Composers
Interviews - Composers
Featured
“A Calculated Exercise in Squeezing Blood From a Stone”: Director Aidan Zamiri and Composer A.G. Cook on Charli XCX’s The Moment
The Moment
Brat summer is decidedly over. The mechanics of its disintegration are lampooned in The Moment, a mockumentary cum critical commentary of the hype that propelled Charli XCX’s 2024 album into a full-blown cultural phenomenon. Charli plays an exaggerated version of… Read more
The Notes of an Age: Composer Bryce Dessner on “Train Dreams”
Still from Train Dream. Courtesy of Netflix
Composers are often brought on to score a film very late into the process, but Bryce Dessner was writing music for Train Dreams before director Clint Bentley began production. A longtime collaborator of Bentley’s, alongside his creative partner Greg Kwedar,… Read more
Composer and Musician Michael Brook on “Heat,” U2 and Hans Zimmer
MIchael Brook
Michael Brook has collaborated with some of the most influential filmmakers and musicians of the last 40 years without ever threatening to become a household name. When I spoke to the inventor and composer last month at the Warsaw Film… Read more
Music as Nourishment: Max Richter on Scoring “Hamnet”
Paul Mescal in Hamnet
With Songs My Brother Taught Me (2015) and The Rider (2017), Chloé Zhao constructed tender epics out of prolonged time spent at the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. Much like her Oscar-winning Nomadland (2020), these films are born out… Read more
-
Existential Rave: Kangding Ray on Scoring “Sirāt”
Few recent films have offered such an overwhelmingly immersive audiovisual experience as Oliver Laxe’s Sirāt. It’s no coincidence that the first shots of the film show tough-looking tech guys assembling an intimidatingly huge sound system on a remote and desolate location, as music is a major driving force behind this cinematic trip. The fourth film by the French-Spanish director (Mimosas, Fire Will Come) begins at a psychedelic rave before embarking on a treacherous journey into the Moroccan desert. The highly unusual score is not only notable for its rough-sounding tribal techno, which will surely deliver a massive stress test to […]
-
Girls Rock: Nobuhiro Yamashita, Doona Bae, and James Iha on “Linda Linda Linda” at 20
Indie director Nobuhiro Yamashita was not under the impression that he had much insight into the lives of high-school girls. For his first three features (Hazy Life (1999), No One’s Ark (2003), and Ramblers (also 2003)) he’d focused on what he knew best—“lazy men.” But Yamashita’s fifth feature, Linda Linda Linda (2005), would prove pivotal, expanding the horizons of his career, his cast and Japanese independent cinema itself. A gentle slice-of-life drama, Linda Linda Linda tells a story in snapshots of four high-school girls as they prepare for their debut performance as a band at their school’s culture festival. “I […]
-
Unholy Melodies: Composer Robin Carolan on Nosferatu‘s Score
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 under the name Vessel) dove headfirst into researching the ethnography of Nordic music to craft the film’s harsh, mythic sound. They used traditional Nordic instruments and modern experimental techniques to approximate the music of the era, a mandate Eggers routinely insists upon for his period genre films. That directive continues with Eggers’s longtime passion project, Nosferatu, a new telling of […]
-
“Massive Decisions Can Be Made In the Mix”: Composer Anna Meredith on Her Film Score Career
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 volume. It’s at once visceral and programmatic, applying classical discipline to an earth-shaking instrumental in a mission statement that also opened Meredith’s first full-length album, 2016’s Varmints. In an interview with The Guardian’s Laura Snapes at the time, Meredith was insightful about the economics of choosing to move from the realm of classical music, where she wrote work paid for […]
-
Kill the Piano Player: Composer Sean Murray on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Call of Duty and Jesse V. Johnson
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 video game series. His most fruitful collaboration has been with his longtime friend Jesse V. Johnson, a director of low-budget/high intelligence genre movies—the latest of which, Chief of Station, a spy thriller starring Aaron Eckhart, was released in May. Both Murray and Johnson are students of old Hollywood, and their films and scores honor the spirits of their idols. Filmmaker: […]
-
Inner Soundtrack: Composer Jerskin Hendrix on Poor Things
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 punctuated by dirge-like ambient burbles. Speaking from his home in England, the Brixton-bred Fendrix still seems surprised that Yorgos Lanthimos “just happened to hear” it when seeking a composer for his fantasy/sex comedy/road picture/existential bildungsroman Poor Things. For his first screen credit, Fendrix builds on those tonal disjunctures, translating cinematic themes into musical ones. Supplied with a script and a […]
