Oscar-Nominated Composers Single Out One Magic Moment in Their Scores
An absurdist satire, a horror story, science-fiction, a historical drama, a black comedy: this year’s Oscar-nominated composers were called to score a variety of engaging scenarios. But they had one thing in common: a special scene in which they could take pride, moments where music made a difference in each film.
For Ludwig Göransson, up for Oscars in both song and score categories, it was the juke joint scene in “Sinners” where Preacherboy (Miles Caton) sings “I Lied to You” and, thanks to director Ryan Coogler’s restless camera, we see images of music-making from throughout Black history, from African drummers to a Jimi Hendrix-style guitarist to modern-day hip-hop artists and DJs with turntables.
“He closes his eyes, starts playing and he’s connecting with his ancestors and his future self through his music,” the composer says. “That also tells the evolution and the history of the blues where he came from.” Göransson wrote the song with Raphael Siddiq the day before leaving for the Louisiana set where he would spend more than three months writing and coordinating the musical sequences.
“We had one day to shoot it,” he adds. “We knew we had to go from point A to point B within seven or eight bars of music, but (Caton) is not going to move exactly in time. Because I had my (music) rig there, I was able to cut back and forth and do small trims on set.” The scene is one of the most talked-about in the film.
In the case of “Hamnet,” composer Max Richter’s music led director Chloe Zhao to rethink the conclusion of her film. “Toward the end of the shoot, Chloe found herself dissatisfied with the written ending,” the composer says. That’s when actress Jessie Buckley (who plays Shakespeare’s wife Agnes) sent her Richter’s “On the Nature of Daylight,” a track from his 2004 album “The Blue Notebooks.”
“Daylight” is one of Richter’s best-known pieces and has often been used in films and TV, including prominent placement in “Arrival” and “The Handmaid’s Tale.” “Chloe listened to it in the car,” he reports, and “three or four days before the end of the shoot, she had a kind of epiphany, a vision of the end of the film. And then they played that music on the set 10 hours a day for four days, and they made the end of the film.”
Although Richter wrote new music for that sequence, Zhao “was really adamant” that “Daylight” needed to close the film because “the music had, in a way, unlocked the ending of the film for her. And I supported that idea in the end.” (The remainder of the music in “Hamnet” is original, and that’s what was nominated.)
French composer Alexandre Desplat found a clever musical solution for the scene in Guillermo del Toro’s “Frankenstein” in which Victor (Oscar Isaac) visits battlefields, collects corpses and begins choosing the parts he will assemble into a “new” body to be reawakened as part of his monstrous experiment.
“The first instinct is to emphasize this horrific moment, but it would have been unbearable,” says Desplat. “But if you consider his point of view, which is that of an artist creating his masterpiece, the excitement, suddenly you share his passionate action and you don’t really look at the corpses in the same way.”
His response was to create a grand waltz for orchestra and choir. “There’s even a sense of dark humor to it,” he adds. “I play with that, of course, with the score taking pauses and starting again. It’s a counterpoint to what you see on the screen.”
For “Bugonia” composer Jerskin Fendrix, the special moment wasn’t a scene in Yorgos Lanthimos’ film but rather all the research that went into it. Lanthimos refused to show him a script or discuss any specifics about the film, but instead gave him three words (“bees,” “basement,” “spaceship”) and sent him off to write music about those topics well before shooting started.
“I spent months and months by myself doing all this esoteric, bizarre research on bees and spaceships and so on,” Fendrix says. “I knew that meetings were happening, the film was being made, none of which I was allowed to be privy to. I was starting to get a bit paranoid.” He wrote more than an hour of music and recorded it with a 90-piece London orchestra, which Lanthimos assembled into a score.
When he finally saw the film, the story felt familiar. “I saw this guy, a real loner, who was doing all the research, getting really paranoid, and just hoping that all this effort means it’s right,” he adds. “A lot of the music echoes the psychology of Teddy (Jesse Plemons), this kind of frantic grandiosity.
