Keeping Score with RIGHT ON CUE
A discussion of film composing with podcast host Clint Worthington
Happy Oscars weekend!
There are still some categories with a tiny bit of suspense, but one of them is not Best Original Score. The Oppenheimer steamroller has made Ludwig Göransson’s triumph all but assured since the first prizes were handed out. All the same, I think it’s worth taking a deeper look at the five nominees as a reflection of the state of film scoring altogether.
I’m grateful to have an expert guest today to help talk me through it:
, host of the film score-centric podcast Right on Cue. In addition to talking to film composers in great detail on the show, he currently serves as the Editor-in-Chief of The Spool, and you can also find his bylines at RogerEbert.com, Consequence, Block Club Chicago, and elsewhere. He also hosts the podcast Travolta/Cage with Nathan Rabin) and is a member of the Chicago Film Critics Association and the Critics Choice Association.Join us as we dive into film scoring through the lens of this year’s Oscar nominees!
Let's start with a lightning round: Best living film composer?
John Williams because, miraculously, he is still alive and just turned 92.
Best dead film composer?
Bernard Herrmann.
Most underrated film composer?
Elliot Goldenthal, who's very much a favorite of mine.
I'm trying not to say people who I've talked to because there are plenty of composers that I've spoken to for the podcast and elsewhere who I think are sorely underrated. But that's the one that comes to mind for me. Because he doesn't work very much anymore and was operating in the '90s in this incredibly operatic, gothic space, and he contributed some of his best scores to some of the movies to some of the most poorly received movies of his time like Batman and Robin or Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. If you go back and listen to his score for that, it's incredible.
A film composer everyone should have on their radar?
I think Shonda Dancey is destined for great things. She did the score for Devotion, which is a pretty solid movie unfortunately co-starring Jonathan Majors. Incredible. I think she's operating in a really interesting space right now. There's also Stephanie Economou, but I also don't want to say that she's underrated because she just won the first-ever video game score Grammy.
Most influential recent film score?
I'm gonna be boring and say Hans Zimmer's Inception score. He's been influential throughout his career. But I feel like that specific mode didn't just inform film scoring for the next decade or so; it also informed film trailer editing for the next decade plus. That was the trend, then it was the sad moody covers, and I don't even know where we're at at this point.
What got you interested in making composers and film scores such an area of focus for you?
It's an interesting journey. Dovetailing with my love of film in childhood was my love of music. I did band and chorus in junior high and high school. I relatively excelled at that, to toot my own horn a little bit. I enjoy the experience of playing in a band or singing, so I got interested in music, and that tied into my love of film. Like so many white boys my age, it was the Star Wars trilogy and Star Trek that [made me realize], "Oh my god, that's music! I would listen to this outside of the movie." I think the third CD I ever bought was The Mummy score, which is great. The first soundtrack CD I ever bought was the score to a little film called Wing Commander, the adaptation of the video game. That's the ultimate horrible film to fantastic score! David Arnold wrote the themes, and then Kevin Kiner who does a lot of the Star Wars stuff now wrote the music around it. Killer themes, great score, vastly underrated.
Then, as I grew as a film critic, I would start getting interested in talking to composers. Right on Cue started life as a more generalized interview podcast called More of a Comment, Really (a title that I'm still proud of to this day). I would interview filmmakers, actors, and composers, but I just found myself gravitating towards it. I wanted to niche down and didn't want to be a jack of all trades, master of none. It just feels like a fallow space for this kind of stuff. I just wanted to be part of that space, and I just really treasure the opportunities. I get to learn more about the things that I love and get to build relationships with some of those composers as well.
To your earlier point about good music accompanying bad films (or vice versa), what makes a great film score to you?
That is a really interesting question because there are two different modes for me in which I listen to film scores. My initial instinct is it has to serve the film no matter what. It can be as listenable outside of it as you'd like, but there's no point in just making concert music for an unrelated picture and just plopping it into a thing. It has to fit what the director wants, what is on screen, and what you're responding to in terms of the craft and the performances. It can't be incongruous unless the incongruity is the point.
