How do you score a film?
Composer Heather McIntosh explains how she brings the energy of her Elephant 6 live performances to a film score.
First a couple of things I enjoyed this week:
• I was thinking about the short-lived but well-loved series Lodge 49 recently, and while there are so many things to love about it (seriously, watch it), what I was thinking about this week was the title sequence. It’s gorgeous and strange and walks you through the visual mythology of a laidback but complex world of a rundown Los Angeles lodge and all its bizarre—and mundane—secrets. It’s a show that has felt at times difficult for me to describe to others, so I can only imagine the task that was set up for legendary title designer Kyle Cooper (music composed by Andrew Carroll).
I looked up some interviews with Cooper to see if I could find out more about his process, which led me to this one published on Thunder Chunky. I zeroed in on this little throwaway tidbit:
I love the idea that a good title designer can step in after a film is already picture-locked and act as the liaison to the audience. He’s right that some films don’t need more than some sparse text to tell you who made it, because they may open with a dynamic scene that could be hampered by an additional bumper. But in its fullest context, the job of a title designer is mediating that space between the viewer and the world they’re about to enter and deciding whether or not they need a more formal invitation to it. This got me thinking about end-title sequences.
• I watched The Elephant 6 Recording Co., a documentary on the storied music collective out of Athens, Georgia, whose lo-fi freakout hallmarks bridged the grunge scene of the ’90s with the burgeoning electronic and garage re-renaissance of the early 2000s. As a girl who heard Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane Over the Sea once and immediately bought a guitar and learned to play the title track (while my mom worried it was a song I’d written myself and that her daughter was in desperate need of therapy, not joking), I’d say I had a pretty deep connection with several of the bands that came out of that movement. And not just the music but the DIY aesthetic of art and recording that I implemented in my own musical projects later on and continue to admire. The film is good, probably even better if you’re already a fan. I was mostly satisfied with where it ended its storytelling, but I still felt a little something missing. And then the end credits started. Filmmaker Chad Stockfleth made a genius little decision to include the home videos of a diverse collection of people who’d recorded their own versions of “In the Aeroplane Over the Sea” over the years, from an older gentleman seemingly in his 60s to the young girls like I was.
There was a breathtaking quality to watching these videos as the credits rolled, realizing how many people from all over the world for the past 25 years felt the same way I did in my teenage bedroom and continue to do so, all spurred on by a recording that heralded the poetic, experimental pleasures of the Elephant 6 sound. When the videos ended, I was wiping my eyes. That was the real ending of the film I desired. It did, in fact, require just one more scene.
Secondly, it was real great to be able to see a familiar face pop up in the Elephant 6 documentary. I got the chance to work briefly with Heather McIntosh on an indie film I was associate producing years ago, called Molly Takes a Trip, directed by Annika Kurnick. Heather had only been composing for film for a few years at that time, but she was already becoming very prolific. Many will either recognize her as the frequent and welcome cello presence on Elephant 6 records, or as the composer for the exquisitely chilling film Compliance—among so many others now. I’ve always loved her music, and I had the suspicion I would love her process, too.
Here, Heather lets me ask her about how you can infuse a film score with an experimental process, what it’s like to take synthesizer lessons as a child, and how she created the music for the upcoming film Cat Person, directed by Susanna Fogel.
I know you got your start as a professional musician as part of the Elephant 6 recording collective. Can you explain how that began?
I moved from Cleveland, Ohio, to go to school in Athens, Georgia, because I loved the previous generation of music there—Pylon, The B-52’s, and R.E.M.. A lot of folks ended up there because of that. I worked at the video store in town and the coffee house and started meeting these friends and played in punk rock bands and avant garde orchestra type things and found those folks from various jobs and playing at The 40 Watt. I was like, Hey do you want cello on stuff? and that’s how it started. They were already making these wild and weird symphonies on 4-track cassette, and I was a good fit. It was so cool, because it was the first time I’d seen euphonium or mellophone or even clarinet in a band that wasn’t full-fledged jazz or ska stuff, that it was in this lyrical bizarro space. It really did create these cinematic landscapes.
I imagine you learned how to play cello very young.
