, which was even better. Did you immerse yourself in going to ice capade shows to really get a vibe going?
Christopher Lennertz: I didn’t go to them, but I watched a ton of them online, and yeah, I really did a lot of homework on that one. It was very funny to try to make it as legit, sort of like, Disney on Ice as we possibly could.
We Are Movie Geeks: That was great, that was great. So once again, you and Eric Kripke, you’re doing another series to the bitter end, and it’s been, like, what, 30 years?
Christopher Lennertz: More than 30 years. We met in 1995, no, 1992, and I think we did his first student film, that we did together, was in 1993, so 33 years since we started working together. Isn’t that insane?
We Are Movie Geeks:That’s amazing. I love that, because I was watching Deadline’s, Sight and Sounds, and you were talking about that, and it has been 30 years.
Christopher Lennertz: We both had hair back then.
Jack Quaid (Hughie Campbell), Karl Urban (Billy Butcher)
We Are Movie Geeks: How crazy has it been working on THE BOYS from when it first started, and when you and I were first talking about it to where it is now, because when we were talking about Season 1, you were talking about wanting to use lots of drums, and metal, and trash and stuff, and broken symbols, and all this noise and feedback. So, where you started and where it is now, did you change anything?
Christopher Lennertz: I don’t think we changed anything, I think we added a lot of stuff, I think, and especially this last season, because, you know, I think you’ll still hear a lot of the broken instruments, and you’ll hear the trash, and you’ll hear feedback and things like that, especially to represent Butcher and our boys, our heroes. Homelander’s theme on this violin was gonna be such a big part of the show, and really represent his descent into just mania, and just insanity, and to have his, like, the inside of his brain be represented by that. But we also didn’t know we were gonna end up doing this thing where we, every year, we do, you know, a couple of original songs that are really fun satire and parody, and I was gonna get to work with you know, half the cast, to sing them, and to be able to write songs for the cast to sing. That was something that didn’t start until Season 2, and has been such an amazing surprise.
We Are Movie Geeks: I love how, over the five seasons, there’s been a lot more use of orchestra, and I think one of my favorites of this season, also, is, the song, “Faster”. Did that come from another season?
Christopher Lennertz: Yeah, so there was the rap version of Faster that Jesse actually did in Season 2, so that when we knew that A-Train was gonna die, Eric sent me a note, and we’re like, oh, we have to do a funeral gospel version of Faster. So yeah, it was really fun to be able to do that and take it in a very different direction.
We Are Movie Geeks: I’m hearing a lot of orchestra, but there’s a lot more of those non-conventional choices of instruments. Did you and co-composer, Matt Bowen, make a conscious decision? Was that something that Eric said he wanted? It works really well.
Christopher Lennertz: Yeah, thank you! I think it really was, you know, I think the show sort of told us what to do, and one of the things that we were surprised about, and we knew that things were gonna be big, because it was the last season, it was season 5, but what we really weren’t prepared for was how emotional a lot of it was gonna be. I knew that we’d probably see a lot of death, but, you know, but starting in episode 1 this year, we lost A-Train, and then we lost Firecracker, and Black Noir, and, every time you start to realize, oh my god, there’s a lot of emotion here, you know, and obviously last night, she died.
So to be able to go through that, you kind of need the orchestra to come in and tug on your heartstrings. The orchestra can do something with both emotion and scale to say we’re approaching the end, and you’re saying goodbye to characters you love, and this is getting big. You know, and that’s something that, you know, it’s harder to do that with a guitar or a bass. It’s easier to do that with, you know, the grandeur of an orchestra, and really do that kind of thing. As we got into this season, Matt and I really knew that, you know, we were going to do more orchestra than we normally do. But really, especially in the last two or three episodes, it’s become sort of much more orchestral than it ever was before. And I think it’s because the show warrants it, the story warrants it.
Kimiko Miyashiro (Karen Fukuhara), Frenchie (Tomer Capone)
We Are Movie Geeks: it’s great. It’s impactful. I mean, I’m watching Frenchie Die last night, and I was like, oh no, oh no, and here comes the orchestra, and the strings, and everything else. It was really sad. It was, like, the worst part of all five seasons.
The first season, the first few seasons, you were the sole composer, and now you’re working alongside your co-composer, Matt Bowen. I mean, that cue for the last diabolical dance, which I was listening to yesterday, is perfect.
Christopher Lennertz: Thank you.
We Are Movie Geeks: What is that like?
Christopher Lennertz: Matt and I had been working on other things together. He’s worked on some movies with me, and he comes from the world of being a real record producer. He’s really great at playing lots of instruments, but also, you know, comes from more of a rock background, whereas I have more of an orchestral specialty. And so he was involved from the beginning, producing a lot of the rock stuff.and a lot of the punk vibe of the show. He was starting to come up with so many great things, and became so integral to the show that, when they greenlit Gen V, and we started working on Gen V, and we knew that it was gonna go into a situation where we were gonna just be doing episode after episode after episode, going from one show to the next.
And then now, obviously, going to Vought Rising coming up, we’re gonna do the same, we talked to Kripke, and I said, look, Matt’s been on this, you know, sort of from the beginning, and he’s really started writing with me on a lot of things and great music, so, so can we just, you know, bring him in on the team and have him make sure that we have, you know, because we’re doing so many shows, back-to-back. I was like, oh, this way we’ll be able to make sure that we, you know, that we’re here for whatever you need, and also, he’s brilliant, and he’s really good at some of the things that I’m not great at. He plays cello, and he plays, you know, he plays, you know, violin, and I don’t play violin at all, so, it’s really helpful to have both of us involved, and we’ve sort of gotten into the world of the VCU and the show with Eric that I think we just all get what it’s supposed to sound like, and we’re all sort of one big family now, which is really great.
We Are Movie Geeks: I love that it’s called the VCU now. I love that. When I was watching that interview on Deadline on YouTube, the sound and screen, it’s a lot of fun. It was really fun watching the two of you, you know, talk about the show and the music.
We Are Movie Geeks: Tell me about, then, the process of composing for not only THE BOYS, but GenV, which was its own thing, and now you’ve got VOUGHT RISING.
Christopher Lennertz: You know, they’re all in the same world, and so they needed to relate somewhat. It was a much younger cast in Gen V, they were in college, there was definitely a stronger female lead presence, which were really amazing, like Marie, and we knew that they needed more of that sound, and so we had more vocals involved, and it definitely had more electronics involved than the boys would have had. But it definitely also lived in the same world. There was, you know, dissonance and feedback and tension. And then it’s gonna be interesting to see what we do with Vought Rising, because we do have themes that carry over now, because we’ve got Soldier Boy, we’ve got Stormfront.
You know, so there are themes, and we actually introduced a new theme this season for Bombsite. Once we go back, you’ll hear the Bombsite theme as well, which is really cool. There is some cross-pollinization of themes, but also, it takes place in the 50s, we’re just starting it, so I’m not exactly sure how much of that period music sound will be in there. My guess is it’s still gonna live very much in the world of boys-related stuff, and it’s gonna have the same kind of shock and blood and violence and gore and stuff that THE BOYS has, I’m sure. So I’m sure there’ll be dissonance and there’ll be tension, like there always is, but I’d like to think there’s gonna also be an expansion into the 50s of that kind of thing to, you know, to hopefully, you know, give it its own voice, but yet feel like it belongs in the whole universe.
We Are Movie Geeks: What can fans of the boys and Gen V expect from VOUGHT RISING? It sounds like there’s going to be that kind of Flavor of the 50s, but not too far removed from what people have been listening to the last five seasons.
Christopher Lennertz: We haven’t finished any episodes yet, so I’m not sure how it’ll end up, but I do think when it comes to things that are in the same world, fans have an expectation that they want to feel like it belongs, and whether that’s like, James Bond, you want to hear that guitar, you want to hear the brass, and so I think with anything, when you’ve got a world that you’ve created that people love, you want to make sure you give the fans what they want, but also in a new way, and that’s probably what I think we’ll end up doing.
We Are Movie Geeks: Getting a little way from THE BOYS. You’re also working with Tim Story again.
Christopher Lennertz: I am, we actually just finished a little bit ago, we finished 72 Hours, which is a Netflix movie.
We Are Movie Geeks: What is this, your 9th, 10th collaboration with him?
Christopher Lennertz: That was my 9th movie with Tim. It’s awesome and he’s just the most lovely human. Both he and Eric are my two favorite, long-time collaborators, and, they love making really fun entertainment that people can get lost in. And Tim just knows how to make a fun, funny movie, and especially when he and Kevin get together, it’s just always gonna be fun. This one’s cool, because it’s got a bunch of the young, really great new Saturday Night Live stars in it, Marcelo and everybody else, so it’s gonna be really cool, sort of the next wave of big-time comic actors are in this movie, which is great.
We Are Movie Geeks: You and I, we spoke about Think Like a Man 2, we also talked about Ride Along, and the trailer for 72 hours, it’s actually really funny. I think it’s gonna be a lot of fun.
Christopher Lennertz: It comes out in July, so I hope everybody loves it.
We Are Movie Geeks: After that, what do you have on the horizon?
Christopher Lennertz: Nothing I could talk about specifically, necessarily, but, you know, I have been, because of THE BOYS’ songs and everything else, like, I’ve really gotten caught by the bug of songwriting, and especially musical theater songwriting, so I am working on a show for Broadway, which I can’t tell specifically about, but it’s really great.
I did the Rogers musical for Disneyland when it was out a couple years ago. I did all the new songs for that, and then writing songs for THE BOYS and having superheroes sing theatrical songs, it might be a world that I would like to be pigeonholed in. If I can be the superhero slash sci-fi Broadway songwriter, I would be happy to be that person. I’ve got something up my sleeve, which is fun, and the fact that we got to do a song with Daveed Diggs from Hamilton this season was a dream come true for me. Hamilton’s one of my absolute favorite shows, and Daveed is a legend. And to be able to write it with him was unbelievably fun. He’s brilliant, and as cool as you could imagine. And yeah, to be able to write that, and singing about Homelander being God is so ridiculous, and then having, like, angels twerking, and it’s so ridiculous.
We Are Movie Geeks: That was a crazy.
Christopher Lennertz: Yeah, but it’s so Kripke. After the Emmy last year, everyone knows that I love writing songs, and they’re more open to me writing more songs within the actual movies and the shows. I’d love to write something for one of Tim’s movies, I’d love to write a song for that, and, who knows, there just might be a song in Vought Rising, too, or two, maybe. So we’ll have to see and wait and see.
We Are Movie Geeks: I’ve been re-watching Supernatural, showing my husband, who didn’t see it on its initial run. I watched it from the start when it first began, so this is my third time watching it.
Christopher Lennertz: Good, right?
We Are Movie Geeks: Oh my gosh. That show, just perfect, still just amazing. And to have them show up in THE BOYS!
Jared Padalecki as Sam Winchester, Jensen Ackles as Dean Winchester, and Misha Collins as Castiel on Supernatural – Credit: Jack Rowand/The CW/Everett Collection
We Are Movie Geeks: So lastly, what can fans expect from the finale, from THE BOYS?
Christopher Lennertz: There’s a lot of orchestra in it, there’s a lot longer, big cues, which was really fun to write. Plus a huge buildup at one point in the show, and, normally queues on THE BOYS are a minute to two, three minutes long, and there was a queue that’s 9 minutes long. In the finale, there’s big, dramatic music that usually means that really important stuff is happening, so I will say that I think people are gonna be like. It doesn’t pull any punches, we’ll put it that way. I hope people like it. And I think, It’s got stuff that’s gonna move people, but it’s also got stuff that might put people’s jaws on the ground. I think they’ll be surprised.
We Are Movie Geeks: Chris, thank you again. Thank you, for sitting down and having this conversation.
Christopher Lennertz: You too. Thanks, Michelle, appreciate it.
