Filmmaker Noah Hutton on his Slyly Scorching Feature Debut “Lapsis”
Writer/director Noah Hutton was due to make his narrative feature debut with his sci-fi film Lapsis at SXSW in March of 2020. You know how that turned out. Nearly a year later, Hutton’s slyly lacerating debut is now available on Virtual Cinema, VOD, and Digital. His low-budget feature debut is an impressive feat of world-building, cinematic wit, and a darkly funny critique of late-stage capitalism, specifically corporate greed and the exploitation of workers.
Composer Jongnic Bontemps on Scoring America’s Past, Present, and Future
Jongnic “JB” Bontemps knows how to turn emotions into a musical composition, whether it’s for a character in a narrative or a historical figure in a documentary. Composing on narrative features, documentaries, shorts, and video games, Bontemps can speak to his collaborators in whatever narrative language they need. For Creed II, he provided director Steven Caple Jr. with additional music worthy of the film’s fighting spirit. For the doc United Skates, Bontemps threaded hip-hop through the story of America’s underground roller rink subculture as it was on the verge of being erased.
Sundance 2021: Composer Kathryn Bostic on Scoring Two Docs About Trailblazing Women
As we near the close of the first week of Black History Month, it’s important to recognize those who are making history now. Given the overall lack of working female composers of any race, as a Black female composer, Kathryn Bostic has been carving out a road few have traveled, and she’s been doing it for decades. She arrived at this year’s Sundance with not one but two films for which she has supplied the score,
Composer Emile Mosseri on Scoring for Family Dynamics in “Minari”
Dream-like piano notes accompany the Yee family as they gaze out the windows of their beat-up station wagon, on their way to a new home in rural Arkansas. Hoping to make it as a farmer, patriarch Jacob (Steven Yeun) is in the process of uprooting his wife, Monica (Yeri Han), and American-born children, Anne (Noel Cho) and David (Alan S. Kim), from California to this sparsely populated corner of the rural South.
Branford Marsalis Gets the Blues For “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom”
“Uh one. Uh two. Uh you know what to do.” That’s how the band leader cues his musicians in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. In fact, the actors portraying sidemen to Viola Davis’ title character did not really know what to do, musically. But thanks to Branford Marsalis, the actors in director George C. Wolfe’s adaptation of the August Wilson play manage to mimic the moves of veteran blues musicians with persuasive panache.
Hans Zimmer Protégé Guillaume Roussel on Composing the “Black Beauty” Score Remotely
The good news for Guillaume Roussel: this spring he fulfilled a lifelong dream by working with the London Symphony Orchestra. The bad news: he had to supervise the Black Beauty recording sessions from his garage in Los Angeles due to COVID-19 travel restrictions. “It was just after lockdown, so the big frustration came because I was not able to fly to London for the sessions,” says Roussel. “Fortunately, my good friend Gavin Greenaway conducted and did a great job.”
Composer Steven Price on Scoring David Attenborough’s Plea to Humanity & Glen Keane’s “Over the Moon”
Those who work in the arts have an innate ability to invoke emotions through their work— to cause an audience to connect with a certain theme or issue. But what if that issue is the inevitable destruction of the planet told through the life story of one famed historian and world traveler? That was the daunting task presented to Oscar-winning composer Steven Price (Gravity, Suicide Squad, Baby Driver).
David Attenborough: A Life On Our Planet serves dual purposes as both Attenborough’s witness statement — his plea to humanity to save the Earth — and an autobiography of sorts.
Composer Jay Wadley on Scoring Charlie Kaufman’s Bittersweet New Film
When you think of a Charlie Kaufman film, you start with his scripts. Being John Malkovich (1999), Adaptation (2002), and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) made Kaufman that rare thing; the star screenwriter. Each of these films was fearlessly weird, often unsettling, and always bittersweet. They were funny, too. Then we started to get to know Kaufman the writer/director, beginning with Synecdoche, New York (2008),
“Becoming” Composer Kamasi Washington on Scoring Michelle Obama’s Life
As one of the most famous women in the world, we’re familiar with the broad strokes of Michelle Obama’s life, from her rarefied resume and progressive values to her playfully chic sense of fashion. Thanks to her critically-acclaimed memoir, “Becoming,” the former First Lady’s legions of fans have also gotten to know more about her early life, marriage to Barack Obama, and their eight years in the White House.
Composer Sherri Chung on Batwoman, Riverdale & More
Composer Sherri Chung faced the production freeze due to COVID-19 with equal parts equanimity and patience. Because her work is often done alone, the self-quarantine aspect of the pandemic hasn’t changed her process all that much. Chung has a studio where she has her own recording stage that can fit about 15 players, so that part of her process has been shuttered, but the fact that she was already on a natural hiatus, as she described it,
Composer Terence Blanchard on Scoring Spike Lee’s Must-See New Epic Da 5 Bloods
Spike Lee’s films’ timeliness speaks to his prescience, and to his fearless, decades-long willingness to examine the continued and persistent injustice experienced by Black Americans. His new film Da 5 Bloods lands in the midst of a pandemic disproportionately affecting Black, Hispanic, Latino and Indigenous communities, and a wave of demonstrations protesting police brutality and systemic racism against Black people by those who are sworn to protect all Americans following the murder of George Floyd.