I started when I was a kid, and I also took synthesizer lessons when I was in 5th grade. I learned how to manipulate sounds and how to play songs like “We Built This City,” real ’80s magic type stuff. I loved the television show and the movie Fame. I didn’t know what I wanted to do with any of this stuff. I took dance classes, I liked the idea of building other worlds with an electronic palette. MTV was a little bit my babysitter in the ’80s, so I was finding Devo and Thomas Dolby and was like, This is where it’s at. When I was a kid, I either want to be a synthesizer player, a marine biologist, or architect. I didn’t know I was going to be a cello-playing indie rock person that’s gonna score films, but when you look back, you think, oh yeah that all makes sense. I just kept following the stuff I liked. But I started when I was 9 on cello and 4 or 5 at piano. I never got super good at piano, I could hold my own, but I wasn’t like blasting concertos.
I need to back up to your taking synthesizer lessons in Cleveland, Ohio. I don’t want to skip over that.
Oh, it was great. We were at this music school, and we saw the classic flyer pinned up on cork board, reading, “Synthesizer Lessons,” with the number, and I remember grabbing a tab and reaching out. I had a Casio CZ 1000, a little robust prosumer synthesizer. I thought about sound differently from an early age. I remember my teacher was kind of tough. She had the classic permed hair, like visualize Joan Jett in the movie Light of Day with an understated loose perm and a little more heft. She was awesome, and we figured out how to make seagull sounds and manipulate waveforms. I learned sonatinas and stuff with her, but there was this groovy process of learning how to figure out songs on your own and learning how a sound is formed with a wav file. Like what does a sawtooth sound like? All those sorts of things that are weirdly part of my job right now. I guess I did become a synthesizer player. I hadn’t thought about that in a while.
Were you always more interested in live performance or recording? Because now I imagine you’re almost exclusively recording because of the nature of film scoring.
Those two things aren’t mutually exclusive. There can still be experimentation in recording. I love playing live, though. Sometimes with bands, I’d come in for a rehearsal and we’d run through some stuff I played, like for Elf Power, and I’d play on my four songs, and they’d be like, Why don’t you just stay up here and play? There’s sort of a freeing let-it-rip quality, where sure there’s a structure, but there’s a lot of trust and excitement in that space. That’s the Elephant 6 version. Playing on records, especially with cello, it felt like I could make these little symphonic moments pop out, like all of a sudden I’m my own little string orchestra, and I can come up with these complicated parts, like with Of Montreal, where we are building these complicated fast-change things. It’s great to be the kind of person that plays 100 percent what they had in mind and then do some layers or textures they wouldn’t have thought of. It’s the same with recording to be able to give that extra flavor if they want it, or if they have this through-composed idea of exactly how they see it, I can do that. They’re just different muscles.
So you can still inject some of those exciting live aspects into the compositions?
When I come in, usually the picture is already there. The director, the team that’s making the film, they’ve been hanging with the subject matter longer than I have. sometimes I’m on board early days and we’re talking about it before it’s shot, but there’s a lot of wanting to bring that to life, but sometimes there’s room for real experimentation. In the Cat Person movie that’s coming out in October, it’s like there are a lot of very simple, thoughtful, individual notes doing exactly what we wrote down, but then there’s this wild build that happens throughout the film. I was able to use these textures I built just playing cello with all these crazy loop peddles and extra effects, tapping back into my electronic music days where I’m really going wild. When you can break through the regular meter, pull out of how you normally think about pop-music structure and build these textures and colors from just play—which is what you do when you play an instrument—to think about experiment not as a quality but letting it rip and seeing what comes is a really exciting thing to tap into. It’s not for every project, and I think that stems from playing in those bands and having the improv brain in me.
So what’s the first step in composing for a film?
After I’m employed and get a cut of the picture, I would have already done a lot of research on what the filmmaker likes, what they were listening to when they were writing the project, what films they’re inspired by. If there was a lookbook that shows their approach with cinematography or style, I look at that. Any reference they have. This comes from my research-heavy video store background, where I want to know every single concrete metric I can to discover my entry point of the film. Getting close to the filmmaker creative headspace is the first step. That’s not even making a note yet.