The score for the upcoming Netflix series Man on Fire, composed by Max Aruj, blends propulsive action with a deeply emotional core. It was developed over a six-month process with a mandate to avoid the original film’s musical legacy. Central themes include “Creasy Investigation,” a driving baritone guitar–led motif, and “Man on Fire,” a sweeping piece tied to the series’ most powerful moments.
Based on A.J. Quinnell’s book series, Man on Fire tells the story of John Creasy. Once a high functioning and skilled Special Forces Mercenary, known for surviving even the most desolate of situations, Creasy is now plagued with intense PTSD. Determined to overcome his personal demons, he sets out on a path to redemption. But, before he can adjust to this new life, he finds himself back in the fire, fighting harder than ever.
In addition to serving as composer on Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, and the video game Screamer, Max contributed additional music to Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One, Top Gun: Maverick, Mission: Impossible – Fallout and the series The Crown. When we last spoke with the Los Angeles–based composer in June 2021, Aruj was working on CRAWL and ICE ROAD. https://www.wearemoviegeeks.com/2021/06/interview-with-max-aruj-composer-of-ice-road-lansky-and-crawl/
Man on Fire will stream on Netflix on April 30.
The series stars Yahya Abdul-Mateen II in the lead role of Creasy, alongside Billie Boullet, Alice Braga, Scoot McNairy, Bobby Cannavale, and Paul Ben-Victor. Director Steven Caple Jr. directs the first two episodes of the series’ seven-episode season.
WAMG: It’s good to talk to you again. It’s been since, like, 2021.
MA: I know, a long time.
WAMG: The new trailer for this show, have you seen it?
MA: Wait a second, is there a new trailer?
WAMG: There’s a new trailer, it’s great! Have you seen the series yet?
MA: They’re wrapped. Oh, yeah. Because by the time I came on, they were already picture-locked, so I just got to score the whole thing straight up, really smooth. really streamlined, so it worked out great.
WAMG: I gotta tell you, congratulations on all your success in the recent years. I mean, when we last spoke, we were talking about Crawl, we were talking about Ice Road, and then I see you as composer on Mission Impossible, Top Gun, another Mission Impossible!
MA: And I see right next to you The Right Stuff poster, and that is a movie that we discussed when doing Mission, because McQ (Christopher McQuarrie) loves that movie, and loves that score.
WAMG: So let’s talk about Man on Fire. It’s really great! The score is terrific. Who did the vocals? How did you come about that? Because the vocals on that one cue are fantastic.
MA: Thank you for pointing that one out. This gentleman named Maroka Paris, who is a singer from Portugal, so, what I love about this whole process is that at the beginning, I worked with the Netflix team, and they said, let us know how we can help, what can we do, And we just kind of talked, and we said, what cool musicians could we work with? The story’s very intimate. The story’s very personal, and also, you know, there’s these big moments of action where the score explodes. And Sam and Ashley brought up a bunch of musicians, and Morocco was one of these singers that has this super unique tone and a really special approach to singing.
I listened to his music, and I thought, whoa, we have got to get that guy. And we reached out and spoke to him, and thank goodness he was available and interested. And then we spoke, sent in the tracks, and then we did a remote session with him, where we sent them the tracks, and we had video, and we got an audio feed, and we got to watch him sing. And it was one of my favorite moments, I think as a professional, because I heard his voice and I thought, whoa this is going to be so impactful and it was such a win for the whole team.
WAMG: I’m listening and all of a sudden, you hear these amazing vocals come in. Plus, there’s a lot of great percussion from another country.
MA: That’s right. So since they’re in Brazil in the show, we’ve really got to dig into those colors. So, for example, we used some samba influences, maracatu influences, which is African-influenced drumming. Ashea, which is kind of a combination of samba, reggae, and pop. And then, in terms of instrumentation, we got to use Kashishi seeds, timbales, cajon, Congas, frame drum…Hondero, and these weren’t necessarily all invented in Brazil, those instruments, but they’re heavily used in Brazilian music. So, it really started to feel special and unique to that location.
And then we also got to work with another wonderful musician whose name is Ayuri Oliveira. And he’s also in Portugal and plays some incredible Brazilian percussion, and when you get a good musician, in music, it becomes three-dimensional, because all of a sudden, these bills are popping, And these grooves are just combining in ways that make it feel like a living piece of music. So, I’m so glad you enjoyed that, and the percussion is something that, again, from the very beginning, working with the team was such a win.
WAMG: There’s so many emotional parts to your score… some powerful stuff. I was wondering, you had already said everything was locked in? By the time you went to score the film, had you seen some of the rough cuts, or was it completely done when you started scoring?
MA: I started basically August 1st of last year, and I worked until the end of January. So, I think everything was picture-locked, so when I started, I wrote some suites, and then they said, okay, we like these, but we’d love to see more. Then I scored the whole of episode 1 all in one go and then presented it to them, and in general, every concept worked. Because we have them named one way for 6 months, and then we change them at the last minute.
WAMG: When I was listening to it, I found my favorites were the real emotional, very melodic tracks,“My name is John Creasy” and then “She needs you…“
MA: With “My Name Is John Creasy”, that kind of descending melodic line we actually pitched for the titles as well. That was in the running, and the director said, I love it. But they wanted something a little more punchy for the titles, and I’m glad it landed where it did.
I’m so happy that everything went according to plan, because creating these variations from that piece I thought would work was well received, and it worked so well with picture, and just kind of gives just the right hug to the music that it needs to feel that emotion.
WAMG: So, it sounds like everybody was really receptive to what you brought to the table, what you brought to the series. Which came first, them saying, here it is, here’s what we want, or you, here’s my music, here’s what I have to offer.
MA: I watched it, and we had some initial discussions, and they said, we want you to come in with a vision. And at first, I was like, whoa, okay. I asked some questions where I was thinking, do you want it to be like this or like this? They responded and said, we want you to come in with your own ideas.
They gave me their vote of confidence, which really is the best way to start a project, because you just feel so supported, and then I did, and it was so fun and exciting. Episodes 1 and 2, we had a lot of back and forth. kind of working out a few of these creases, Uh, no pun intended.
And just making sure that all these moments were honored. But in general, the stuff for Poe, the stuff for Creasy worked really well off the bat, so I’m so glad.
WAMG: In these last few years, you’ve been working on Top Gun, you’ve been working on Mission Impossible but every time I’ve listened to one of your scores, they all sound so different. How do you avoid repeating when you’re trying to get that distinct, unique music palette for a new project? How do you go from not sounding like the Top Gun theme, or how do you go from not sounding like the Mission Impossible to this, because it doesn’t sound like anything you’ve ever done, quite frankly.
MA: Thank you. That’s a great question, and I think that question is starting to apply even more as I’m doing more, because now, I’m booking jobs where people will say, we love what you did in this thriller. We’ve also got a thriller. They don’t say, can you do the same thing?
But as I’m working on it, I might do a piece, and I think, you know what? Did I not kind of do this concept already? How can I enhance it? How can I reinvent it? And it’s hard. And people like Lorne Balfe are the master at when they start a new project, they have to think of new ideas, and think about how much he’s done, and always thinking, okay, how can I approach this with a new lens and a new perspective?
I think the challenge of it is that when you book a project, you’ve got to deliver quickly. So that means you have to write original material very quickly, and then the next part is, it needs to sound original sonically with either new instruments or new sounds that no one’s ever heard before, so you really have a lot to do super quickly. And in this case, on Man on Fire, I was thrilled that both elements of those were received well. I was always thinking throughout the project, it’s going so smoothly, like, when’s the other shoe gonna drop? And then it never did!
WAMG: It’s a great score! There are certain scores that can stand entirely on their own, outside the context of the movie like Star Wars. There’s certain iconic movie albums that you could listen to outside of the movie. There doesn’t even have to be a film yours is one of those scores. This is a great score just to listen to. Are you, as a composer now, writing for the visuals, or are you writing so the music stands by itself?
MA: That’s the goal, is that someone can listen to it and be moved, and have no clue about what the series is. They should hear notes, and they should feel a sense of loss and longing. And a rousing sense of heroism, or trying to find some heroism within yourself. And if the audience or listener can feel that, then that’s the goal, you’ve won, and especially with a well-written series, every episode has been crafted and sculpted. So, if you write a good piece of music, it will mimic a good character arc. It just naturally will happen, and so if you write a good theme and melody, if you put that up against episode 7 in the climactic moment, it needs to work, because if it works there, then you work backwards and backwards. And it will just take on a life of its own, even without picture, so it takes practice to do that. I feel like only just understanding how to do that, because I don’t think that it’s automatic being able to do that at all.
WAMG: When do you know that a scene doesn’t need music? Is it difficult to leave a scene silent as a composer?
MA: Let’s just put ourselves 10 years ago when the producer and director are coming into your studio for every meeting and you will watch a reel, so let’s just say 20 minutes and you will craft that stuff together, and then you will come upon a scene where you’ll talk to each other, and you’ll say, I don’t think this needs music here, because we just had such a moving cue before, and then we go right into an action scene after. So, this 2-minute dialogue scene, let’s do it without music. And then you will have remembered and decided together as a team that that works. I think when everyone is remote, and everyone is off on their own, It’s just more natural when you’re sitting by yourself to think, Should this have music here? And the answer is, it could. but you know, the scene is well written, it doesn’t need it, we know where the characters have come from, we see where they’re going.
So a lot of the time, I would score more scenes than I needed to, and then on the dub stage, at the very last second, we’d say, you know what, we don’t need this here. And the post supervisor, Paul Goldman (co-producer) was brilliant in saying, we don’t need this here, and he would be cutting out music along with the whole team, and I thought, this is what we want, because we don’t need to over-score all these intimate scenes. If it works without it, that’s what we’ve got to do.
WAMG: The last time we spoke, you were composing the score for the video game, Wrath of the Druids, and now you’ve done the score for The Screamer, which got great reviews. A lot of composers go back and forth. For instance the Game Awards held in December have become huge now. They have 3 Music categories (outstanding original scores, licensed soundtracks, and original songs in gaming), and the composers getting nominated are big names (Bear McCreary, Lorne Balfe). Even the Grammy Awards – The Academy now hosts a dedicated Best Score Soundtrack for Video Games and Other Interactive Media category. Do you find that you’re still approaching that just the way you would any score for any projects?
MA: I think, as I’m getting better and better when I was scoring those cut scenes, because the length of a scene or of a piece, or a game really matters, so I started to learn very quickly that almost every cutscene had three parts to it. There was a beginning, middle, and end. So as soon as I understood that, I tried to boil the scene down into these really simple parts, so that I could maximize the effect of the music, just knowing that we’re going to bring the audience in, then there’s the body of the scene, and then in the last part of the scene, there was some climax. or some conflict that would yet be resolved, or that is resolved. So I think once I understood these scenes, I was just flying, and I knew how to approach each one of them.
WAMG: Your YouTube page, especially for people who love film scores and want to be composers, is great to watch. Before, you got a score, you bought the record album, and that’s all you got out of it. What advice do you have to people who might want to become composers?https://www.youtube.com/@maxaruj3831
I think practice is always the number one thing. You know, when you’re practicing an instrument like piano, you can practice 12 hours a day. With brass, you can’t practice that much, but with composition, one should see it like an instrument, so you should be practicing and writing pieces and setting goals for yourself. 7 days a week. When you’re starting out, there’s plenty of things you need to do, but what I love is that now, once I’ve gotten the wheel going and I’ve made some amazing connections and worked on some amazing projects. Now I’m almost back to the basics of it, it’s all about the writing.
I think for any aspiring composer, what I can say is that it really is you need to do networking, but let’s say you get the project, then you have to be able to write all these different genres and teach yourself other genres and new genres you may have never even heard of. So, it’s just about practice.
WAMG: What do you have coming up?
MA: First of all, we do have Man on Fire videos that are being made right now, so, those will be coming out in a couple weeks and we worked with an amazing editor named Dallas Crane, who spearheaded this whole process, so I’m really thankful for him.