“My interpretation is that this is a form of ‘method composition.’ I’m basically put in the same position so I can actually live a similar psychological experience.”
For Ludwig Göransson, up for Oscars in both song and score categories, it was the juke joint scene in “Sinners” where Preacherboy (Miles Caton) sings “I Lied to You” and, thanks to director Ryan Coogler’s restless camera, we see images of music-making from throughout Black history, from African drummers to a Jimi Hendrix-style guitarist to modern-day hip-hop artists and DJs with turntables.
“He closes his eyes, starts playing and he’s connecting with his ancestors and his future self through his music,” the composer says. “That also tells the evolution and the history of the blues where he came from.” Göransson wrote the song with Raphael Siddiq the day before leaving for the Louisiana set where he would spend more than three months writing and coordinating the musical sequences.
“We had one day to shoot it,” he adds. “We knew we had to go from point A to point B within seven or eight bars of music, but (Caton) is not going to move exactly in time. Because I had my (music) rig there, I was able to cut back and forth and do small trims on set.” The scene is one of the most talked-about in the film.
In the case of “Hamnet,” composer Max Richter’s music led director Chloe Zhao to rethink the conclusion of her film. “Toward the end of the shoot, Chloe found herself dissatisfied with the written ending,” the composer says. That’s when actress Jessie Buckley (who plays Shakespeare’s wife Agnes) sent her Richter’s “On the Nature of Daylight,” a track from his 2004 album “The Blue Notebooks.”
“Daylight” is one of Richter’s best-known pieces and has often been used in films and TV, including prominent placement in “Arrival” and “The Handmaid’s Tale.” “Chloe listened to it in the car,” he reports, and “three or four days before the end of the shoot, she had a kind of epiphany, a vision of the end of the film. And then they played that music on the set 10 hours a day for four days, and they made the end of the film.”
Although Richter wrote new music for that sequence, Zhao “was really adamant” that “Daylight” needed to close the film because “the music had, in a way, unlocked the ending of the film for her. And I supported that idea in the end.” (The remainder of the music in “Hamnet” is original, and that’s what was nominated.)
French composer Alexandre Desplat found a clever musical solution for the scene in Guillermo del Toro’s “Frankenstein” in which Victor (Oscar Isaac) visits battlefields, collects corpses and begins choosing the parts he will assemble into a “new” body to be reawakened as part of his monstrous experiment.
“The first instinct is to emphasize this horrific moment, but it would have been unbearable,” says Desplat. “But if you consider his point of view, which is that of an artist creating his masterpiece, the excitement, suddenly you share his passionate action and you don’t really look at the corpses in the same way.”
His response was to create a grand waltz for orchestra and choir. “There’s even a sense of dark humor to it,” he adds. “I play with that, of course, with the score taking pauses and starting again. It’s a counterpoint to what you see on the screen.”
For “Bugonia” composer Jerskin Fendrix, the special moment wasn’t a scene in Yorgos Lanthimos’ film but rather all the research that went into it. Lanthimos refused to show him a script or discuss any specifics about the film, but instead gave him three words (“bees,” “basement,” “spaceship”) and sent him off to write music about those topics well before shooting started.
“I spent months and months by myself doing all this esoteric, bizarre research on bees and spaceships and so on,” Fendrix says. “I knew that meetings were happening, the film was being made, none of which I was allowed to be privy to. I was starting to get a bit paranoid.” He wrote more than an hour of music and recorded it with a 90-piece London orchestra, which Lanthimos assembled into a score.
When he finally saw the film, the story felt familiar. “I saw this guy, a real loner, who was doing all the research, getting really paranoid, and just hoping that all this effort means it’s right,” he adds. “A lot of the music echoes the psychology of Teddy (Jesse Plemons), this kind of frantic grandiosity.
“My interpretation is that this is a form of ‘method composition.’ I’m basically put in the same position so I can actually live a similar psychological experience.”