For those who want to start taking their film score listening to the next level, how do you not only listen to a film score but also understand what it's doing?
This is a broader problem in the music industry as well with things like Spotify where we've moved from an album mindset to a playlist mindset. Even film score fans, and I'm not immune to this, can get into a pattern of finding individual tracks they like. I think the key to a broader understanding of a score as a whole has to be looking at the album or how the music functions in the film ... which are often two very different things. The soundtrack release is not always one-to-one, here's every track. A lot of times is more curated, sometimes it's different cuts in different takes. They tweak it to make it more of an individual soundtrack.
I think the key is understanding that the soundtrack in isolation is not the film score. It is a curated version of it, in some form or fashion. Look at it as a whole and pick up on instruments or motifs. If it's a more atmospheric film score, think about the textures and the overall journey that the composer is taking you on throughout the whole thing. It's not like a Taylor Swift album where you're picking out an individual track, and they're like, "Oh, here's my superstar track. Here's my hit single." There are tracks like that in a score, but to get a better understanding, it's a whole album experience.
Pivoting now towards the Oscar nominees, what do you make of the overall state of the music branch? There's a little bit more controversy on the song side ... do we need to keep giving Diane Warren nominations for just touching a piano each year?
Thank you for that! By the way, I love Diane Warren, but she is the Meryl Streep Supporting Actress of Best Original Song where she has to put something out every year. You may not have watched it. You may not have loved it. But she will get nominated and not win. Flamin' Hot, what are we doing here?
Putting Diane Warren aside, on the score side of the house, I get the sense that the consensus around this year and recent years is that it's been a lazy, uninspired crop of nominees. Do you feel like the music branch is reflecting the state of the art any less than other branches are?
I don't know if it's any more or less. I'm roughly happy with the eventual nominees. It feels like a mix of tipping your hat to legacy composers who are either on their way out or, in the case of Robbie Robertson, unfortunately no longer with us. Then we've got Ludwig Göransson, who is at the peak of his powers right now. It's so weird to think that just a few years before that, he was scoring sitcom episodes. Then, he really hit big with Black Panther and moved up immediately. Now it really feels with Oppenheimer and Tenet, he's A-list.
And then you have Laura Karpman, who is an incredible workman-like composer. I don't mean that to diminish her because she's an incredible composer, but she's been working in the trenches SO long. I think she co-founded the Alliance for Women Film Composers. I interviewed her for Marvel's What If? She's really varied, a big student of music, and it feels like a "finally" for her.
And then Jerskin Fendrix, who is a British indie pop guy who did this underground album and then immediately moved on to an incredible Yorgos Lanthimos for his first score ever. It feels like a decent cross-section. I would say I'm roughly happy with it. I think they could make bolder choices with a few things. But apart from the John Williams nomination, that's maybe the closest to the Diane Warren nomination.
The one snub that sticks out for me is Mica Levi for The Zone of Interest. I think their Under the Skin is one of the most influential of the last decade, and this score feels like a significant leveling up — not to mention bookending given it's another collaboration with Jonathan Glazer.
Going back to your earlier question about scores that influenced film scoring, that's another great one. With Mica Levi, I think something that hurts them when it comes to nomination time is the broader trend that has happened in this kind of waxing and waning in film scoring of combining scoring with sound design. I think that's where the moody, atmospheric stuff can go so far in that people who aren't searching for the "rum-te-tum" John Williams motif are like, "Oh, that's just sound design, I'm not going to register it as score." So when it comes time for voting bodies to vote on it, that doesn't happen, which is unfair to folks like Mica Levi. I think that's indicative of a broader trend.
A part of me wonders if there just wasn't enough music in The Zone of Interest. But even just the bookending pieces are astonishing because they stand entirely on their own.