And next, I’m actually working on a thriller right now which is kind of wild and exciting. They have a deadline coming up. I’m doing a first pass, but not gonna rush, because we’re going to revisit it after this deadline.
And I’m also working on a video game. It’s a VR game, actually. And as I was saying, I had to learn an even new genre for this project. It’s so humbling starting a new project and you’re thinking, oh my god, I thought this music was really easy to make, but it’s not. That keeps you engaged and challenged and excited, so I’m thankful for it.
Max, it was a pleasure, once again, to speak with you. I love the score and I think people will really like the music. I think people who love the movie will also like the series.
Opening in theaters on June 13 is HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON. Inspired by CRESSIDA COWELL’s New York Times bestselling book series, DreamWorks Animation’s How to Train Your Dragon franchise has captivated global audiences, earning four Academy Award® nominations and grossing more than $1.6 billion at the global box-office. Now, through cutting-edge visual effects, director Dean DeBlois transforms his animated saga into a breathtaking live-action spectacle, bringing the epic adventures of Hiccup and Toothless to life with jaw-dropping realism as they discover the true meaning of friendship, courage and destiny.
The music is by two-time Academy Award® nominee John Powell (DreamWorks Animation’s How to Train Your Dragon franchise, Wicked)
Few film scores have left as profound a mark as Powell’s How to Train Your Dragon, a career-defining work that earned him his first Academy Award® nomination. Nearly 15 years later, he returns to revisit the music that shaped the world of Berk – this time for the live-action adaptation. Fresh off his second Oscar® nomination for Wicked, Powell approached the project not as a recreation, but as an evolution, shaping the score to match the film’s expanded scale and emotional depth. “When Dean first called me about directing the live-action adaptation, my answer was simple: ‘If you’re doing it, I’m in,’” Powell says. “The animated film was already cinematic in its approach to music—more live-action in its sensibilities than most animated scores. So, in many ways, this wasn’t about reinventing anything, but about realizing something that was always present beneath the surface. How to Train Your Dragon has always felt like a grand fantasy epic, even in animation. This adaptation allows it to reach the scale Dean always envisioned.”
Though the foundation of the score remains, Powell’s process wasn’t about direct translation. The rhythm of live-action demanded something more. “Some moments needed no adjustment, while others required substantial changes,” Powell says. “The transition from animation to live-action affects everything – timing, pacing, intensity. The performances bring a different weight, the storytelling has a new depth, and the music had to evolve alongside it. And once the visual effects began coming in, I saw what Dean had been crafting and it was extraordinary. The sheer scope of it required me to rework the music to match its scale and weight. My goal was for longtime fans to feel like nothing had changed, while in reality, a great deal had been subtly reworked to fit seamlessly.”
Powell also introduced new material to support the film’s emotional core. “All of the old themes are there, but I also wrote new material, including a theme that people might assume was always part of the original score,” Powell says. “There’s a new piece tied to Hiccup and Stoick’s relationship, which is explored more deeply in this film. The feeling of disappointing a parent carries a heavier weight here, and the performances really express that, so the music had to support that evolution.”
Listen to a sample of the score below.
Despite the changes, Powell approached the live-action score with the same methodology he used in 2010. “We recorded in the same place, using the same program we did in 2010,” Powell says. “Even then, the score was more tuneful than a typical animated film, which was very much at the encouragement of Chris Sanders and Dean. They wanted a rich, melodic approach – an overture of sorts that introduced every major theme right from the opening. That philosophy hasn’t changed. The tools have advanced, but the fundamental approach of writing orchestral music, whether on paper or digitally, remains the same.”
For Powell, the most striking part of the process was watching the film take shape as he scored it. “Watching the film evolve during the scoring process was extraordinary,” Powell says. “With animation, I was used to working from rough storyboards or unfinished renders, but even in live-action, a lot of what I was scoring early on wasn’t fully realized yet. As shots became more refined, the film took on this breathtaking intensity. And watching it all come together was one of those rare moments where you hope it will work, and then it exceeds your expectations.”
SANTA MONICA, CALIFORNIA – FEBRUARY 04: Josh Ruben and Jay Wadley attend a special Beyond Fest screening of Screen Gems and Spyglass Media Group’s HEART EYES at Aero Theatre on February 04, 2025 in Santa Monica, California. (Photo by Eric Charbonneau/Sony Pictures via Getty Images)
For the past several years, the “Heart Eyes Killer” has wreaked havoc on Valentine’s Day by stalking and murdering romantic couples. This Valentine’s Day, no couple is safe…
Hitting theaters this February is the Valentine’s Day horror-comedy HEART EYES from director Josh Ruben.
Screen Gems and Spyglass Media Group present a Divide/Conquer production, Heart Eyes. Starring Olivia Holt, Mason Gooding, Gigi Zumbado, Michaela Watkins, with Devon Sawa and Jordana Brewster. Produced by Christopher Landon, Greg Gilreath, and Adam Hendricks. Written by Phillip Murphy and Christopher Landon & Michael Kennedy.
The director of photography is Stephen Murphy, BSC, ISC. The production designer is Rob Bavin. The film is edited by Brett W. Bachman, ACE. The costume designer is Jaindra Watson. Casting by Mary Vernieu, CSA, and Bret Howe, CSA.
They say that whether you’re trying to make an audience care about whether a couple gets together or survives a slasher comes down to the same thing: get them invested in the characters. “We didn’t want to wink at it—’scream cute,’” says Ruben. “We wanted to play terror for real—to be vulnerable and root for these characters.”
Heart Eyes centers on a mysterious serial killer whose mission is to take out couples—the more obnoxiously in love, the better. “Heart Eyes is a brutal and nasty killer, a cunning slasher,” says Ruben. “The killer can’t stand couples. What’s Heart Eyes’s MO? Repulsed by couples? Hates PDA? An anti-Valentine’s Day vigilante?
All of this effectively comes through the screen with a pulse racing score by Jay Wadley. In her review, WAMG’s Cate Marquis says, “Director Ruben also adds a little fun with the music choices, one of the best parts of the movie, along with the fine horror effects.”
Wadley’s various tracks give audiences a fun return to the horror movies we all love – SCREAM, NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET, FRIDAY THE 13TH – with his musical jump scare cues.
In a recent interview with Wadley prior to the opening of the film, the composer and I discussed how he crafted a genre-defying score for the movie by blending lush rom-com melodies, spine-tingling horror motifs, and comedic beats, the score reflects the film’s unique tone.
Just in time for Valentine’s Day, the soundtrack will be released Friday, February 14th.
When asked about his inspirations for composing this musical character of HEART EYES, he said he drew from the music of Bernard Herrmann, Christopher Young, and Krzysztof Penderecki. Jay created a musical palette that weaves classic romance, modern horror, and experimental textures into an unforgettable auditory experience.
At the heart of the score lies a haunting three-note motif for the Heart Eyes Killer, a flexible theme that shifts from eerie harp whispers to bombastic brass climaxes, evolving with the character’s menace. The score also features a tender love theme for the protagonists, Ali and Jay, that struggles to find space amidst the chaos—mirroring their romantic journey.
From suspenseful aleatoric string textures to lush orchestral swells, the music keeps audiences on edge while delivering moments of beauty and emotional release. Highlights include the climactic drive-in theater scene, where the love theme finally flourishes in its full glory, and the film’s action-packed finale, intricately scored to amplify its thrills.
Wadley’s past work includes the psychological thriller I’m Thinking of Ending Things (Netflix), the historical drama series Franklin (Apple TV+), and the Sundance NEXT Award-winning I Carry You with Me (Sony Pictures Classics). His upcoming score is for the film THE WEDDING BANQUET.
Director Josh Ruben (center), Jordana Brewster as Detective Jeanine and Mason Gooding as Jay on the set of Screen Gems and Spyglass Media Group’s HEART EYES. Photo by: Christopher Moss
WAMG: To start, what was the initial inspiration behind your musical score for Heart Eyes? Did the director, Josh Ruben, provide any specific guidance? How did you balance the slasher movie elements with the romantic comedy tropes?
Jay Wadley: The initial inspiration for the score came from the juxtaposition of two genres that, on the surface, seem completely at odds: slasher and rom-com. Josh Ruben, the director, was incredibly clear about wanting to merge these two tones in a way that felt organic. He pushed me to explore both the humor and the suspense in the story, and to treat both with the same level of sincerity. So, in a way, the score needed to reflect the contrast between something playful and light-hearted, with moments of tension and even dread. It was about creating an atmosphere where you can laugh one minute and feel uneasy the next, which is what makes the film so fun and surprising.
WAMG: That’s a fascinating challenge! How would you describe the overall sound and style of the score? Was it more orchestral, electronic, or something else?
Jay Wadley: The score is definitely a mix of both orchestral and electronic elements. I used lush string arrangements and piano for the rom-com portions—those moments needed warmth and intimacy. But for the slasher side, I incorporated synths and a lot of distorted, unsettling sounds. The use of electronics allowed me to evoke a sense of unease, but still in a way that felt fresh and modern. There’s a lot of tension in the score, but it’s layered with moments of sweetness that reflect the romantic angle of the film. The balance between the two was key.
WAMG: That balance must’ve been tricky to get right. What were some of the biggest challenges you faced while composing the music for this film?
Jay Wadley: The project came together pretty quickly, and we had to be efficient. Beyond that, the challenge was capturing the nuances of the characters and story through music. I had to be very conscious of how the score would highlight the shifting moods—from light-hearted rom-com moments to the darker, more intense slasher scenes. Also, working with Josh and the team to ensure the music complemented the pacing of the story without overshadowing the humor or tension was a delicate balancing act.
WAMG: What was the most rewarding aspect of working on Heart Eyes?
Jay Wadley: Honestly, the most rewarding aspect was seeing the whole thing come together on screen. It’s one thing to create music in a vacuum, but seeing how the score fit with the visuals and the performances was incredibly gratifying. Josh really allowed me to take creative risks, and the film as a whole feels like a true collaboration. It’s a fun ride, and the music feels like it plays a big part in making that happen.
WAMG: Did you use any unique instruments or recording techniques in the score for Heart Eyes?
Jay Wadley: Yes! For some of the more intense, slasher-driven moments, I used unconventional sounds—like prepared piano (where you place objects on the strings) and bowed cymbals. These techniques create eerie textures that added a lot of tension. For the romantic scenes, I stuck to more traditional instrumentation, but with added layers of synths that gave the score a bit of a contemporary edge.
WAMG: That’s really interesting. How did you integrate the music with the film’s visual and narrative elements? Did you use leitmotifs or thematic development?
Jay Wadley: Absolutely. I used motifs for both the romantic and horror elements. The romantic theme is light and playful, often appearing as a melody played on the piano or strings. For the horror, I developed a more jagged, dissonant motif that would emerge at key moments. By weaving these themes in and out, I was able to underscore the shifts in tone without being too overt. The integration was really about setting the emotional foundation for each scene, so the audience could feel the tension before it even fully manifested on screen.
WAMG: Did you compose digitally, with a live orchestra, or a combination of both?
Jay Wadley: I composed most of the score digitally, using a mix of sampled instruments and synths. However, for some of the more intimate moments, I recorded with live musicians, particularly for the string sections. There’s something special about having live instruments that can’t quite be replicated digitally – especially for the romantic moments, where I wanted to capture a sense of warmth and humanity.
Olivia Holt as Ally and Mason Gooding as Jay in Screen Gems and Spyglass Media Group’s HEART EYES. photo by: Christopher Moss
WAMG: How did the film’s story and characters influence your creative process?
Jay Wadley: The film’s story had a huge impact on the music. The characters are quirky and endearing, so I wanted the score to reflect that playfulness, but also the fact that they are in a very dangerous situation. I tried to keep the characters at the forefront of the music, capturing their vulnerabilities and moments of triumph. The music had to reflect their emotional arcs while still supporting the genre-defying nature of the film.
