NICHOLAS BRITELL,
‘SHE SAID’
Nicholas Britell has featured cellist Caitlin Sullivan on the majority of his film scores — most prominently in “If Beale Street Could Talk.” But when he saw “She Said,” an intense procedural about the two New York Times reporters who broke the Harvey Weinstein sexual assault story and sparked the #MeToo movement, he felt strongly that she should play an even bigger role.
“There are many parts of the film where I would tailor things to match the investigation, and to follow those really functional needs,” he says. “But I think what really drew me to this was to explore the inner emotional world. And the wonderful outgrowth of that was getting to collaborate with Caitlin as the co-producer on the score — which is something we’ve never had the opportunity to do before.”
Sullivan and Britell are also married and have known each other since just after high school.
“Every single day we talk about music,” Sullivan says, “and I think we just basically live and breathe all of these conversations about what we feel about music, what artists are exciting us . ... But it felt like a pretty natural progression to want to just work a little bit more deeply together.”
Sullivan had a strong emotional reaction to Maria Schrader’s film, which stars Carey Mulligan and Zoe Kazan as Megan Twohey and Jodi Kantor fearlessly unraveling the decades-long cover-up of Weinstein’s sexual predation and empathizing with the trauma of his many victims. She translated feelings of fury into visceral effects — like snapping strings on the fingerboard of her cello, or plucking a string with the back of her nail “to create a percussive, reverberant, repetitive sound that I felt was gritty but also tenacious.”
She came up with a swirling arpeggio effect, which Britell turned into a motif for the “memory of trauma.” It “symbolizes this idea of the complexity, and the pain, and the feeling of needing to deal with this in some way,” he says. “You don’t know when this is going to come back, and occasionally it rears its head. That’s something that the score is actively trying to express.”
The largely strings and piano score swirls and snaps and crescendos, at times crashing in huge sonic waves — exploding on behalf of these women who have been terrorized into silence.
“There was this docudrama feel of it,” Britell says. “At the same time, I felt that it was really important that the full range of emotion was felt through this. It’s not a documentary. And on the surface there is this investigation, there is this search for truth, and for the real story — but I think one of the really special things that Maria did, that the whole film does, is it gets into this question of public and private, of the sort of inner feelings and outer feelings of the world.”
“That was really the center of the emotional world that I was looking for in the music,” he says, “was this question of how to balance people’s public lives and their private lives, and the inner journey of both Megan and Jodi — but also in a sense, I think, all women.”