When I get the cut, I watch it a lot to get it under my skin a bit, but it depends on how much time you have on a project. After I watch it down a bunch, I will do a spotting session with my director, producer, picture editor, or, if you’re lucky enough to have music editor, them, too. You talk about what each music moment means to them, if there is a temporary score there, how does it work, how it doesn’t work, asking a lot of questions about choices and dramatically what the film is doing. I keep those all in my notes, so I can say, “Okay we’re trying to be in this POV,” or, “I think this music is pushing it too hard into this weird romantic space.” Those sorts of notes are helpful, even if it’s to discover the ins and outs of things. Then I just start writing.
What do you decide to write first?
Every time is different. Sometimes I’ll be like, I’m gonna do these ones I know exactly, or I’ll be like, I want to do the hardest thing first to unlock this. Often, if I can unlock a giant cue at the end or something, then everything else will be informed. Sometimes I play directly to picture. Sometimes it’s building a suite of music, which can be helpful, because then you already have a built-in sound palette—that’s where I usually like to hang out. Even if I haven’t tracked a bunch of ideas in a playlist style, I’ve thought about what the instrumentation is and what that means to me. Sometimes I’m starting with color, like I’ll know it’s an abstract, extra-electronic texture, and I know the arrangement will be really light, so I’ll just start playing in those spaces looking at picture. I might pick up the cello first. Might start from a keyboard place, but sometimes it’s nice to just pick up the bass or the cello or any of these other instruments I play to find that sound. So after I’ve done all that research, I’m thinking about the orchestration color and that’s where I jump off from.
What do you do if your director isn’t great at communicating about music?
You don’t want them to feel daunted if they don’t know musical terms. If that person is a director or writer-director, let’s just talk about what’s going on with a narrative, how should I feel. When you can get to the universal language of feelings and the stuff they’re good at like how would they direct an actor, it’s easier to communicate. The second you start getting too wrapped up in musical terms, you lost it. It’s our responsibility to lean into their language as much as possible. A shorthand trick I do is I will send out multiple variations of the same piece of music. One pass where it’s like all the bells and whistles—topline melody, the twinkly stuff, big percussion, soaring and sweeping. Then I’ll do another version that won’t have that melody and maybe just has the moving line on the strings and pulse of a drone. I’ll do another version where it’s even simpler, maybe just the drone. And maybe even another one that’s just some spare notes. This is very useful in television writing, where you need to build a world very quickly, and it’s good to have variation for your picture editor so they can experiment with how hard to push the scene. Does this make the scene feel melodramatic? What if we just dialed back that certain element?
If you can solo out sounds for the director, that helps. Sometimes it’s not the whole cue is bad. It might be they just don’t like the clarinet. Also by making those different versions, it helps new composers to get more comfortable with how plastic we should look at our compositions, to get away from that hard line of “This is my composition and it’s how I want it to be.” That sort of frees you from the critical judgement. You’re giving which path or which road is correct for our film and sometimes you’ll learn like this version is too active right now, but it might be perfect for the third act. You’re not chasing a temporary score anymore, and you’re able to riff off those ideas, and it makes it way more cohesive, instead of feeling like a needle drop.
Speaking of needle drops: How do you work with a music supervisor?
Sometimes you’re in a spotting session with them, and you know right away which parts are going to be supervised and which will be score, and where I’m gonna need to help make a transition out of the licensed material. Other times, you’re on this whole other holistic journey. Music supervisors have suggested me for jobs, and when that happens, we’re having a lot of conversations before we even get to a spotting session to help find the world of the film. There are the two versions, though. Strictly licensing or talking about these bigger picture ideas. Both are wonderful.
Music editors are a whole other bag, too. To have someone that is connected to helping you bring the score to reality, but might be able to try different things for you. Say you’re on episode 3 of a television series, and you have all this material from 1 and 2, and you’re like, I would love to see what this theme feels like over here, they can pop it in and show you. coming from the indie world, I’ve had to be my own music editor for forever, so I can do it if I have to, but it’s great to have that support when you’re in the mix stage or spotting sessions.
Right. It’s a luxury to have a full sound team on an indie film.
