Composing Chaos: How Amie Doherty Scored Disney’s Four-Way Body Swap in “Freakier Friday”
There are already two generations of hardcore fans who love Freaky Friday. Gen-Xers and their parents flocked to see Barbara Harris and Jodie Foster for the 1976 release, and in 2003, Disney struck gold again with Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan playing the body-switching mother/daughter duo, bringing millennials into the fandom fold. More than 30 years later, those Gen-X grandparents and Millennial moms and dads are poised to make fans of the youngest among us with a long-awaited sequel to the 2003 film, Freakier Friday.
The movie features returning stars Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan, and features a number of other cast members from 2003 reprising their roles. Director Nisha Ganatra helms a story in which not only mother and daughter switch bodies, but the grandkids do, too, making it a four-way swap. Of course, mayhem, misidentification, and misadventures ensue.
Ganatra is known for incorporating a lot of music into her films (see The High Note), and Freakier Friday is no exception. There are 29 songs spanning a variety of genres on the soundtrack, and the movie includes an appearance by the band Pink Slip playing their song “Take Me Away,” made famous in the 2003 film. It was composer Amie Doherty’s job to weave all those musical styles and genres together in a cohesive way, while amplifying the film’s heart and emotional center in the Freakier Friday score. Doherty spoke to The Credits about how the music she created took shape and how she brought Nisha Ganatra’s vision to musical life.
How did you get connected with Nisha Ganatra?
It was through the film music team at Universal. I had done the Universal Scoring Program and scored Spirit Untamed. I worked with them on that, and then a few months after Spirit finished, her film The High Note came up, and they needed a composer for a quick turnaround. They thought of me, and that’s the thing about the Universal Composers Initiative. It’s just so supportive. They aren’t doing something performative with it, or just trying to look good to the outside, they are genuinely wanting to support women and people of color and people with diverse backgrounds. They put their money where their mouths are. Every person who has been part of the program has been hired by Universal.
And they introduced you to Nisha?
Yes, they said they’d love for Nisha to meet with me, and then the following day, she asked me to score the movie. We just had a great time working together, and really connected as creators. After that, I scored a short film for her called Rise that premiered at Sundance in 2023. It was another amazing project supporting women, a short documentary. When it came time to do Freakier Friday, she just called me out of the blue last March. I didn’t even know what the project was. She just said, “Hey, I have this new film at Disney, and I told them we’d definitely need you on the project.” I told her I was ten toes in, not even knowing the project. I hung up the phone and realized I didn’t even ask what it was. I texted her and asked, she told me it was Freakier Friday, and I was floored. It was a film I watched a lot when I was a kid, so that just made it incredibly exciting from day one.
What was your approach?
It was so much fun, but the thing about this movie, much like The High Note, is it’s very song-heavy. With Freakier Friday in particular, I think 29 tracks on the soundtrack aren’t score. There’s everything on there from The Spice Girls to Chappell Roan, some really nostalgic pieces mixed with very modern pieces. Trying to figure out the score and how to blend that all together to create a cohesive world was part of my job, as well as to convey the emotion. The songs are used to bring a lot of energy, and to give the movie that nostalgic vibe in some places, and modern in others, to establish and reference the older two characters and the younger two in this movie, so the score was there to help with the emotional beats, first and foremost.
How did you collaborate with Nisha and her team in creating this score?
I initially went and worked on my own because I came in so early. I got the script and the dailies, and they started sending me early edits. We had decided to focus on the bonding theme, this family theme, as the main one for the film. I went away and worked on that, and sent it back to Nisha. We tried it against a few scenes and worked on it back and forth. It was amazing to have that time, which was not something I had on The High Note, on which I had a total of six weeks. On Freakier Friday, I had months. It was so nice to have that time to play with ideas and get feedback, and give Nisha and her team time to get used to it and see how they felt about it. Once we had the themes, it was just a matter of me going through and scoring every single scene, but always based on the emotion of the moment.
What was a particularly fun cue to work on?
There are scenes with Madame Jen (Vanessa Bayer), the psychic in the film, and she’s absolutely hilarious. Nisha wanted to make sure she had a unique musical vibe. We played around with a lot of kooky, off-the-wall ideas until we landed on something that fit the character perfectly. I think there was a suggestion from Nisha and the editor Eleanor Infante that we’d use some bagpipes for a finish. Originally, I had done some world instruments, then they thought it would be fun to lean into her Scottish heritage. I also added some whale and dolphin noises, if you listen carefully, because it’s subtle.
And there’s quite a wide range of sounds and genres within your score as well.
In terms of palette, we definitely pulled some ideas from the songs, like there are some punk rock elements that touch on Lindsay Lohan’s band in the first film, so I wanted to play with that a bit. We also have orchestral themes and recorded with a beautiful string orchestra here in LA. I have some modern beat electronic stuff in there, as well. It’s a mishmash, but the idea was to tie it all together and make one cohesive, unified whole.
It’s always wonderful to have live instruments in the score, which is not as common as it used to be.
Yeah, we used just strings on this one, which we recorded at Warner Brothers with a 40-piece string section. We did it with just one day of recording, and to Disney’s credit, they made sure it happened, because it’s a Disney movie, so they wanted that beautiful, polished Disney warmth. You really need strings to do that. They were committed to it, so we had some of the best players in the world.
How did this project stretch you as an artist?
On Freakier Friday, I had to step out of my comfort zone to incorporate modern synth elements into the score, mixing them with traditional string sounds. That definitely stretched me, but I’m really loving working that way, trying new things. I love the energy of it.
Freakier Friday is in theaters on August 8 nationwide.
Featured image: (L-R) Julia Butters as Harper Coleman, Lindsay Lohan as Anna Coleman, Jamie Lee Curtis as Tess Coleman and Sophia Hammons as Lily Davies in Disney’s FREAKIER FRIDAY. Photo by Glen Wilson. © 2025 Disney Enterprises, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
