The New Yorker Radio Hour - Nicholas Britell on the Art of the Film Score

Episode Date: February 18, 2022

Nicholas Britell has emerged as one of the most in-demand film composers working today, creating original music for projects that hew to no style or model. He wrote the infuriatingly catchy theme of HBO’s “Succession”; he is nominated for an Academy Award for the score of Adam McKay’s manic apocalypse comedy “Don’t Look Up”; he was previously nominated for his score for Barry Jenkins’s “Moonlight.” In 2017, Britell spoke with the New Yorker editor Henry Finder on the occasion of the release of “Battle of the Sexes,” about the 1973 tennis match between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs.    This segment originally aired September 22, 2017. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. The Oscar season is a time when film composers get a single moment in the limelight. Nicholas Brutel wrote that infuriatingly catchy theme of HBO's show, Succession. And he's nominated for an Oscar for the score of Adam McKay's recent film, Don't Look Up. I've been running it all day. I keep getting the same result. a direct hit of Earth in six months and 14 days.

Which is all about the impending destruction of the world and what the world decides not to do about it. Bertel also scored McKay's film The Big Short, which was about the financial crisis, and he also worked with director Barry Jenkins on Moonlight and the Underground Railroad. In 2017, Brutale wrote a score for a film called Battle of the Sexes, which was all about the 1973 tennis match

between Billy Jean King and Bobby Riggs. It starred Emma Stone and Steve Karell. It's Bobby, Bobby, Bobby Riggs. Bobby? How'd you get my number? Call every hotel in San Diego. Listen, I had a great idea. Okay. Well, it's after midnight, Bobby, so can we talk another time? You and me, Billy Jean. Three sets, five sets. Your choice.

Are you drunk, Bobby? No, of course not. Nicholas Bertel sat down with the New Yorker's Henry Finder. In the old days, it seems to me, most composers, when they weren't writing sacred music, were writing in the service of story. You think of Henry Purcell in the 17th century. He becomes the greatest English composer writing incidental music, theater music, ballet music, opera. But it's all serving story.

And Beethoven was obsessed with his Egmont music, which is, what, soundtrack to a play. So to me, movie music is actually the great tradition. It's music's highway. It's not the byway. I think that idea of musical storytelling is really interesting because for me, one of the things that I love about movies is they provide this amazing form to inspire music. It's totally possible to write music on its own,

sort of abstract music. But I've just always found that the interaction of all those elements moves me. Sometimes I feel music more strongly, actually, in that theater context than I do outside of it. Yeah, I want to get to that idea of the interaction of elements,

but what I'm kind of jazz about right now is Battle of the Sexes, this movie about Billy Jean King and her match against Bobby Riggs, which you scored. And this is a very music-forward film. I mean, this movie is like a piano concerto in the key of tennis.

That Billy Jean King Q. And the way it builds and develops. This is what it got me thinking about. One thing was the amazing power of the piano and orchestra combination. It made me think about that 1945 Noel Coward film, Brief Encounter. Yes, yes. David Lean directed, which uses the Rachmaninoff's second piano concerto. Absolutely.

And of course, Vangelis is chariots. And what is it that makes this combination so powerful? That's a great question. I mean, I think for me, I remember when I first heard the Rachmanov Second Concerto, you mentioned from that film, I remember I first saw it. There was a Van Cliver and Piano competition that they aired on PBS, I think, in 1990 maybe. And that summer, I had a VHS of it, and I watched it. I must have watched it twice a day for the entire summer.

And that year, it culminated with a performance by the pianist Alexei Sultana of performing the rock too. And yeah, my whole world that summer was the rock monosic in piano concerto. That's perfect. So for me, I've always been drawn to piano orchestra. combination. And I think the concerto as a form itself is something very fascinating because it's dramatic in and of itself. It's almost like a dance that happens between the more forward virtuoso instrument and the orchestra. And I think in a lot of ways, the best concertos are the ones where that interplay is most integrated. So I'm definitely drawn to that sound. But I always, try to at the beginning of a film project

figure out what is the sound of this film and for Battle of the Sexes the sound of the piano was something that Jonathan Dayton Valerie Farris and I

the directors and I we were drawn to it over the course of the film the orchestration evolves until by the time you reach the match it's a full symphony orchestra and the themes that you've heard in a more intimate setting earlier in the film

are now writ large on a full orchestra. Yeah, I was so struck by that. The piano concerto as a form can almost be like a tennis match at times. And it felt like you had to up the stakes even further. At a certain point, into that match, you switch from piano to organ. So it's like we're in a cathedral now, and we're listing the father, the son, and the holy ghost to go where we need to go. Yeah, that's one of my favorite moments in the film, actually,

is in that match where you hear that organ. We wove that in earlier in the film. It's very in the background. It's actually more of like an accompanying texture to some of the very early scenes. And it has that sort of featured moment central in the match. And there's something about that, too, where thinking about sort of like the scope of an orchestration

and how you make something seem very big. And one thing I've found over time is that sometimes more is actually less. Adding instruments to a point makes things very large, but there's a real power I find to pulling everything out. And sometimes just a solo piano or one note on a violin on its own can feel massive. Composer Nicholas Bertel talking with the New Yorker's Henry Finder in 2017. More in a moment. So let's talk about another film you worked on.