It speaks to having those technical chops. I write in Logic and mix and deliver in Pro Tools, so extra nerdy, but I have that sense of how to deliver my music. Most rerecording mixers mix dialogue, sound design, and score together, and those people work in Pro Tools and Avid, so it’s good to know how to make sure what they open up is going to open up correctly. On an indie film, you’re the last line of defense, so I wanted to make sure I had these skills. Having not come through traditional film music school, I had never delivered stems to a mix stage. I spent a lot of time reading and watching as much as I could and talking to as many people as possible, because it’s really important to be able to deliver your stuff properly. It’s one thing to be able to write something great, but, especially on an indie scale, if you don’t know how to get it out the door, that’s a problem. With my synthesizer background, I’m sure I had a leg up. Anywaaaaays…
What do you do when a score is more experimental and the lines between what is score and what is sound design may not be as defined?
I was so lucky that my first narrative was such a strong sound team, and all of us really connected on such a deep level. It was a film with Craig Zobel called Compliance, and we were able to mix it up at SkywalkerSound. We got a grant, and we all went up there shoestring style, stayed in Marin and drove up the hill every day and put together the final mix in a week. I love being there for a mix. It was a real lesson in the beauty of working with a sound designer who has a great musical sensibility and me being a composer who has a real sound designer sensibility and to be on the mix stage and not feel like it’s a competition. It’s building the world. Sometimes my score crossed the line into sound design, and we thought about those handoffs and some of them were happy accidents. But when you can remove the ego of Where did my score go? it’s seamless. I learned so much on that project. That whole process, it really set the bar for me.
How much of a shock was it that your score was so singled out in the praise for the film?
It was a special score to me, but all of it was surprising. It was my first film, my first time at Sundance. I found a corner, crashed in the townhouse with the rest of the crew. It reminded me of the Elephant 6 days. The score itself is a valuable lesson to new composers that sometimes the parameters will make such a strong result. I didn’t have much. I had a cello. I had my friends play rhythm section stuff. I went back to University of Georgia and used their grand piano. For that movie, I was part of production as well, so I was writing before and during filming, and Craig shared that score with people on production. When I popped in, I saw his buddy David Gordon Green on set, and he said, “That score is great. I’ve been listening to it,” and I was like, That’s so weird, it’s not even a film yet. But it was part of the cast and crew’s subconscious already. I still talk to music editors, and they’re like, I know your music! I feel really fortunate that all of those sort of things hit at the right time for me. It made me believe my voice can still be strong, even with all those limitations.
You said before that you have to watch down a film several times to let it get under your skin. I imagine with Compliance that might have been a difficult thing to sign up for. I love the film, but I’ve only ever been able to watch it once.
At the beginning, I was working from a draft of the script and some reference points from films and ideas and started diving into that world and sharing the sketches before the picture was being pulled in by picture editor Jane Rizzo. She’d drop things in and say, “It’d be great if something built here,” so immediately all I’m thinking about is how I can make those adjustments. Very technical. If you’re looking at the frames thinking about individual scenes the whole time, it isn’t until you end up watching the finished film in a room full of people that you almost see what you made. When you’re dealing with something so intense, you need to be able to just look at each piece of music and how it best supports the scene. It’s definitely a loaded film, but when you’re in the middle of it, you lean into this art-technician space. I was talking to Anna Waronker, who wrote the score for Yellowjackets, and she said it was kind of hard to be in that space. She’s singing vocals to that stuff. Not that it’s hard, but it’s emotional there’s a weight to it when you’re navigating those darker worlds.
Right now, I’m learning about rest and stepping away and trying to not be that 18-hour workday person. Before, I was like, The only way you’re an artist is if you’re making, and you have to do a mind shift to think about the sustainability of that. If you need an hour and a half to watch something real dumb on the television, it’s not that you’re bad at your job. I used to be like, I need to finish this, who do I think I am? You romanticize the self-loathing artist. But I want to get up to John Williams’ age and do this. I wanna long haul, so learning how you can dive in emotionally and physically, you need to find rest.
What’s the most difficult score you’ve done?
This is not a copout I swear, but every project has something tricky to navigate. Sometimes it’s a deadline, sometimes you find out there’s suddenly a whole studio that needs to give you notes. Sometimes the challenge is it needs to be so simple and sparse, because the director is allergic to a denser score. This sounds like a copout. I’m a real stinker. But Z for Zachariah I got to record a whole string orchestra. Cat Person was one of the films that needed to be stripped down—we kept doing less and less, because we wanted to be uncomfortable with their feelings, but I got to record some amazing Theremin on that.
I imagine you have a lot of unused music from over the years, either things the director didn’t want to use or things that were stripped down. What do you do with your orphaned music?