WAMG: Did you personally connect with any of the characters or themes in the film?
Jay Wadley: I think I connected with the themes of love and fear—those two emotions often run parallel in life, and they’re both explored in Heart Eyes. The characters are navigating relationships, but they’re also dealing with this intense, life-threatening situation. It was easy to relate to that kind of emotional rollercoaster, and I think that’s why the score feels so authentic.
WAMG: What was it like collaborating with Josh Ruben and the rest of the filmmaking team?
Jay Wadley: It was fantastic. Josh is a visionary. He had such a clear idea of what he wanted, but he was also very open to ideas and experimentation. The collaboration felt very organic—there was a lot of trust between us, which made it easier for me to push creative boundaries. The whole team was incredibly supportive and passionate, which made the experience so rewarding.
WAMG: How has working on this project impacted your own musical style and approach?
Jay Wadley: It’s definitely expanded my approach to genre blending. The challenge of weaving together two very different tones—comedic and horrific—has made me more comfortable with taking risks and pushing boundaries. I feel like I’m more confident in my ability to shift between moods and create something that feels cohesive, even when the ingredients are wildly different.
WAMG: What do you hope audiences will take away from the music in Heart Eyes?
Jay Wadley: I hope the audience leaves with a sense of excitement and surprise. The music reflects the unexpected nature of the film itself – romance and danger can coexist in a way that’s both funny and unsettling. I want people to remember the emotional highs and lows of the music, and hopefully, it will make them reflect on how these different feelings – love, fear, joy – are all connected in our lives.
WAMG: Thank you so much for sharing your insights with me, Jay! It’s been a pleasure hearing about your creative process.
Jay Wadley: Thank you! It was great to talk about the project. I hope everyone enjoys the film and the music as much as we enjoyed making it.
In it’s third weekend at the number one spot at the box office, director Kelly Marcel’s epic conclusion to VENOM has grossed $394.2 million worldwide.
In VENOM: THE LAST DANCE, Tom Hardy returns as Venom, one of Marvel’s greatest and most complex characters, for the final film in the trilogy. Eddie and Venom are on the run. Hunted by both of their worlds and with the net closing in, the duo are forced into a devastating decision that will bring the curtains down on Venom and Eddie’s last dance. Venom: The Last Dance stars Tom Hardy, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Juno Temple, Rhys Ifans, Peggy Lu, Alanna Ubach and Stephen Graham. The film is directed by Kelly Marcel from a screenplay she wrote, based on a story by Hardy and Marcel. The film is produced by Avi Arad, Matt Tolmach, Amy Pascal, Kelly Marcel, Tom Hardy and Hutch Parker.
VENOM: THE LAST DANCE (ORIGINAL MOTION PICTURE SOUNDTRACK) is by composer Dan Deacon. The album features an original score composed by Deacon for the final film in the Sony Pictures Venom trilogy. Combining dynamic, emotional orchestral movements with bold, action-packed electronic sequences, Deacon’s score is the perfect musical accompaniment to the final chapter of the franchise.
In my recent conversation with Deacon, the composer talked about getting into the world of composing, how taking Eddie and Venom on their final journey was a musical dream come true, plus a surprise meeting with director Francis Ford Coppola.
WAMG: Did you have those usual beginnings like most composers… Did you play in the school orchestra or marching band when you were a kid?
Dan Deacon: I played trombone in the school band. And it was fun. I wasn’t particularly good or bad at it. But I really got into music with my dad. He and my mom ran like a small mom and pop business; bought a used computer and had this MIDI program on it called MIDI Songs. And I just fell in love with it. I became completely obsessed with writing music. I started a band. I would write parts for things like the horn section and it was like my absolute obsession. I didn’t like to think about it as anything that I would do other than like a hobby.
I went to college and I was undeclared for two years and I was going to drop out. My friends asked, why would you drop out? You love music, why would you leave the music program? And I said I’m not into music. And it made me think and I got into the composition program and it took off from there. And then I was really into writing Fluxus style chaos music. I was into 20th century minimalism and mostly avant-garde and really loved the more radical performances; like Fluxus pieces.
Not really a thriving market for that, I just thought I would be a poor musician freak. As my studies were focused on quote unquote classical or experimental classical electroacoustic music; I got into writing like fun party music and just as a hobby. I didn’t think anything would come of that. Then a friend said, hey, I’m going to book a tour. Do you want to come on tour? And I thought that would be fun. And completely fell in love with that, made enough money to pay rent on a warehouse place in Baltimore. I thought this could be my job. I could play this like electronic party music. That was it. I was happy to do that. As long as I averaged $70 a show, I could afford to live in this warehouse space. That took off in the underground and I found success there as a recording artist, but I really always wanted to get back into writing for larger ensembles and seemed like the best way to do that, especially if you want to write orchestral music and to try to get into film composing. And I kind of put that out there and I love films and at this point I was doing pretty significant press at the time.
In 2009, I was doing this one interview on NPR about musicians and for my album. And some music has this singular privilege that other art forms don’t really seem to have and the privilege is that it could be this perfected, definitive version of the album where it can record the album to the best of their ability in the cutting-edge state of technology and release it as intended to be interpreted and listened to exactly that way again and again. But then they can perform it live and do it differently and however they want. They can cut parts they want, they can add new parts, they can improvise, they can slow it down if the audience is vibing that way or they can speed it up if the audience is ruckus. But a film is locked, it’s set in stone. And when I was a kid I would watch a movie and I would wish this part would just keep going on forever. Or you go to a play and it’s different every single time. You never know what an Oscar Wilde play was like being staged with Oscar Wilde’s involvement, the same way poetry is read or even classical music… we have no idea what the exact tempo Beethoven was going for. There’s a victory in that, but we know exactly what The Who wanted their albums to sound like. We know exactly what Aphex Twin’s records sound like.
I get an email that I think is a scam from Francis Ford Coppola, and in my mind, it’s like the new Nigerian Prince. I don’t believe it. Two weeks go by and it’s from a different email address and it says, “Dan, it’s Francis.” A couple more emails go back and forth and I think he reaches out to my agent for a meeting and it’s actually a friends contact. So I hit him up and he says I heard you’re on NPR about like a breathing media that music has. I’d love to talk more about it, so I fly out to Napa and we just hang out and be nerds who love the stuff that we like. This is like 2011 or ’12 and we hit it off and a couple of months go by and we’re continuing the conversation and then he offers me to be a co-composer on the film Twist. I’ve never scored a song. And in college, even though I went to school for composition, I didn’t study film composing. I was composing strictly for the stage or strictly for the studio. I don’t know what a cue sheet is. I don’t know what a music editor is. I’m way in over my head and luckily, just a co-composer, so I’m getting cues and I’m chopping them up and making new music out of that; sending over like chronic stuff that’s being set in that is chill. Then I realized this is a different set of muscles. This is a different… The way I think about it is like being a recording artist and being a film composer. Not like siblings, it’s cousins but far removed.
I think, I need to learn how to actually do this, but if I really want to do this, I need to learn how to do it and at this point – my recording arts career is still doing well. I’m really enjoying it. But I know it’s going to take me over a decade to get all right at this and I want to start writing new music and different music and music that’s not just centered in my brain, but in a larger story or larger narrative. I also want to collaborate and get involved with other artists. And that to me is what I was missing in my solo project. I always felt like I was alone in the process, even when I would bring in other people. At the end of the day, I always had this ultimate veto power and for better or for worse, sometimes it would be like I would be arrogant about a choice. And looking back, I definitely like it, like getting ready to get back into it in 2016 and I realized I need to start at the same level that I’m as a film composer. I found the Baltimore film scene and I connected with Theo Anthony who is making his feature documentary RAT FILM. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Film
He’s had a couple of successful shorts. He says, I think I’m going to make this weird experimental documentary. Would you want to write some music for it? And I tell him, Yeah, I’d love to. And it starts growing into a feature and I’m totally down to just explore it. We don’t know anything about anything and we figured let’s just make a list of all the songs to put in it. It’s just this fun period of discovery. That’s how I got into music and that’s how I kind of fell into all my hobbies.
Luckily the film was beautiful and it did really well in the festival circuit. That opened me up to a whole new world of people who weren’t familiar with my recording career or were and I could start with that like small scene that I could grow with as it grew and I could learn how to do it without like the pressure of working with someone who’s massive and incredible as Coppola.
I liked that. I liked being able to like work with other filmmakers that were equally discovering their craft and as it grew over, I guess that’s eight years ago, my profile started to grow there and I started doing just larger projects, still mostly nonfiction at this point. But then luckily I got on Kelly Marcel’s radar. I scored her series The Changeling. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Changeling_(TV_series)
We developed a musical language and vocabulary and had that shorthand. I always thought VENOM was going to be an unreachable thing. I’d never done theatrical, it’s a tentpole superhero movie. It just felt like – no way, so when she asked me to write some demos and let’s see how this goes, it wasn’t lost on me that this was la once in a lifetime opportunity.
WAMG: What was great is your recent Instagram post (instagram.com/dandeacon/) and you had all the Venom comic books collage. And your other post where you are at the premiere, you’re just kind of chilling and you’re kind of like laying down in front of the Venom on the red carpet, which I thought was hilarious. Like most composers you don’t start out to be a film composer. You just fall into it. I was reading how you love comic books and how you really loved Venom – how you would save your money all the time and you would go and buy the comic books.
The attention given to film scores and composers, that’s been a recent thing. People have really started taking notice more than just, this is Star Wars or this is Jaws or this is the music of Titanic. They’ve really started to know the composers and their music. You definitely have a “sound” as with your score for HUSTLE, which had that electronic synthesized atmospheric score, like with VENOM. What and who were some of your inspirations as far as film composers?
DD: That’s a great question. Normally it starts with making a playlist with the director and the editor and what they are listening to. We talk about what the character in the film is, what its roles may be, how it will provide another level of storytelling that isn’t being told visually or through dialogue? And something that I really think resonates with me about Venom and how it’s just augmented, and his physical form. And I kept thinking it would be great to work with really blown out, heavily processed acoustic sounds. Like the whole “Knull suite” is really distorted trombone or really distorted cello. Those are some of the earliest sounds we worked with. Some contemporary legends would be like the Junkie XL scores. I love Mica Levi for Under The Skin, cues like that for the more haunting strings. And then we’d listen to a lot of Penderecki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krzysztof_Penderecki and Iannis Xenakis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iannis_Xenakis for like the more haptic sort of strip classic core sounds or György Ligeti https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gy%C3%B6rgy_Ligeti.
We built up a playlist of references building that shorthand of – we want the wild strings here or we want the whispers here – and we want more drums here and that’s sort of like how we built the playlist but asking, what are we telling the audience without telling them and how do we do it without holding their hand? How do we help their brain revisit a previous scene? Just getting into the subtext and how can we do that musically? So that the audience can be transported back to earlier in the story without having to remember to go there. They can focus on what’s in front of them at all times and to me, I think of film scoring as like an ingredient in a cake.
I think that the score is a very important ingredient, but I don’t want anyone to bite into the cake and notice how overwhelming it is. The whole point is that it becomes a cohesive thing that adds seamlessly. I don’t want anyone to come out of the film, whether it’s so bad they noticed it or it doesn’t fit because it’s trying too hard. I would say this worked a lot with Mixolydian modes to find that sound for Knull to really create something that had this center of gravity pulling towards it that was almost atonal.
WAMG: You’re following Ludwig Göransson’s score from VENOM and Marco Beltrami’s score from LET THERE BE CARNAGE. Did you and Kelly talk about incorporating any of their themes or, as this is the third movie and tying everything up, we’re going down a new path.
DD: It was pretty much the new path. With each film being a different director and different composer; it’s like a fresh palette. Kind of like when the comics change writers and for the illustrators. It takes on a new look and a new feel and a new edge. You’re still working with the same story and there’s still the same back material and canon that you’re working with. Well, it’s got a different look, a different feel, a different vibe.And I never was like, oh, I gotta fill these shoes. It was like, I need to score this film with this director, with this script and this team. It was amazing to follow those two absolute legends, but always felt like its own chapter.