The Righteous Gemstones Composer Joseph Stephens on Creating Earworm Tune “Misbehavin”
Joseph Stephens is the composer behind Danny McBride’s HBO series The Righteous Gemstones, and he helped craft one of the show’s funniest moments—the song “Misbehavin”—which he co-wrote with McBride and co-star Edi Patterson. In the show, “Misbehavin” is performed by the sibling musical duo of Baby Billy (Walton Goggins) and Aimee-Leigh (Jennifer Nettles). Watching it now feels like a musical blast from an alternate dimension when laughs were easy to come by and the sight of seeing musicians perform shoulder-to-shoulder was commonplace.
Composer Brandon Campbell on Scoring Netflix’s The Letter for the King, Hans Zimmer, & COVID-19
Composer Brandon Campbell remains busy despite the worldwide shutdown of just about every film and TV production due to COVID-19. “I’m doing alright, all things considered, ” he says. Although he can’t give us the names of his current projects, he’s got two he’s still scoring and a third that might follow. Campbell’s relatively full plate makes him one of the lucky ones in the film and TV world at the moment, but it’s still a precarious position.
Composer Vivek Maddala Underscores Discrimination in Asian Americans Documentary for PBS
The versatile composer Vivek Maddala recently shifted gears from his zany Emmy-winning music for Cartoon Network series The Tom and Jerry Show to score PBS’ somber documentary Asian Americans (debuting May 11). A musical prodigy, Maddala enrolled in Boston’s prestigious Berklee College of Music at age 15 with dreams of becoming a jazz drummer but switched to electrical engineering at Georgia Tech before earning a graduate degree in applied physics.
Composer Herdís Stefánsdóttir on HBO’s Fabulous New Unscripted Series We’re Here
There’s a new unscripted show in town, and it wants you to know We’re Here. That’s both the name and the aesthetic of co-creators Johnny Ingram and Stephen Warren’s fabulous, fierce, and fun show featuring renowned drag queens Eureka O’Hara, Shangela Laquifa Wadley, and Bob the Drag Queen. On the series, the Queens drive into towns across America, and recruit local residents representing a wide swath of humanity as ‘drag daughters,’ to participate in a one-night-only drag show.
Joker’s Oscar-Nominated Composer Hildur Guðnadóttir on Creating a “Wordless Dialogue”
We’re looking back at some of our interviews with this year’s Oscar nominees in the lead-up to this Sunday’s telecast. This story was originally published on October 7, 2019.
A female composer being hired for a studio film is a rarity, with 94 percent of the 250 films released in the US in 2018 scored by men. It is to his credit that director Todd Philips hired Icelandic cellist and composer Hildur Guðnadóttir to create the score for Joker.
How Oscar-Nominated Songwriter Joshuah Brian Campbell Helped Harriet Find its Voice
One of the more inspirational moments of Harriet, the stirring 2019 feature about Harriet Tubman, the legendary 19th-century slave turned abolitionist, happens when Cynthia Erivo sings Stand Up, an uplifting anthem to human dignity and the struggle to be free.
Erivo has deservedly received an Oscar nomination for her performance as Harriet Tubman. But she also landed a second nomination for Best Original Song as the co-writer of Stand Up.
Composer Christophe Beck on Returning for a Second Round of Ice & Earworms in Frozen II
In Jennifer Lee and Chris Buck’s Frozen II, sisters Elsa (Idina Menzel) and Anna (Kristen Bell) are back, older and wiser and reunited for good. Unfortunately, Elsa, now Queen of Arendelle, is still having trouble with her ice-making powers, a disturbance that arrives this time around via a mysterious siren call she can’t make anything of without following it to the Enchanted Forest, where it turns out an indigenous people,
Composer Joseph Trapanese on Scoring a Live-Action Lady and the Tramp for Disney +
Video snippets from Disney’s history, showing the studio’s early animators gathered around a live deer, drawing its actions for Bambi, make for both great contemporary Instagram bait and charming Disney lore. They also demonstrate the extent to which Walt Disney encouraged his animators to learn and experiment. That level of commitment to creative exploration is something that can be heard today in the score to the live-action remake of Lady and the Tramp,
Composer Alan Silvestri on Going Big in Avengers: Endgame
There’s hardly a movie-goer alive who hasn’t heard at least something of Alan Silvestri’s body of work. The composer started making music in Hollywood in the early 1970s, he’s scored all 17 of Robert Zemicki’s films—including the Back to the Future trilogy—and in 2011, he entered the Marvel Cinematic Universe, with Captain America: The First Avenger. The following year, he scored The Avengers, and strains of that theme music can be heard in his newer work in the back-to-back epics capping off this superhero saga,
