Eclectic Selection
Oscar nominees for score illustrate different approaches to music
This year’s contenders for the original score Oscar are a fascinating cross-section of classic and modern approaches to music for films. John Williams, now 92, is on his 54th nomination (his fourth for an “Indiana Jones” movie), while Ludwig Göransson, 39, is seeking his second Oscar, for “Oppenheimer.”
The late Robbie Robertson is only the seventh composer in Oscar history to receive a posthumous nomination in this category; he died Aug. 9 after finishing “Killers of the Flower Moon.” Laura Karpman, who scored “American Fiction,” is just the fifth woman to be nominated in this category and only the second of those to be American; she and English composer Jerskin Fendrix, for “Poor Things,” are first-time nominees.
American Fiction
Karpman created a jazzy backdrop for Jeffrey Wright’s author character, named after jazz great Thelonious Monk. “It’s a musical language that the character might embrace,” she reports. “We wanted everything to have the feeling of jazz, but it needed to have strong thematic elements that could evolve and develop and have different emotions.”
The five-time Emmy winner shared piano duties with jazz artist Patrice Rushen, and carefully tailored her score to support the dialogue throughout. A unique challenge was a slightly different musical approach for each of the film’s three endings (mystery, romantic comedy, 1990s action film).
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny
Five-time Oscar winner John Williams supplied a rousing new score for Harrison Ford’s final appearance as the archaeologist-adventurer, featuring a new theme for Indy’s devious goddaughter Helena (Phoebe Wallerbridge). Her character reminded him of “the femme fatale of earlier film periods where you had gorgeous women who smoked and drank, were adventurous and had mystery in their lives and their faces.” That theme won a Grammy.
The score was “virtuosic in concept and playing,” Williams says. He conducted an 86-piece L.A. orchestra that provided the requisite “color and texture and tone, energy and heroic style, a kind of traditionalism which the films have always embraced.”
Killers of the Flower Moon
For Canadian musician Robertson, “Killers of the Flower Moon” was a prized personal project, not only as his 10th collaboration with director Martin Scorsese but because his mother was Cayuga and Mohawk and he spent much of his childhood on the Six Nations Indian reserve in Canada.
He visited Oklahoma and, he said just before his death, conferred with the locals “to get a feeling for the sound, [then] built an orchestra of guitar sounds, adding different kinds of Native drums... taking something incredibly traditional and mixing it with a world that was sonically modern. I feel that the score is authentic to the heart of the story.”
Oppenheimer
“Black Panther” composer Göransson spent nine months creating more than three hours of music for Christopher Nolan’s biopic of nuclear physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer. He wrote a theme of “haunting loneliness” in strings for the title character and added synthesizers for the “impending doom” of the A-bomb tests. Interestingly, there are no drums or percussion in the score.
“It goes from an intimate personal journey to an operatic piece,” Göransson explains. “We had to focus on the emotional core of the music.” His complex tapestry has so far won a Golden Globe and a Grammy.
Poorthings
First-time movie composer Jerskin Fendrix made the list for his strange-sounding music for Yorgo Lanthimos’ sci-fi comedy. He had to “build this musical universe from scratch,” he says, taking conventional musical instruments and then processing them electronically into often unrecognizable sounds: “something you feel a kinship to, but there is something off about it,” he says.
“The music is basically serving to illuminate the psychological interior of Bella,” he adds, “to furnish these characters with emotional empathy and be able to speak for their experience.” He estimates 95% of the score was written even before shooting began.
The music is basically serving to illuminate the psychological interior of Bella.” — Jerskin Fendrix