I feel like I don’t have that many now, but I’m currently going through my entire archive of films—all 47 films and television stuff I’ve scored since 2011—and I’m finding all kinds of good sorts of bits and bobs, and I don’t know what it’s for, but I’m archiving it now. It’s good to have a lot of materials. In those moments where you’re may not be employed, you’re still composing, because you’re writing and you’re still a composer. There’s something valuable to loving the practice of it. Is it for me to be the next Hans Zimmer? No, you’re writing to find who you are. All those little sketches I’ve made, they’ve ended up all over my music, whether it’s how I navigate my theme or what my voice is. And say I lost a job and I wrote a bunch of music for that job, which happens to every composer. Say you have all this beautiful music, and it doesn’t get used. You still get to use it on your demo reel to be considered for the next whatever. So those things have a long lifeline for all of your output. You have to be really joyous in your making process. Sounds real hippy dippy, but welcome to my world.
What do you do when you can’t tear a director away from their temp score?
I think that’s when hopefully writing away from picture can help. I think it’s good to encourage your filmmakers to sit with it a little longer. I’ve learned from co-composing that sometimes if a choice isn’t a choice you’d make, your knee-jerk reaction is no. But I’ve seen my mind change on a thing after sitting with it. One thing you can do to prevent your director from getting married to a temp is get your library to your picture editor and try to get stuff temped with your music. Not that you want to have to chase your own temp, but at least there’s a language that’s innate to you. Sometimes it just means you find everything else in the film and that’s the last piece you unlock, and they realize, Oh this actually stands out like a sore thumb, and they realize they don’t want that music to bump. Whatever cool thing they’re stoked on in that temp music, hopefully they’ll be like, Wait we made our own cool thing. A lot of times, it doesn’t actually hit until you get to the final mix. If I’m working remotely with the filmmaker, I’m sending off Quicktimes of just the scene with the music in it. They’re more myopic in scope, what this music is doing here, so sometimes I’ll send a longer scene, extending the in and out, so they can see how it dramatically lands. You want them to look at the big picture—bad pun. Ugh sorry, Lord have mercy upon us.
When have you changed your mind on a score?
The biggest version of that is my co-composing relationship with Allyson Newman, who’s also my co-president for the Alliance of Women Film Composers. It could have gone so south when we started working together. I was brought on to score The L Word, and it was important to have queer representation in the sound, but we’d never worked together. I just like her and like her music, but we have different points of entry for a score. It helps you to let go of feeling there’s only one way to score a thing. I learned a lot about her being more objective about the work, like if you got a note from a director that says, “I need more energy,” sometimes the answer isn’t rescore the whole dang thing from scratch. It’s maybe speeding up the tempo, bringing in this new little bass idea. The change doesn’t always need to be big. You also have to be comfortable chucking an idea out if it’s not working.
I built my whole world on being independent and being on my own and Gollum-ing over the keyboard, and it was a great reminder you can have a good time and you can share the job. It’s preparing me for world domination. No, just kidding. For thinking about team building. What does an ethical composing team look like? How can you make sure that people are getting credit and aren’t being overworked and it doesn’t have to be this toxic thing? I think that’s really exciting, too. It’s okay to give other people credit. There’s a version of this work that doesn’t have to live in an abuse cycle.
I won’t name names, but I think we’ve all heard the stories about composers who do not share the credit. Can I ask the one thing you think people don’t understand about your job?
When you say you’re a composer, they think that also means you’re doing the music supervision, like you’re picking the songs, and I don’t know if that’s a gender-bias thing. Like they wouldn’t even think I’d be the composer? I don’t know if it’s that big, or if it’s just these post-production gigs are mysterious to the outside world. Probably a bit of both, I’m sure. The process is pretty mysterious. How do you get from a sketch to a final version? I didn’t know. When I was a kid, I thought john Williams floated in on a cloud and made some giant Darth Vader situation happen. I loved it, but I didn’t have an entry point to that. It wasn’t until I went to a video store and saw other films that I realized it doesn’t have to be full Wagner symphonic blowout. You can still get so much from the quiet spaces. That’s a misconception I had. You could only be a film composer if you’re making the big orchestral sound. That stuff is exciting to me, but there’s just as much power in a chamber score. But that’s my own misconception.