Yeah, it's really incredible. There's just a lot of really great stuff. Even just like scrolling through the eligible titles, and there are just so many great scores. Bobby Krlic, who was Ari Aster's composer [on Beau is Afraid] also operates on a similar level. He even did a halfway decent score for Blue Beetle, which is hard to do, branching out into a superhero thing.
So now let's run through the nominees, maybe from least to most likely to win. The John Williams memorial nomination for Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny was one I know people thought was ,ay, and I agree with you it's not at the top of his scores. But I will say for a movie that I was very meh on, the thing that stuck with me from watching was how central the John Williams score is to the DNA of the franchise.
Yeah, I think you especially feel that because James Mangold's direction is so unlike Spielberg's. It feels like they usually are so simpatico, and when you're watching an Indiana Jones movie that's not directed by Steven Spielberg, it just feels so different. But you still have this very familiar John Williams scoring to usher you through some of those bits, and I think that helps a lot.
Next, I'd say, is American Fiction. I remember when they announced the nomination, I thought, "Wait, that movie had a score?" But I think this gets back to my question about what makes a good film score: do you want to be very cognizant of the work that someone is doing? Or do you want it in the background? That's not to diminish Rachel Karpman's score, but part of me thinks it isn't a bad thing that I didn't really notice it.
I think in the case of Karpman's score for American Fiction, it is the one that, admittedly, I'm the least familiar with. I've listened to all of them, but I haven't re-listened to it the same way I've listened to other stuff. It's a very loping, jazzy kind of score. It's perfect for Jeffrey Wright's main character, Monk, a curmudgeonly guy who's very set in his ways. It's giving voice to his desire to stay in eras like the Harlem Renaissance where there was this artistic integrity to writing, especially for Black writers. There's something about scoring to picture and not really calling a lot of attention to yourself but fitting what the characters and the filmmakers want you to do. I think she succeeds in that.
Then, Poor Things, which I believe is the first time Yorgos Lanthimos has commissioned an original score for one of his films.
That feels right. I don't remember if we talked about this when I talked to Jerskin on the podcast, but I think that's how Yorgos tends to think. Sometimes to a fault, he's trying to eschew traditional modes of filmmaking, so he's like, "I want something WEIRD for Poor Things. Give me something really dissonant but playful." I think Jerskin provided that.
Following your discussion with him, what's your read on why this was such an integral piece of the vision for Lanthimos?
Yorgos' aesthetic is so herky-jerky and asymmetrical. He's really bouncing a lot of different things off the wall and very idiosyncratic. Obviously, on that surface level, Jerskin's score works there. But one interesting strain that I think really works for the arc of the thing is that it's following a character who was literally born yesterday. We were talking about matching score to main character with American Fiction, and Poor Things is following a character who is learning how to be a human being. She's learning how to walk and talk and have sex and figure out her place in the world, especially when she's beset on all sides by all these men who have very specific ideas about what she should do. What I like about Jerskin's score is that the trajectory of the scoring follows that arc as well. There are these strange strings, and there's also this thematic divide between the woman she was and the woman she is. There are two separate motifs for those. I like that eventually, as the film ends and she gets to that equilibrium, it has this beautiful traditional sweep of happiness and completion. I just think it's a really great match of Yorgos' aesthetic and the character journey that Bella Baxter's is going on.
I loved what he was saying about wanting to end it with this giant crescendo of all the motifs, coming together as if it was a Disney animated movie from the '50s.
It feels like we did it, everyone! We did it. Bella Baxter did it. You did it for watching this movie and enjoying it. Let's all celebrate the fact that we're here, in that odd way. It's not like a "rum-te-tum" John Williams thing. It's like, "We have our own fucked-up family, but that's great."
Do you think there was some element of Jerskin Fendrix being a first-time film composer that made it so special? In some ways, it seems very similar to Bella Baxter where he's feeling through it with us.