WAMG: I love now that the credits of movies are including a list, the names of the vocals, they’re including the names of the orchestra members. And now that’s a relatively new thing, which I think is just great. They’re finally giving credit to the members of the Symphony, the members of the orchestra. What was your one go-to instrument?
DD: One go-to instrument. I guess it was cello and trombone. We focused a lot on those early on and again, like really distorting them and blowing them out. And I did like the demo process more, working with a cellist and trombone player out here. Um, then I think, you know, if it counts as an instrument, I would say these plugins are cool, particularly the pitch shifter and their distortion. I really use those as more of these timbral modifiers with 100% saturation, 100% completely take sound and bring it to a new place. And again, right now, when Eddie goes from Eddie to Venom, it’s just like a complete gigantic augmentation where the human form is there, but it’s clearly this alien symbiote that’s all encompassing.
WAMG: Scores have just become their own character. You can’t watch JAWS without hearing John Williams score and not think of a shark. You’ve composed the artist installment at the National Aquarium in Baltimore, which is going to debut on the 21st of November and has already sold out. You’re trying to engage guests with musicians and soundscapes and these interactions. Can you tell me about this project?
DD: It’s a two-hour piece that is basically six 20-minute loops. This loop is feeding off of the last one. The theme is feedback. drawing the parallels between electrical and acoustic feedback and natural feedback like within ecosystems. So it’s used for about 50 musicians that are spread out all throughout the entirety of the aquarium and they’ll be playing based upon what they hear from the musicians around them, what’s being broadcast through the House PA system as well as radio broadcasts which are going to be piping in different players throughout the museum.
And then the audience is going to have a sound-based element as well, which is– I think it’s going to work. There’s one or two ways we’re going to do it. One way is very, very elegant and smooth, but the most complicated for us. And the other is funky and insane, but will be very easy for us to make any sense.
But the main thing that we need to consider is animal welfare, because it is still their home – and that’s a major aspect of the piece is making sure that we never break a particular decibel threshold, because if we do, then the eco-cooking goes out of balance, it crumbles, and that’s part of the design as a piece, to making sure that if we do go over that threshold, that falls apart. So there’s a real role the audience plays because all the sound that they make will also contribute to that. I’m very excited to see how it goes. It’s definitely like an experiment, but I think it’s going to be a lot of fun. I like working with big groups and I love something that has a real risk of not working.
It’s really focusing on the fragility of an ecosystem, the fragility of quickly feedback to swell into some chaos, to the point where you need to rip the power out of the speaker. So playing with that and making sure that we’re always on the cusp of homeostasis.
DD: I can’t get into specifics, but I’m working on two films now. I think that’s about as vague as I can get. With a great team and some people I’ve worked with before and some people that are new to me, but that’s. I’m very, very excited about it. That’ll be coming out next year.
And working on, I’ve got a ballet with New York City Ballet that’s premiering with Justin Peck In January.
WAMG: What is that called?
it’s currently still untitled. We had a working title, but I just was on the New York City Ballet website today and I just saw it said, New Ballet. Justin might be playing with the titles.
WAMG: Dan, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us and congratulations on the success of the film. And I really enjoyed your score.
Drum & Lace, aka Sofia degli Alessandri-Hultquist, is an artist and composer from Florence, Italy. Her music has been described as being genre-fluid and having a “chameleon-like nature” (A Closer Listen), melding together sampled field recordings, lush layers of synths, chamber instruments and electronic beats. She draws inspiration from film music, music concrete and nature to create textural electronica, often blending unlikely sounds with one another.
Her feature-length film scoring credits include Netflix film “Night Teeth” (directed by Adam Randall), campy-thriller “Deadly Illusions” (directed by Anna Elizabeth James, Netflix), THEY/THEM (directed by John Logan) and the just released RED, WHITE & ROYAL BLUE. Television credits include AppleTV+ Original Series Dickinson (created by Alena Smith), seasons 3 and 4 of NBC Good Girls (created by Jenna Bans & Bill Krebs) and I Know What You Did Last Summer (created by Sara Goodman) for Amazon Prime Video.
Sofia recently discussed with WAMG her terrifying and thrilling score for Lionsgate’s COBWEB, how music and legendary film scores have played a big part of her career, and how she went about scoring for a film that goes deep into the “horror land of things.”
Eight-year-old Peter is plagued by a mysterious, constant tap, tap from inside his bedroom wall – a tapping that his parents insist is all in his imagination. As Peter’s fear intensifies, he believes that his parents (Lizzy Caplan and Antony Starr) could be hiding a terrible, dangerous secret and questions their trust. And for a child, what could be more frightening than that? The film is from writer Chris Thomas Devlin (TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE), producers Evan Goldberg and Seth Rogen and directed by Samuel Bodin.
COBWEB is streaming now and will screen August 26 at FrightFest.
WAMG: I’m so glad to speak with you Sofia. I saw the film on opening weekend and oh my goodness.
Sofia/Drum & Lace: Thank you.
WAMG: It’s really scary and I’m so glad that the trailer and the clips don’t give anything away.
Sofia/Drum & Lace: Yeah, that was a really, like I mean, I had nothing to do with the trailers, but yeah, I’m so glad that they really played into the whole first half of it. But yeah, the last half, last third, nobody knows that’s coming.
WAMG: Before we get into the film, I want to back up quite a bit and I want to start off with how the name Drum and Lace came about.
Sofia/Drum & Lace: Oh, my goodness. So, I, at the time, was living in New York City. I was recently out of grad school, and I was working for this sort of up-and-coming music marketing, music composition company. And I decided to leave because I finally felt comfortable enough to sort of go off on my own.
And at the time, the plan was to start scoring, doing things for fashion, and subsequently try to do film and TV. And then I was like, well, I need to come up with a name. And it was so hard that I think day after day I just kept scribbling down names and they were just so serious. And then I think I just wrote down Drum & Lace, it’s a play on drum and bass, and it was a style of music that I used to listen to when I was growing up. And I was like, oh, well, that’s kind of clever. And I was like, it kind of works and ties in with fashion stuff, so that’s kind of how it came about. That was ten years ago.
WAMG: Who are the influences on you as an artist, as a composer?
Sofia/Drum & Lace: I have a lot of influences that aren’t necessarily scoring related, I guess musically, I would say obviously Bjork and Radiohead. Definitely Aphex Twin and Telefon Tel Aviv. There’s this kind of very specific sort of electronic current which has always been what I listen to and what I sort of take from, even from my scores in terms of scoring.
I mean, when I was growing up, I feel like I always struggled to find composers that I really sort of related to. The one composer that I’m a huge fan of is Thomas Newman because the way that his music has moved me, literally, Finding Nemo, and I say this all the time, Finding Nemo is it gets me every time the low strings come in for Nemo, it’s so good. I would say those are sort of my references mean, I could just keep going forever. But I think that that’s a good sort of mixture of composers that I sort of look up to.
Netflix/Marianne – credit: Emmanuel Guimier
WAMG: I was reading Indiewire’s interview with the director of Cobweb, Samuel Bodin. And I had previously seen, before I knew this movie was coming up, the Netflix series Marianne.
I read it and thought, oh, my gosh, he’s doing this movie. This is great. And in the interview for Cobweb, he talked about American culture and not really knowing, as he called it, the reality of Halloween in the US. But he really did know about pumpkin patches and little kids in costumes and all of it. But your score and the music cues, the soundtrack, which I’ve been listening to over the weekend when the whole score dropped on YouTube and Spotify.
Your track titles are called “It’s Halloween” and “Pumpkin Patch” and “Cinnamon”. Your score so made me not like Halloween anymore because it’s so eerie. What did you discuss with him to where he said, “this is what I want it to sound like.” Because the strings the strings throughout it and these otherworldly eerie noises create an ominous mood.
Sofia/Drum & Lace: The process of working on this film was pretty long. I was brought on very early, before they shot, just because there used to be some on camera moments, so they needed music to be sort of ready when they were going to film. And Sam and I have talked about music ad nauseam because I think he’s such a horror lover and he has so many references, and he, I think, in his work, just wants to continue and sort of do the best that he can by the genre, but still honoring its themes. So, I think that there was a lot of conversation, especially in the first half, about it sounding more like a traditional score. So, we talked about traditional horror suspense scores.
We talked about John Carpenter movies, and we talked about Hitchcock movies and Bernard Hermann scores, Psycho and The Birds and something like that. And then another reference musically was created from M. Night Shyamalan’s “Lady in the Water” by James Newton Howard. There was this kind of history that he musically wanted to associate with the first part of the movie just because it had this kind of timeless fairy tale, dark fairy tale quality, and we had to get the sound right and also really not give anything away. That was the biggest thing. We couldn’t go too horror too soon.
So that was one of the biggest notes that even when we started scoring we thought, no, we’re getting too creepy too quickly. We have to wait. And it was hard for me because I was so ready to go there, so ready to go into the deep horror land of things, that it was kind of an exercise in restraint for me to be like, oh, but we’re still kind of in this mode which is sort of ambiguous. You don’t really know what’s happening. And the family is so strange. And I really do think as much as he doesn’t have firsthand account of what Halloween is like and it’s the same for me. I’m having Halloween experiences as I’m getting to see it for the first time now that I have a daughter and I’m not even in the US anymore. But I do think that his sort of idea of what Halloween is as a foreigner helps to make the film and the sound of the film even stranger because he didn’t want to fall into the tropes of Halloween, to kind of make it his own.
Woody Norman as Peter and Antony Starr as Mark in the Horror/Thriller film, COBWEB , a Lionsgate release. Photo courtesy of Vlad Cioplea
Those are the conversations for the first half and for the second half, he was so open to just letting me do whatever. And the only note from him was, we need to go bigger, and we need to go bigger, we need to go bigger. And you’ve seen the film. Now, there are some moments that I’m like, I literally cannot get any louder. It’s still strict and there’s so many other elements, like the more guttural elements that you mentioned. One of them is manipulated, so they sound very throaty. Some of it is my singing into the microphones and distorting and pitching down. There’s a lot of these sort of roars of different instruments and different things that are a cello of doing the same thing and provides the sort of eeriness too. But yeah, the strings really do a lot of work.
WAMG: It’s really scary. It’s so eerie and as I was listening to it, and then when I went back and listened to it again, I was like, what did she do here? Is this instrument? Is it really strings? Is it just a lot of things, just regular objects just banging together. It’s just such a really rich mix of everything. To give it that sound, and it’s kind of a twisted Halloween. It’s Halloween, but it’s kind of a nightmarish Halloween.
But one of your outstanding good cues is the vocals on “The Girl” track. Because when you finally find out what the twist is in the reveal and you’re listening to this eerie, what sounds like a young girl with the vocals, how did you go about saying, this is where I put this in?
Sofia/Drum & Lace: The vocal stuff is some of the first demos that I ever sent Sam. And it was electric piano pieces and then the melody for the girl. And then there’s another one that shows up. I believe in “Carving pumpkins” or “Muffins for my Muffin”. Or there’s another couple of cues that have vocals.
And those two melodies, I literally sang into my phone the first time I resent them afterwards. But it was one of those I was so in the zone having read the script, and it’s just like the first thing that came out. And I think that we really wanted to play into the innocence and really wanted to play into this sort of like, what’s purer and more innocent than a single vocal minor melody?
My original idea was that I was going to take that and orchestrate it and then I think it was the editor, the film editor or the music editor, had placed in just the vocals, go a couple of places and we were like, oh, this works great like this. And most of them are very sort of like takes that I did not expect to be final takes. They were just kind of like to get the ideas down. And that they possess such a quality to them, so breathy and so whatever. And I was like, I don’t know what I was doing when I was singing these.
