The only way I can describe watching your film with your original score for the first time is; magic.

But to get there you need to go through the creative process of working with a composer to create the score.

This week we’re talking about the relationship between director and composer, and how you can help your composer create the perfect score for your film.

I’ve had the honor and privilege of working with composer, Alexander Arntzen, on several of my films. I’ll share how we collaborated to create the score for Wild Boys, but first, let’s dive into something that scared me for a long time: how do you even talk to a composer?

Let’s roll.

How to talk to composers

Some directors have backgrounds in music or are musically inclined. I’m not one of those. Apart from a year playing the trombone (badly), I’ve never studied music or practiced an instrument.

I used to be self-conscious about not knowing how to talk music. I didn’t know the right terms or how to translate my vision into words that my composer would understand.

But after talking to my composer, Alex, I realized I didn’t have to learn a whole new language to make us understand each other. He was my translator.

DPs help you turn the images in your head into images on screen. Actors turns the words in the script and your direction into a performance. You don’t micromanage every single detail (I hope you’re not!)

You direct.

The same goes for composers. The most powerful directing tool I’ve found is using my expertise on the story to guide my collaborators in the right direction. Once you’ve hired a composer you already know they have what it takes to score your film. Now you need to trust that they have the skillset and experience to turn your story and character arcs into music.

This, honestly, relieved so much stress from the scoring process for me and made the whole thing so much more enjoyable.

So trust your collaborators and lead with your story expertise.

Before I share the story of how we scored Wild Boys, let’s talk about temp music.

The good, the bad, and the ugly of using temp score

“Temp music is the bane of my existence […] If they’re addicted to it, it’s just going to make my job harder.”
Danny Elfman, legendary composer

Temp music is a double-edged sword. It’s an awesome tool for editors and directors to use when cutting the film. Before you have the original score it makes the film feel like a real movie.

The way scoring a film normally works is that you finish editing the film. You lock the cut, meaning you say you’re not making any more changes (lol, there are always changes.) And then you turn the film over to your composer and say, here you go, make it sing.

I’ve already shared how I like doing the rough cut without music, but at some point during the editing you’re going to want to start adding some tunes.

This is where temp music comes in.

Every editor and assistant editor has a hard drive full of movie scores they bring to every film they work on. They use it as a library to pull temp music from.

Because the composer hasn’t started working yet, you borrow from other films. There’s a fantastic video essay about why all movies sound alike from Every Frame A Painting, called The Marvel Symphonic Universe. If you want to learn more about how temp music influences the final score I’d highly recommend it.

What inevitably happens when you use temp score is that your brain gets used to watching the film with the temp. When the composer comes in with a new score, it changes the film you’ve been watching for months in the editing bay.

It can be jarring, and a lot of directors don’t like it.

Because they’re not able to express how they want to solve the problem, they revert to the simplest solution: just make it sound like the temp.

If you watch the video I shared above, you’ll see the examples they show. It’s uncanny how similar some movies sound.

As much as I find temp music helpful to inform the edit and to let the composer know the direction I want to go with the score, I do my best not to get married to the temp.

One trick that might be helpful is to watch your film without any music before you watch it with the composer’s work. Think of it as a palate cleanser.

Like any creative process, there will be some back and forth, things that work, things that don’t, but that’s just the name of the game.

The payoff when the final score is done and you play it back is awesome.

Scoring Wild Boys - how we did it

We started scoring Wild Boys at the height of the pandemic in 2020, so it was all done remotely. Normally, when I work with Alex, we’ll sit together in his studio and watch the movie together and talk about all the different pieces of music we want in the film.

Doing it remotely resulted in a bit more back-and-forth, but in the end, we settled on the big picture stuff. We wanted a score that supported the epic landscape where the film takes place while incorporating Kate’s love for retro gaming.

Normally, you score a film in reels, roughly 15-20 minute chunks of the film. You start at the beginning and move forward. But because the themes of our film come together when Kate first meets the Wild Boys we started by scoring the second reel of the film.

This let us establish the sound for Kate, the Wild Boys, as well as our main villains, Axel and the Hillbillies.

Getting the main themes locked in informs the entire rest of your soundtrack. Once we had these in place, it became easy to go back to the beginning of the film and score the first 20 minutes.

The main themes played in different ways, with different levels of complexity creates a recognizable cohesiveness to the film and builds the characters’ arcs through the film.

In our story, Kate starts out as a loner, afraid of the outside world, and she ends up befriending these wild young men who couldn’t be more different than her. When we were discussing character themes we wanted Kate’s theme and the Wild Boys theme to able to meld into one theme and create our main theme as they grow closer.

At the end of the day, working with a composer is a lot like all the other creative collaborations you have on a film team. You figure out a way to communicate, then you go back and forth until you have something that’s perfect for your film.

Using the score to enhance the story and bring everything together is one of the reasons I love working with a composer who can create an original score. I don’t care if you have access to the best music libraries in the world; nothing beats a soundtrack tailor-made for your film.

I’m incredibly proud of the soundtrack Alex created for our film and I highly recommend you take a listen. It’s available on Spotify and Apple Music.

And cut!

That does it for this week. Here are the key takeaways I want you to bring with you into your directing career from today:

• Talk story with your composer
• Be careful of falling in love with your temp score
• Embrace the creative process of collaborating on the score for your film with your composer.

As always, thanks for reading.

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