Yeah, absolutely. We talked about on the podcast, too, that there are no bad habits when there's no existing framework. He's a blank slate, just like Bella Baxter is, and he could figure this out on his own. We also talked about how so much of his music before this is very autobiographical, and he had to remove his ego for this score. I think that was an interesting journey for him. In all of those elements, it feels like Jerskin's figuring out the score along with us. That's exciting, and it just sounds unlike anything we've ever listened to before.
Killers of the Flower Moon is obviously scored by the one person who would not be made available to be Right on Cue. What would you want to ask Robbie Robertson about the process of creating this score?
I would ask about the temporality of it, because it's a comparatively modern score. It's a very honky-tonk kind of score for what this movie is. I've been talking to a lot of composers who have been handling projects that center Native themes — I talked to Dave Porter about Echo and the composer of True Detective: Night Country. I love to ask composers, especially those who are not native, about the efforts that they make to incorporate native elements into the music without sacrificing authenticity, how much they consult with native musicians, and how much they are used in the score. I would ask him about the decades of work he's done, not just there but in The Band. If I were to make a pick, I feel like they might give the posthumous Oscar to him.
You brought up how it feels such a modern score, and as I was re-listening to it, I was picking up on this fusion between the native themes and the folk music that sounds like the primitive pangs of rock. It's like he's reaching back to some extent.
I think it also helps with the genre cross-pollination that's happening. There are also elements of the crime thriller; it has the same structure and feel as Goodfellas, just in an entirely different setting with an entirely different perspective of its characters. The film is so committed to tying the atrocities of the past with the way we view them in the present, especially that coda at the end. It shines a light on everything from true crime media, to the very book that this was inspired by, to Scorsese as a filmmaker for making it from the perspective that he has, to the audience for watching it and enjoying it. He shines the light on us and makes us realize that we have just spent three-and-a-half hours dramatizing this very real genocide for our own entertainment. We should reflect on what that means for us, and I think the score does a lot towards tying us to the present in that way.
Ludwig Göransson for Oppenheimer is the odds-on favorite to win at this point, which puts him into a certain category with these multi-Oscar winners like John Williams, Hans Zimmer, Alexandre Desplat, Howard Shore, as well as Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. Do you think he deserves to be in that pantheon?
I think it's it's really admirable the way that we're elevating Göransson's sense of experimentation. His scores sound unlike anything anyone's doing. I think it was tempting to liken him to Zimmer a lot whenever he got the job for Tenet because Nolan has been such a Zimmer guy. But it really feels like there's something different going on with him, in a great way. He's so versatile. Even going minimalist, he feels big. He can toy around with instrumentation and genre and locality so effortlessly. Just to give voice to the rise of the nuclear bomb and make everything feel so propulsive, it's so incredible to hear. I can't be happier for him because I feel like he deserves it. He's so young, so he has so much time to shape film scoring.
What do you make of the character he brings to a Nolan film as opposed to the Hans Zimmer scores of his earlier work?
That ties into differences in production because Hans Zimmer has his own factory. What I've observed is that when you get to a certain level — once you become a Zimmer or a Giacchino or even a Bear McCreary — they are too big and busy to do it all themselves. There was an article a year or two ago about the open secret in Hollywood that when you see "score by Michael Giacchino," it's kind of like, "score by Michael Giacchino's assistants" and "themes by Michael Giacchino." TV scoring is getting a lot better about crediting the right folks, but I think Zimmer is a lot more factory-ready, for lack of a better term than that. He still gets to experiment and do all this really interesting stuff, but Göransson feels scrappier and younger. I get a sense of a frisson and a passion that doesn't necessarily happen in Zimmer's stuff, which can be a lot more droning.
Göransson helped the Haim sisters find their sound, which blew my mind. They couldn't figure out how to translate their live sound into the studio setting, and he worked with them for a weekend to knock it out together.
That's fantastic. He sounds really generous with his collaborators and other people in the industry. You have to be at this point because it's bleak out there and you got to stick together.
To some extent, Göransson feels like a bridge between some of the more experimental work that's being done and the grand spirit of scoring a Hollywood epic.
He's not Mica Levi, but he still gets the blood pumping.
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