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Unholy Melodies: Composer Robin Carolan on Nosferatu‘s Score
Nosferatu
For Robin Carolan, working on his debut film score for Robert Eggers’s 2022 Viking epic The Northman was a “baptism by fire.” After closing his influential electronic record label Tri Angle in 2020, Carolan and Sebastian Gainsborough (who records music… Read more
“Massive Decisions Can Be Made In the Mix”: Composer Anna Meredith on Her Film Score Career
Julia Louis-Dreyfus in Tuesday
In 2012, Scottish composer Anna Meredith released her first non-classical-music recording, Black Prince Fury, a four-track EP opening with what immediately became her signature tune: “Nautilus,” a ferociously escalating blast of brass running arpeggios up and down at increasingly overwhelming… Read more
Kill the Piano Player: Composer Sean Murray on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Call of Duty and Jesse V. Johnson
Aaron Eckhart in Chief of Station
You’ve probably heard Sean Murray’s music without knowing it. A composer for nearly 40 years, his work has appeared on dozens of soap operas, action movies and cultural touchstones like TV’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the Call of Duty… Read more
Inner Soundtrack: Composer Jerskin Hendrix on Poor Things
Kathryn Hunter and Emma Stone in Poor Things (Photo by Yorgos Lanthimos, courtesy of Searchlight Pictures)
Jerskin Fendrix’s 2020 album Winterreise wends through a bog of squelchy pop textures—discordant bursts of rubbery noise, percussion lines that sound banged-out rather than played, synthesizers overextended to within an inch of their lives. Upbeat melodies and Dada sloganeering are… Read more
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A Collective Voice: Composer Hildur Guðnadóttir on Women Talking
Upon winning an Oscar for scoring Joker, Hildur Guðnadóttir dedicated it “to the girls, to the women, to the mothers, to the daughters, who hear the music bubbling within,” telling them in her acceptance speech to “please speak up.” So, when she was approached to score Sarah Polley’s drama Women Talking, “after the Oscars were over and I had already given that speech,” the Icelandic composer and cellist remembers being taken aback by her own “knee-jerk reaction” to the project: “Who wants to sit through two hours of women talking?” “I stood up on that stage, urging women to talk, […]
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“Pretend Sonic Youth Composed the Score to Jaws“: Deakin and Geologist of Animal Collective on Scoring The Inspection
22 years after the release of their debut album, the Baltimore-bred quartet Animal Collective is as prolific as ever. Members Avey Tare (Dave Portner), Panda Bear (Noah Lennox), Deakin (Josh Dibb) and Geologist (Brian Weitz) released their 11th studio album this year—the delectably jammy Time Skiffs—to a wave of acclaim the band arguably hasn’t received since their indie-tronica staple Merriweather Post Pavilion in 2009. On the heels of Time Skiffs’ success, the band has already hit the studio to record their forthcoming release, rumored to hit shelves and streamers from the band’s longtime label Domino Records in 2023. This year has […]
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“Film Can Be a Powerful Medium for Disrupting Assumptions About What Is Normal”: Evan Bode on His Student Short Film Showcase Winner Thine Own Self
Currently a candidate for an MFA in Syracuse University’s film program, Evan Bode recently pursued a cinematic undertaking that is staggeringly bold in its sheer gumption. Though he had never formally dabbled in helming animated films, Bode decided to use the newfound creative freedom of film school to make Thine Own Self, a 5-minute, dialogue-free animated film that utilizes desk drawer clay, green poster paper and the filmmaker’s own hands as its principal storytelling devices. The film begins by introducing the viewer to a sect of colorful entities that exist in whimsical tranquility, floating above the horizon without qualm. That […]
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Read Interviews With The 2021-22 Student Short Film Showcase Winners, a Collaborative Award From The Gotham, JetBlue and Focus Features
The winners of the third annual Student Short Film Showcase, a collaborative award bestowed by The Gotham, JetBlue and Focus Features, are currently available to stream here at Filmmaker, on Focus Features’s YouTube channel and in the air as part of JetBlue’s in-flight entertainment selection. More than 20 graduate film schools submitted works to be considered for the Student Short Film Showcase, and the winners selected for the 2021-22 slate hail from diverse backgrounds and schools across the country. Columbia College Chicago grad Akanksha Cruczynski creates an amusing yet melancholy work of autofiction with Close Ties to Home Country, which […]
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Western Promises: The Power of the Dog Composer Jonny Greenwood
Wailing French horns, recorded in the vastness of an Oxford cathedral; the mechanized sputtering of a player piano; the anxious propulsion of an ascending and descending cello, defamiliarized by being plucked like a banjo—these are some of the seemingly counterintuitive approaches composer Jonny Greenwood took to scoring Jane Campion’s brooding and suspenseful Western, The Power of the Dog. But just as Campion’s film, set in the early 20th century, tacks away from genre signifiers to tell an unexpectedly intimate tale of fraternal rivalry and stifled desire, so too does Greenwood’s score subvert the expectations of a “big sky” Western soundtrack […]
