Middleburg 2024: For Film Songwriters and Composers, Timing Is Everything

Maybe because it’s one of the most immediate art forms, it can be hard to talk about music. But on Friday at the Middleburg Film Festival, composers and songwriters Lesley Barber, Kris Bowers, Charles Fox, Mychael Danna, Clement Ducol & Camille, Taura Stinson, and Diane Warren were able to get at some key insights into how scores and songs can support great film storytelling. As it does with most things, the time musicians have to grapple with a story matters. 

The danger of too little time is that you won’t be able to get the work done, of course, but there is such a thing as too much time too. Danna told the panel and the crowd at Middleburg that it’s possible to over-rotate and second-guess yourself into losing sight of what the music needs to accomplish. “No one can procrastinate as well as me. My favorite way is to do a lot of research. I’ll tell myself I’m researching,” Danna said somewhat tongue in cheek. “If you have too much time, it actually is distracting.” 

Danna also told the panel that some of his best score work, on Mira Nair’s “Monsoon Wedding,” was done in a blistering three weeks — one week to write it, one week to record it in India, and then one week to mix it. “I didn’t have time to double-think things like we all do,” Danna said. “There’s definitely a sweet spot [in terms of time on a job].” 

But that sweet spot isn’t always such a tight turnaround, at least it doesn’t have to be so high-pressure. Kris Bowers, composer of the score for this year’s “The Wild Robot,” was on the film for two years and laid down music for a couple of key sequences that were animated to music, rather than the music composed to picture. Bowers also appreciates having a more compressed period of time to lay down his ideas and get the right colors and tone for the music. But he also likes still having plenty of runway to refine and iterate on the music after that. 

Bowers initially was shown storyboards for “The Wild Robot” but as the animation began to come in and the timings changed, his music had to change with it. “We had cues that felt like they were working really well structurally but I had to continue to tweak because I wanted it to be recorded to picture and not need [the music to be edited afterward],” Bowers said. “It was a process of just continuing to refine and refine.” 

Composers Ducol and Camille on “Emilia Perez” were responsible for both the songs and score of the Netflix musical, which meant coming onto the project very early but also being able to adapt as the production unfolded. They rewrote a whole number once Selena Gomez was cast, they said, to bring the characters’ voice and persona more in line with Gomez — not necessarily in terms of vocal range, but in terms of the heart and the personality she brought to the character. They rethought how they approached the score, too. 

‘Emilia Perez’Netflix

“When it came to writing the score, we thought that we would have to create a unity for the songs. And eventually, the songs were very different from one another because they followed the transformation of the characters,” Camille said. “We found unity in the score. There was a kind of epiphany at one point where we realized the score should be vocal.” 

That process of discovery and adjustment is key for both composers and songwriters, and it always requires a great collaborator in the films’ directors. But the panelists reflected that maybe the only thing that’s harder than talking to someone without much fluency in music is talking to someone who thinks they know just enough about music to start backseat composing. 

“Some people just have immense clarity and some people are a little bit harder to understand,” Stinson said. Stinson worked on original songs for Steve McQueen’s “Blitz,” and praised both McQueen and actor Saoirse Ronan for taking her demos and making them their own. Regardless of whatever directions given by the film’s team, Stinson said that it was important to always be aware of your initial instincts and ideas as you make adjustments. 

“Don’t scrap it because once you are aware of what it is that you are bringing to the table as a creator and they know that you’re not backing down, like, ‘Hey, you’ll know if this works, but let’s try it,’ I feel like they respect you more when you stand firm on what you believe in,” Stinson said. 

‘Blitz’Apple Studios

Danna, who has had to delicately redirect some directors who have picked up guitars in meetings, said that it always comes back to the story. The discussions that lead to the most fruitful musical results are invariably about character and narrative. 

“On ‘Life of Pi,’ it’s a film with all these high-falutin ideas about philosophy and religion and pain… I would take all these notes [from director Ang Lee] ‘The sky is the father and the Earth is the mother and the sea is this,’ and I would write it down,” Danna said. “And then, when I finally got the film and started writing, after a month, both of us were like ‘This is terrible. What’s wrong with it?’ And Ang went, ‘Just forget all that stuff and just write nice music.’” 

Warren confirmed Lee’s advice from a songwriting perspective, too. Sometimes, the surest approach is to try to stay out of your own head, except to envision the song that will just be nice — and right — for the picture.

“I try to write a song that I want to see in a movie, honestly,” Warren said.