WAMG: You have composed for various different genres, but you also did the score for the documentary “First Monday in May. “ Do you approach it the same way because you’re trying to facilitate the story of the director? Or do you go, okay, got to switch gears from documentary or feature film and vice versa?
Sofia/Drum & Lace: I think ultimately the inspiration comes from the same place. And I think, as you said, it is just a matter of supporting pictures. I do think there’s genres that I prefer to do. And I have been enjoying myself a lot, like doing horror. I mean, I really think Cobweb might be my favorite score that I’ve ever worked on because I think it really just kind of fulfilled so many different things that I’ve been wanting to do.
But ultimately, I think if the story and if the film makes me feel in a certain way, then I’m happy to work on it. And the thought process, it all comes from just trying to serve picture. Of course, then figuring out the palette is a whole different thing. And working in documentary, for example, is so much more music and there’s so many limitations because a lot of time it’s underneath dialogue, whereas in horror, for example, it’s like you’re helping support picture, but you’re doing it in such an extra way because you’re also then supporting and anticipating scares and fights and suspense. So, I mean, I’d say it comes from the same place, but there’s definitely things that I prefer to do.
WAMG: I’ve only spoken with probably a handful of women composers. What’s it like to be a woman composer and what do you want to see happen in the industry?
Sofia/Drum & Lace: Even since I have started to compose for film, I think I’ve been seeing a shift. And I think the industry as a whole is trying to incorporate more diverse voices, whether it’s women or people of color or anyone that just hasn’t had a fit of status quo before. And I think what I would love to see is really I think people like women coaches, for example. We’re not asking to be given jobs because we’re women.
It’s literally this conversation about trying to just be allowed to be in the room, to be considered. So, it’s about leveling the playing field so that it’s like, we can be up for projects. And I’m 100% for the right composer for the right project. And that’s so subjective. But I think for so many years, people of color and women were sort of left outside of this glass house where it’s like you can see what’s happening, but you’re just not in the room.
I think through a lot of kind of groundbreaking and glass ceiling breaking, women that have come before me, they’ve sort of allowed for a lot more of us to be in the room and then to be up for bigger projects. And, I mean, being a woman, I try not to think about it just because I do really believe that it’s like, the right person for the right project. Of course, there’s times when I think that on the filmmaker side or on studio side, I feel like sometimes people do get lazy and it’s easy and I get it. It’s safe to hire people that you know will get the job done for a myriad of reasons. But I do think that it’s an exciting time for anyone who wants to try to be a composer and maybe not in this moment, with everything going on in Hollywood but in general, I think there’s a lot more opportunities for different types of people and I hope that it continues.
I really hope to see sort of in the next ten years women who are getting out of college or sort of like becoming adults that get into the field because that’s really where people were sort of shut off, was sort of like at the beginning phase.
WAMG: I love film scores. Since I was little, my mom would listen to her records, and they would be film scores. And I love to speak with new composers. I spoke with Transformers Rise of the Beast composer Jongnic Bontemps, who is the first person of color is doing a Transformers movie.
This is a historical thing for a movie and for the franchise. And then I was thrilled to see that you were doing Cobweb and you composed the score for it, so I totally agree with what you’re saying.
Does your schedule permit you to perform live? I read on your website you do concerts.
Sofia/Drum & Lace: I do when I’m not working on scores, I release music as well. In the past I’ve released a bunch of EPS and singles and then last year I put out my first full length record and now I’m currently working on my second full length.
But in between, I love performing. I feel like my first love is performance. And it’s fun because it’s a completely different type of release of energy and emotion. It’s really like during these hours I can just kind of be myself when I’m performing.
It’s always a nice challenge too because it’s really shifting gears. Scoring different types of film and TV is one thing, but then completely shifting and being like, okay, now I have to be socially front facing and put on a performer hat. But the best part about it is that the music that I release, that I write for myself, informs the films I end up scoring, if that makes sense. So, it’s like I’m able to express the genre that I like to work in and then as a result I can build a body of work that way. And then I get hired for things of talent that way. I don’t know. It’s been a nice sort of symbiotic relationship. And I get to test out a lot of stuff too. Like with my own records, I get to do things that I can’t do with scores. Often, it’s just another great outfit.
WAMG: Are you working on any movies right now?
Sofia/Drum & Lace: Well, I just finished working on another film, which is a completely different genre from Cobweb, but it’s a movie called Red, White and Royal Blue, and it is an LGBTQ romance. And it comes out August 11 on Prime Video. It’s an Amazon movie. Again, it’s a completely different genre, but it’s based on a book that is very successful and very popular. I’m hoping that a lot of people will see it and it’s a much more sort of like heartfelt score as opposed to obviously a horror one, but that’s coming out and then hopefully it’ll have a record out in 2024.
WAMG: This was a real pleasure getting to speak with you. I love COBWEB and your score just really elevated it and made it so much better.
Sofia/Drum & Lace: Thank you for watching the movie. Tell your friends. I feel like it has gone really under the radar, but I’m hoping people will get to see it.
Lakeshore Records is set to release Red, White & Royal Blue—Amazon Original Motion Picture Soundtrack digitally August 11 with an original score by Drum & Lace (AKA Sofia degli Alessandri-Hultquist). In addition, Lakeshore will release two singles from the project—the first available today, a version of the iconic ballad from Carousel “If I Loved You” performed by Vagabon (AKA Lætitia Tamko), and the second “Fruit (Red, White & Royal Blue Version)” by Oliver Sim who recorded the song with a full orchestra, on August 4. The Amazon Original directed by Matthew López (Some Like It Hot), streams exclusively and globally on Prime Video August 11.
Alex Claremont-Diaz (Taylor Zakhar Perez), the son of the President of the United States (Uma Thurman), and Britain’s Prince Henry (Nicholas Galitzine) have a lot in common: Stunning good looks, undeniable charisma, international popularity … and a total disdain for each other. Separated by an ocean, their long-running feud hasn’t really been an issue, until a disastrous—and very public—altercation at a royal event becomes tabloid fodder, driving a potential wedge in U.S./British relations at the worst possible time. Going into damage-control mode, their families and handlers force the two rivals into a staged “truce.” But as Alex and Henry’s icy relationship unexpectedly begins to thaw into a tentative friendship, the friction that existed between them sparks something deeper than they ever expected. Based on Casey McQuiston’s critically acclaimed New York Times best seller, Red, White & Royal Blue marks the screenplay co-writing and feature film directing debut of Tony Award-winning playwright Matthew López (The Inheritance). The screenplay is co-written by Ted Malawer and the film is produced by Greg Berlanti, p.g.a. and Sarah Schechter, p.g.a.
Vagabon notes: “Composing a rendition of “If I Loved You” for Red White and Royal Blue was a exercise in discovery. I wanted to preserve the melodic information that makes this song from the 1945 Rodgers & Hammerstein musical “Carousel” so special, while reimagining the instrumentation and arrangement. It was great to have the support and trust from Matthew Lopez and the entire team in this.”
Adds López: “Music has always been an important part of Red White & Royal Blue’s place in the world, and I knew that the movie would be no different. I’m excited to able to share these songs with the book’s fans and to bring the soundtrack to a global audience.”
Notes Drum & Lace: “With this score, I had a chance to really have the music lean into the emotional weight and importance of the story, as well as a chance to write thematically, giving each character their own sound and instrumentation. Working with Matthew Lopez (director) was a delight, his passion and dedication to the project and its story was incredible.”
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)
The highly anticipated addition to the action sci-fi franchise TRANSFORMERS: RISE OF THE BEASTS opened in theaters on June 9. According to Deadline, “the movie has pounced on a $110M opening weekend. Combined with domestic, that gives the Autobots and Maximals a global debut of $170.5M, coming in ahead of projections. The Steven Caple Jr-directed franchise reboot was No. 1 worldwide and at the international box office for the frame.” The film’s exciting score is from Jongnic “JB” Bontemps.
Bontemps is a uniquely modern film composer, harmonizing a classical education with his rich tech background. As a maestro of Silicon Valley he wrote everything from The CW sci-fi series 4400, the Netflix docuseries WE ARE: THE BROOKLYN SAINTS, DANCE DREAMS: HOT CHOCOLATE NUTCRACKER, the Netflix and Shondaland-produced documentary about the Debbie Allen Dance Company’s award-winning production of THE NUTCRACKER, and the Netflix documentary MURDER TO MERCY: THE CYNTOIA BROWN STORY. He was recently nominated for a Critics’ Choice Award for his work in the 2021 Sundance documentary selection MY NAME IS PAULO MURRAY directed by Julie Cohen and Betsey West. He is known for his hip-hop infused score for the Tribeca-favorite documentary UNITED SKATES, to rousing additional music for the acclaimed film CREED II directed by Steven Caple Jr. He became the go-to composer for Caple Jr. while scoring his coming-of-age drama THE LAND, for which he also orchestrated the song “This Bitter Land” performed by Nas and Erykah Badu. JB’s other recent work includes the CNN special THE PEOPLE VS. THE KLAN, the dramatic feature LAST NIGHT IN ROZZIE directed by Sean Gannet, the CNN Films documentary CITIZEN ASHE that premiered at the Telluride Film Festival and the Netflix film WEDDING SEASON. Up next for JB is the Arkane Studios video game REDFALL.
JB has scored dozens of features, series and video games in all genres, fusing a contemporary sound with timeless emotion. His other recent projects include original scores for the Lifetime biopic CLARKE SISTERS: THE FIRST LADIES OF GOSPEL, the Toni Braxton-led drama, FAITH UNDER FIRE, the Sundance selection LEIMERT PARK produced by Charles King (Mudbound), and additional music for the Epix series GODFATHER OF HARLEM starring Forest Whitaker. JB’s scores have echoed at Cannes, the Warsaw Film Festival, Pan African Film Festival, and the American Black Film Festival, as well as at home on Netflix, CNN, HBO, BET, Lifetime, NBC, Showtime, Netflix, PBS and Disney XD.
Brooklyn born, JB learned the piano and soaked up his gospel and jazz surroundings. He studied music at Yale and later found himself at the heart of the tech industry as a software developer and entrepreneur after selling his startup to HP. He thrived there for several years, but eventually decided to pursue his deeper passion and jumped head-first into the film scoring program at USC and the Sundance Film Music Lab. He apprenticed as a programmer for numerous A-list Hollywood composers before breaking out on his own.
JB spoke with me prior to the film opening.
Jongnic had the task of creating a new sound to the franchise while honoring the musical language of the past films. He accomplished this by re-imagining the score from the past to help re-introduce the characters in a new setting and time while also paying homage to all who worked on the franchise before.
With the movie taking place in multiple countries and cities, and Jongnic being a Brooklyn native, he integrated classic 90s hip-hop into the score and was inspired by Afro-Peruvian music. He also added slight easter eggs that fans are sure to notice which makes the score encompass the meaning of ‘More than meets the eye’.
Milan Records has released TRANSFORMERS: RISE OF THE BEASTS (ORIGINAL MOTION PICTURE SOUNDTRACK) by composer JONGNIC BONTEMPS on June 9th. Available everywhere now, the album features music written by Bontemps for the seventh live-action installment in the blockbuster film franchise. https://soundtracks.lnk.to/riseofthebeasts
During our phone conversation, JB and I talked about how he became a film composer, his advice for new composers, the passing of the musical baton by TRANSFORMERS composer Steve Jablonsky and “The Jablonsky Rules”.
WAMG: Hey, JB, it’s Michelle from We Are Movie Geeks.
JB: Michelle, how are you doing today?
WAMG: I’m doing well. I loved the film. Fans are really excited for another TRANSFORMERS film. How did you land the gig? I mean, you’ve worked with Steven before on Creed Two, but when you get that phone call and what goes through your mind like, I’m going to do a Transformers movie.
JB: Well, let me tell you, it was a little further back than CREED II.