You were nominated for won several awards for your score for Moonlight. The Barry Jenkins film about the three stages in the life of this African-American boy, growing up gay in Liberty City, Miami, and music is so central to that film. What kind of brief did you get from Barry Jenkins? That was an amazing experience to work with Barry on Moonlight. So from our first conversations, we were already kind of brainstorming ideas of what might happen.

But I had read the screenplay before the film was shot. And musically, the early conversations that we had had, there was an idea, I think, in Barry's mind, that he really wanted real instruments. He wanted this to be a score that had a human feeling. From pretty much the very beginning, Barry had told me about his love of chopped and screwed music, which is a style of Southern hip-hop

where you take tracks and you slow them down. And when you slow the track down, the pitch goes way down. So there's this totally deepened and enriched musical texture that the audio takes on. We were just like, what if we did that with a classical score?

Like, what if I recorded my own music? And then I took those recordings and applied that chop and screw technique to them. And that's one of those ideas, I think, early on where it sounds interesting, but also you never know. It could work, it might not work. And I think one of the really exciting things there, one of those discoveries, was that when we put those ideas up against the picture, they totally worked. It felt like a musical evolution that was so interlinked with the evolution of Chiron. And those are those moments that I think you really, you know, artistically, you sort of live for those moments where you, where something just feels so, so right and so connected in a way.

To me, an astonishing shift is when you really start to mind these baroque textures, there's another cue from moonlight. I'm thinking of the middle of the world. And the violin is doing these virtuosic arpeggios, and I think we're in D minor. and so you think of Box D. Minor, Chaconne, or even that passage in Sibelius as D minor violin concerto toward the end of the first moment with those rapid broken chords. And it's like we're not in Liberty City anymore. And I wonder, how did you get there?

That was a really important scene in the film, and that was one place where my initial thought was actually pretty different from where we wound up. My initial thought, I was seeing the swimming sequence where Juan is teaching little to swim. And I had this idea of what if this was a moment of uplift, this was a moment of potentially a sort of happy memory of childhood. And Barry said to me, you know, this is a baptism.

This is the beginning of the rest of his life. So there's something about the violin cadenzas, you know, talking about concertos again. But there's something about a violin soaring in that way. that really moves me. And I remember I was with Barry in my studio in New York, and I said, what if we did something like this? And I started playing these arpeggios

using a violin sample just to show kind of what it might sound like. And immediately, Barry was just like, keep going with that. Keep going. And right there, I actually wrote this with him in the room there. It just happened totally organically like that together. Yeah, I was listening to the soundtracks of a lot of the films you've scored, and often there's kind of a spare neoclassical feel that comes back. But when you scored the big short, Adam McKay's movie about the 2007 Financial Crisis,

there are a lot of elements that are just crazy, these sort of playful upbeat melodies, a mouse click symphony, and some big, funky stings like the... the cue for when they go to Vegas. Actually, let's hear a bit of that. It seems like you got to have a lot of fun with Big Short, and what were some of the challenges of scoring that film? The Big Short was so much fun to work on

to see what this movie, this sort of incredible wild ride through the financial crisis, you know, what was the sound for that movie? And in the Big Short, there's actually a huge range of styles. There's no one sound to that. Right around when Adam was shooting the film, he had said to me that something he was wondering was,

what is the sound of dark mathematics? That was his idea. What would that sound like musically? And so I experimented with taking a piano and layering it with like six other pianos and running it through vinyl and then overlaying it with a hip-hop bass. So that started to be some of this feeling of the over-sophistication of the financial products. Something you've said a couple of times is the idea of not knowing what the answer is,

a sense of a plenitude of possibilities. In general, it's like some film composers are known for a very particular type of composition, the John Williams, the sweeping orchestral thing in so many Spielberg movies, He's Michael Nyman's minimalist scorings. Philip Glass, I say, you know, he's as recognizable as Vivaldi. You're like a chameleon. I mean, you're not a one-trick pony or a hundred and twenty-seven trick pony. Is that a gift or a burden?

I think when I was growing up, I always wondered, you know, what is my sound? Like, what do I, what do I sound like? And I think it's only in hindsight in a way that I see things in myself that I'm drawn to. part of that too is just the world we live in is so complex and with technology there's really an infinitude of possibilities whereas historically classical era there were styles of the time

there were much more set bounds to certain ways of writing music I think today for composers there's no form there are no rules so that does present its own challenges because you know what do you do So I think for me, film gives you a set of constraints. Each film is its own set of constraints where we say,

okay, you know what, we're going to be exploring the financial crisis of 2008. What does that sound like? I think, you know, Stravinsky wrote about that in his poetics of music where he talked about how restraints can be so liberating, actually. And I fully second that feeling. film composer Nicholas Pertel speaking with the New Yorkers, Henry Finder, in 2017. His score for Adam McKay's Don't Look Up was recently nominated for an Academy Award, and we'll see how that turns out next month.

He also wrote the score for Barry Jangan's film, Moonlight. And next week on the show, we're going to hear from Jenkins himself. We're going to be spending the program talking about this extraordinary moment in black film and television. I hope you'll join us. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. Thanks for listening. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Yards.

This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Ave Carrillo, Brita Green, Calalia, David Krasnow, Gauphin and Putubuele, Louis Mitchell, Michelle Moses, and Stephen Valentino, with help from Harrison Keithline and Meng Faye Chen, and guidance from Emily Boutin. And we had additional help this week from Rihanna Corby. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.