We met when he was in grad school. We were both at USC together, and we’ve been working together ever since. So it was short films, USC series eventually first feature, THE LAND, and then we go to CREED II.
I was the secondary composer to the great Ludwig Goransson. And finally, when Steven was tapped to do TRANSFORMERS: RISE OF THE BEASTS, he put my name in the hat. And the studio called inquiring, who is this, JB? Because obviously I hadn’t done a major motion picture like this before, so they were curious. And my agent and I discussed it, and we’re like, you know what, we have to do something to knock their socks off on this first interaction. So we conspired and I wrote ten minutes of music based off of my love of the Transformers universe, listening to Steve Jablonsky’s cinematic scores for the movies, and also my discussion with Steven about where he wanted the story to go for this next chapter. Put that together into a suite, about ten minutes of music.
Got it recorded here in LA. With LA musicians. Hired a cinematographer to record a videotape thing and editor edit together with my voiceover, explaining why I should be considered for the job, as well as my love for Transformers. We put that all together into a four minute sizzle reel, sent it to the studio. (pauses)
And then there was crickets. (laughs)
WAMG: Oh my (laughs)
JB: It took a while. Then they gave me a call. I had a great meeting with Randy Spendlove (President of Motion Picture Music at Paramount Pictures). Then after that meeting, there were crickets for about six months.
And then finally, when they wrapped production, Steven called me and said, “hey, we’re about to go into this post-production meeting. This is coming up. Let’s make sure that everybody has the reel you put together.” And they did. And a few days later, they called and said, we are offering you the job. So I did the demo in March of 2021. I was not hired until December of 2021. (laugh)
WAMG: Wow (laughs)
JB: There was a lot of: Am I going to get this gig? Am I not going to get this gig? A lot of giving up, saying, okay, I guess it was good shot and I have some music for my demo. It was definitely a journey. I was overwhelmed. I was really overwhelmed that they called and offered it to me, so much so that I literally cried. It was a culmination of so many leaps of faith just to come and do this.
Director Steven Caple Jr. on the set of PARAMOUNT PICTURES and SKYDANCE Present
In Association with HASBRO and NEW REPUBLIC PICTURES
A di BONAVENTURA PICTURES Production A TOM DESANTO / DON MURPHY Production
A BAY FILMS Production “TRANSFORMERS: RISE OF THE BEASTS”
WAMG: That is so amazing. My next question was going to be had they started shooting any of the movie? Had you seen any of the movie before you really started composing the score, because it’s a nice combination of your score and all these terrific 90’s songs.
JB: When I first did the demo, obviously they had just started production. So the demo was based off of just my understanding and pouring my knowledge of the Transformers universe into some music and what would I want to hear as an Autobots theme? I did that standalone. Then when I was hired in December, they were just starting post-production, so there was like an assembly of the movie.
I believe it was something like wow, 4 hours.
WAMG: I love it. (laughs)
JB: Yeah, exactly, because it was something crazy. And I started watching the film, and I was like, oh my goodness, what did I get myself? (laughs) I asked myself, how am I going to get his done – I have no idea. Just Faith.
And I just started going back and just started writing music. And I started writing music away from picture because picture was not ready for me to start working with directly. Soon after I was hired, I had a meeting with Lorenzo di Bonaventura.
Producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura on the set of PARAMOUNT PICTURES and SKYDANCE Present
In Association with HASBRO and NEW REPUBLIC PICTURES
A di BONAVENTURA PICTURES Production A TOM DESANTO / DON MURPHY Production
A BAY FILMS Production “TRANSFORMERS: RISE OF THE BEASTS”
WAMG: THE Lorenzo di Bonaventura?!
JB: I had a meeting with him and he said, welcome to Transformers. Happy to have you. Don’t mess it up.
WAMG: Oh, my gosh. And you’re like, man…
JB: Exactly! What the heck did I get myself into? But he did have some direction, which was very good. He said, “so many composers end up not finishing the movie because by the time we as the producer, and it’s not getting any better, he says, because by the time we as the producers and the studio hear the score, if it’s not exactly what we were thinking about, there’s not enough time to change gears. And then we go into sort of like triage. What we want to do to ensure your success is we want to hear music to picture as early as possible.
As a matter of fact, we have a cut coming out, I believe, in February for little internal screening. We want to hear music in that. This way we can steer you in the right direction. And there’s time to course-correct.”
I’m like, okay, so it was game on. (laughs)
WAMG: Time to get my game face.
JB: Yeah, my game face. That’s right, I’m not going to mess it up. You don’t have to worry about me. I got it covered. All the confidence came out, but I was sheep on the inside. So what we decided to do was to score the cold open of the film and pretty much all of reel one, which ended up being about 20 minutes of music. And I wanted to have that ready to go for the first sort of like screening of the film for studio’s screening. So that’s what we started working on.
And there was an eight-minute cold open, we say now called the Trans cut because that’s no longer in the movie. The whole thing different direction, different opening, and it’s been called online, the Trans cut. We’re hoping to release that at some point, so my work is not wasted. But what it did was, when we screened the movie with that music in there, it gave the studio, the producers and myself, the confidence that I can do this. And also talking with them about the direction and what they heard, they appreciated. At that point, I was a little more secure, but at least I passed the first test and I can live another day.
OPTIMUS PRIMAL and OPTIMUS PRIME in PARAMOUNT PICTURES and SKYDANCE Present
In Association with HASBRO and NEW REPUBLIC PICTURES
A di BONAVENTURA PICTURES Production A TOM DESANTO / DON MURPHY Production
A BAY FILMS Production “TRANSFORMERS: RISE OF THE BEASTS”
WAMG: I noticed there’s a lot of unique, orchestral instruments. There’s lots of great percussion going on. There’s this other worldly kind of theme. There’s a really great human element to it, but you can almost hear, like, the machines working. You’ve combined all of it with the orchestra for this new sound.
What instruments did you say, Okay, this instrument is going to be this maximal. This instrument is going to be Optimus Primal.
JB: (laughs)
WAMG: This instrument is going to be this to combine for all those music cues.
JB: Well, so much of the foundation of the score was set by Steve Jablonsky in his scores for the original Transformers.
And that music is so beloved and really set the tone and the sound for what a Transformer score should be. So my plan was not to really defer from that language, but to totally embrace that language. And I guess there were a couple of rules, we call them “The Jablonsky Rules.” One is the score had to have a sense of nobility and honor, especially when we talk about Prime and the Autobots. The score has to be a hybrid of orchestra and fit because we’re talking about electronic or electrical energon life forms, so we have to have a sense of both of those together. There needs to be a sense of emotion because we want the audiences to connect to the plight of the Autobots, that they’re trying to save their planet and their culture from extinction. Right? So we want to be able to connect with their journey.
There has to be a certain level of emotion in the score. And then there also has to be themes, because what Jablonsky did so wonderfully was create these memorable themes that we attach now to characters and have become almost synonymous with who they are. I knew I had to create some melodies, some themes that we could attach to this next chapter in the story. So those were sort of the rules that I was playing with, but at the same time, I wanted to infuse my own experience, what sounds heroic to me, what melodies kind of work, and then also what sounds we can infuse from the environment. A very important thing for me as a film scorer is to make sure that the music represents the cultures and the characters that we see on screen.
But I wanted to figure out how we could infuse a little bit of Brooklyn, how we can infuse a little bit of story, how we can infuse a little bit of let’s just say the environment is the third act. So those were sort of the overriding things that I wanted to have in there. And as far as instruments were concerned, both the Maximals and Optimus Prime, the Autobots, I never really created theme for Prime by himself, which is more the Autobots kind of theme. Those are both in brass, so French horns and trombones both sort of lead other lead measurements in their motifs, specifically the large versions of it.
But I also try and use string versions of it as well. We want to get more emotional or not emotional, but the more connected side where we want to really feel their plight, both the Maximals and the Autobots, so I also used those themes in strings as well. It wasn’t really about assigning certain instruments to the characters.
It was about trying to create themes that really connote the essence of all the characters.
WAMG: Because in the movie, you learn this is set in 1994, and the Maximals have been on Earth much longer than the Autobots have. And these beasts, they really know the humans, they know they have merit. They believe that they’re worth fighting for. So it’s like you’re having to keep within, like you said, the Jablonsky rules. But it’s pretty much a prequel, which is so cool.
JB: Yeah, it’s very cool. From the story, we kind of learned that the Optimus Prime that we’ve grown up with or that we know and love from the movie isn’t there yet. And it’s really Optimus Primal who shows him the way to actually find value in humanity.
WAMG: What’s really impactful is Tobe Nwigwe ’s lone original song in the film, “On My Soul” featuring Nas and Jacob Banks. Oh, my gosh, it was such a great finale for the movie. It’s just really good. How did you like working with him?
JB: First of all, working with Tobe Nwigwe was amazing.
He just has a sense of energy. I mean, again, the energy that this man brings to the table and positivity is really infectious, just like being around him as a person. But during the third act, Steven wanted to inject some of that energy from Tobe into the film, so he asked him to write a song that would be used during a sequence in the third act. Tobe did that and he actually wrote the song to Picture, and when we first heard it, we were like, wow, we’re blown away.
Steven brought it to my room and we watched it and we were like, whoa, this is great. Of course, Steven being the great director that he is, he had some notes and some ideas on how to make it more attached to the story and hit the beats in a different way. And Tobe and myself and our music editor and Tobe music team, we sat down and then we kind of rearranged the song based on Steven’s notes. And then it was my job to add all these orchestral elements on top of that. So to really sort of bring out some of the strings and add some more parts, some of the string parts, adding in the brass part, there’s a part of the song where you actually hear the Maximal melody making that work with the picture and the music there.
So that was what my job was, to really add the orchestral elements to the song. And the great news was when we actually did that, we played it back for Tobe and his team. They were like, what did you guys change? It’s great! (laughs)
It means we did our job. We did our job because we basically were able to bring it into the world of the score, yet it still felt like the song that they envisioned wrote.
WAMG: Because it’s a great music video. I just watched it again today on YouTube. And the music video is really terrific.
Who are some of your favorite composers? What are your favorite scores? What grabbed you when you were a young composer or just a person going to movies, and thought, this is great music for this movie.
JB: The funny thing is, I didn’t know this was actually a vocation as a young person, okay?
I was always into music. I played piano for a long time. I was never great. I was never fancy like that because I didn’t spend a great amount of time to really be great and I was okay. But I really enjoyed making music with my friends, doing that thing.
When I went to college, I decided I wanted to study music as well. So I did that. And when I got out to the real world, I had no idea how to make money with music, so I ended up launching into a software career, and I did that for about 15 years. It wasn’t until a friend of mine heard some music I was just messing around with in garage band. She said, that sounds like film music. I said, wait there’s music in films? Wait is music in video games?
By this point, I was in my mid-30’s. I was on the track to be a chief technology officer for Silicon Valley Company and I was married with a wife and two kids. I was entrenched in life and I realized that, no, this is not what I need to be doing software. I need to figure out how to do this music thing and now this is the career that I want because it allows me to have music.
It allows me to actually make some money as well as and it also allows me to work with technology to do this stuff. I ended up going back to school to USC Film’s Scoring program, came out of there and also had no job again. But luckily enough, I had some great friends. And I made one guy named Peter Roder, who is a contractor here in town. He contracts all the musicians for recording sessions.And he suggested to me, “instead of looking for an assistant job, you have this great knowledge of technology and, you know, the process of writing for film and TV. Why don’t you combine those two and create a company that does tech consulting for other composers?” And Composer Tech was born, and I did that for eight years, and by the time I was done, I had about 140 clients around the world, and they included some of the top film score people that I grew to learn to love.
So Danny Elfman was a client, Lucia Gordon, Teddy Shapiro, Michael Giacchino, these are all my clients who I did tech work for. I got a chance to understand how they approached scoring a film, what their process was, how they want to utilize technology. And some people, like Christoph Beck, became mentors to me and took me under their wing and I love their music. So you ask getting back to your original question about where I find inspiration and other composers, I would say I was blessed that Christoph Beck, I love his way of infusing pop sensibilities and electronics into his scores and they always sound so fresh. Ludwig Goransson, look at the way he pulls in. Again, also a pop sensibility, but also a world sensibility, whether it’s hip hop or if it’s music from Latin America, whatever it is, he knows how to pull in the essence of all these styles of music and turn that into a memorable film score.
Mr. Alexandre Desplat, I mean, the guy, let me tell you. And the way he uses these textures, especially with the woodwinds for his scores, he’s so delicate, yet also so powerful. I remember his score for GODZILLA. I was working for him when he was working on that and the first time I heard that in the studio, I said, wow.
Teddy Shapiro is another composer. That score for TROPIC THUNDER still provides a lot of inspiration for me, as well as his amazing work on “Severance” and the way that he makes these very creative ensembles and create his textures that are pretty evocative and interesting. So those are the people that I look to for inspiration.
And I’m blessed to say that I know them all. I have all their cell phone numbers and they may actually answer my phone calls. (laughs)
WAMG: (laughs) That’s when you know you’ve really made it.
JB: Well, remember they needed me to keeping their studios alive for a long time.
WAMG: You know, I saw this YouTube video with you and Pedro Eustache about the Tarka flute that is so cool.
JB: One of the things that I want to do in the film was making sure that the score would get reflected the place that we were. And when we went to Peru, I wanted to inject, but inject authentically, the sound of Peru into the score. So I looked to partner with folks that understood that music and intrinsically could bring that to the cues that they were on. And Pedro Eustache came on.
I was very careful because so many times in a film score, you hear a pan flute, that tells the movie is set in South America. So I was definitely aware of and wanted to avoid that proclivity and I was reticent of any kind of woodwinds. Because I was like, I don’t want to fall into that stereotype. One of the editors said, hey, I think we should kind of get some old woodwinds in here, but I wanted to do it again in a way that was interesting and new, so I talked to Pedro.
I wrote a little bit of line for some Tarka flutes. I didn’t want the pan flutes. I wanted these Tarka flutes. I wanted ocarinas, I wanted some toyos. So I was very specific about the flutes, the woodwinds that I wanted. And then Petro was like, I got you. And he built a custom Tarka flute that was the mouthpiece of the Tarka flute, but the body of a regular Western flute because he wanted to get the breathy sound of a Tarka signature of that instrument. But we needed the body of the flute to get the sustained and all the notes that we needed to work with the actual cue. He built a custom instrument that did not exist before this score and first time being heard. And he did it so masterful.
WAMG: It’s so effective and to watch the two of you on this YouTube video. You both are really giddy about the Tarka and it’s so much fun to watch. It’s really wonderful to watch. And you got a Transformers T shirt on, and the sound is great. The sound is so great.
JB: Thank you so much. It was really a labor of love. I love Transformers. I love the universe. I also want to make sure that what we did, the fans would appreciate.
And that’s really what sort of drove every… drove us to do all the stuff that we did. We want to do this for the fans. We want to make sure that the score elevates the movie and is at the level that the fans deserve. And that meant working with the greats like Pedro Eustache or Alicia Acuña on latin percussion, Abraham Laboriano, hiring the best programmers. Anthony Baldino worked on scores like TENET, “The Mandalorian.” He came on board to do synth programming for us. I just really tried to surround myself with amazing folks.
And then finally, Steve Jablonsky, he came on board as a mentor and guided us toward the end of a process. He was so gracious and so giving up his time. He said, “I’m here to pass the torch onto you and to help you realize the score for the fans and for the movie.” So it was pretty phenomenal, that interaction I was really blessed to have.
Check out this amazing track “Humans and Autobots United” from Transformers: Rise of the Beasts Soundtrack – Music by Steve Jablonsky.
WAMG: Gosh. That must have really been a moment.
JB: I’m so thankful for his involvement and his guidance.
WAMG: I have one last question. You talked about when you were younger and playing music with your friends. What advice would you give to young musicians considering your career in film composing or mixing or editing?
JB: Well, I would say one thing is continue to make music with your friends and the people around you, because that interaction of making music with people, I think, keeps the joy alive.
The second thing is, start making music for media now. No one has to give you permission to score things and find young filmmakers around you. Look to the left and to the right, and now there are people around you that are budding cinematographers or buddy directors. Start working with them right away, because it’s just going to be so important to start to build a rapport with people, build a language with people and start to understand what it is like to work with someone else to sort their film. One thing we remember as film composers is that we are artisians, not artists. Our art is in service of something else. It is to help something else function. So you need that sense of collaboration and to have those instincts of collaboration well honed, so that you can do this and to serve a director’s mission.
WAMG: What else have you got coming down the pike? What else are you working on now, if you can say?
JB: Well, I can’t say about too many things. As of right now, I have four films coming out next week. I’ll be traveling to do that. Choirs on Disney+, a docuseries. I have World’s Best, which I co-scored with Raashi Kulkarni, Disney hip hop musical coming up the end of this month on Disney+. Plus, I have a documentary, The Space Race, about the African American experience in the space race.
WAMG: I can’t wait to see that. Yes.
JB: Which I co-scored with Anna Drubich, my longtime friend. And then, yes, another film for Hulu called JAGGED MIND, which is an erotic thriller. And that comes up on June 16. (laughs)
WAMG: And then you’ve got some little film called Transformers RISE OF THE BEASTS.
JB: (laughs)
WAMG: Thank you again. This was a real pleasure. Good luck with the film. Good luck with all your upcoming projects. And I hope we can speak with you again because this has been a great conversation. Really.
JB: I hope so. I hope we will be crossing path many times.
TRANSFORMERS: RISE OF THE BEASTS is playing now in theaters everywhere. (review)
TRANSFORMERS: RISE OF THE BEASTS (ORIGINAL MOTION PICTURE SOUNDTRACK) TRACKLISTING –
1. The Maximals
2. Unicron / Scourge
3. Autobots Enter
4. What Are You
5. More Than Meets the Eye
6. Mirage
7. Museum Heist
8. Battle at Ellis Island
9. Fallen Hero
10. Chris Meets Mirage
11. Arriving in Peru
12. Hiding in Plain Sight
13. The Cave
14. Switchback Chase
15. The Village
16. Saving Elena
17. One Last Stand
18. The Final Battle Begins
19. Unicron Approaches
20. Home Team
21. Volcano Battle
22. No Matter the Cost
23. Till All Are One
24. Humans and Autobots United
25. Here’s My Card
26. A Long Time Ago
L-r. RHINOX, WHEELJACK, OPTIMUS PRIME, MIRAGE, CHEETOR, ARCEE, OPTIMUS PRIMAL and Anthony Ramos and Dominique Fishback, below, star in PARAMOUNT PICTURES and SKYDANCE Present
In Association with HASBRO and NEW REPUBLIC PICTURES
A di BONAVENTURA PICTURES Production A TOM DESANTO / DON MURPHY Production
A BAY FILMS Production “TRANSFORMERS: RISE OF THE BEASTS”
One of my favorite composers who has made a musical splash on the film score scene is Pinar Toprak. Being a collector of scores, whether it be TV of film, I’m a huge fan of hers and she has quickly become an active and reinvigorating composer in Hollywood. Toprak wrote the fantastic scores for DC’s Stargirl on The CW, and SY-FY’s Superman prequel series Krypton.
Today, Variety reported: “on Sunday she (Toprak) will be onstage at the Dolby conducting the Oscar orchestra for Billie Eilish’s performance of “No Time to Die.” Details about Sunday are otherwise under wraps. It’s said to be a new arrangement of the Oscar-nominated James Bond theme, and Eilish’s co-writer and sibling Finneas is expected to be onstage too. Toprak couldn’t comment.“
La-La Land Records and Paramount Music has released Toprak’s original motion picture score to the Paramount Pictures action adventure comedy THE LOST CITY, starring Sandra Bullock, Channing Tatum, Danielle Radcliffe, and Brad Pitt.
The score soundtrack is available digitally from Paramount Music starting today (March 25, 2022), and on Limited Edition CD from www.lalalandrecords.com starting March 29, 2002.
Also featured on the soundtrack are “Danza De Dos,” “Bolerito De La Isla,” and “Lágrimas Sin Fin (featuring lyrics by David Aguilar),” three new tracks written for the film by Grammy and Latin Grammy winning composer, arranger, producer and performer, Cheche Alara.
In THE LOST CITY, brilliant, but reclusive author Loretta Sage (Sandra Bullock) has spent her career writing about exotic places in her popular romance-adventure novels featuring handsome cover model Alan (Channing Tatum), who has dedicated his life to embodying the hero character, “Dash.” While on tour promoting her new book with Alan, Loretta is kidnapped by an eccentric billionaire (Daniel Radcliffe) who hopes that she can lead him to the ancient lost city’s treasure from her latest story. Wanting to prove that he can be a hero in real life and not just on the pages of her books, Alan sets off to rescue her. Thrust into an epic jungle adventure, the unlikely pair will need to work together to survive the elements and find the ancient treasure before it’s lost forever.
The film’s exhilarating original score bursts with full-throttle adventurous fun, action and romance. “Writing this score brought me back to why I fell in love with film scores in the first place,” says renowned composer Pinar Toprak, “The adventure, the romance, and most importantly the FUN. It’s been a pure joy paying homage to those classic adventure films I loved growing up while giving it my own contemporary signature. It’s my sincerest hope that this score, like the ones that inspired me as a child, will withstand the test of time as well.”
1 – The Lost City of D 2 – Pinot Grigio on Ice 3 – Book Tour 4 – The Only Clue 5 – You’re Safe Now 6 – The Island 7 – Ruins Revealed 8 – People Eat Cake 9 – Gotta Go Up 10 – Highly Trained & Very Dangerous 11 – Contoured Scenery 12 – Hands out, Butt to Butt 13 – Alan Gets a Moped 14 – Hammock Extraction 15 – Set Your World on Fire 16 – It’s Not a Metaphor 17 – Watch Your Step 18 – The Tomb 19 – Fairfax Escapes 20 – Dulcius Ex Asperis 21 – Got Your Back 22 – A New Adventure Beginning 23 – The Final Countdown 24 – Danza De Dos 25 – Bolerito De La Isla 26 – Lagrimas Sin Fin (feat. Cecilia Noel) 27 – Stage Mishap (Bonus Track) 28 – Book Trailer (Bonus Track)
Pinar Toprak is one of the most refreshing voices in music composition today with a diverse body of work spanning across film, television, and video games. She has composed for major superhero sagas like Marvel Studios’ Captain Marvel, DC’s Stargirl, and SY-FY’s Krypton. She also scored HBO’s six-part docuseries McMillions, which earned her a 2020 Primetime Emmy nomination for “Outstanding Music Composition for a Documentary Series or Special (Original Dramatic Score).” In addition, she has written music for Epic Game’s massively popular online video game, Fortnite. Away from the big screen, Toprak crafted the new main theme for Walt Disney World’s iconic EPCOT theme park, scored the celebrated 2021 Walt Disney Animation short Us Again, and wrote music for Christina Aguilera’s 2019 Xperience show in Las Vegas. Toprak was the recipient of the 2019 ASCAP Shirley Walker Award and also won the 2019 IFMCA (International Film Music Critics Association) Award for “Best Original Score for a Documentary Film” for her score to The Tides of Fate.
She had previously won two other IFMCA Awards for her work on The Wind Gods and The Lightkeepers which was on the Academy Award shortlist for “Best Original Score” in 2011. Born and raised in Istanbul, Turkey, Toprak began her classical music education at the age of five. After studying composition and multiple instruments at the conservatory she moved to Chicago to study jazz, before continuing on to Boston for a degree in film scoring from Berklee College of Music. She then moved to Los Angeles and earned a master’s degree at CSUN in composition at age 22.
