Will, it's great to have you on the podcast today.
Thanks for joining us. Thank you for having me.
It's great to be here. You're very welcome. We're
here to talk about the score you've composed
for Tuna. And for listeners who aren't aware,
the film focuses on the life of a gifted piano
tuner called Nicky, played by actor Leo Woodall,
and his meticulous gift for cracking safes. Anyway,
I won't go into the plot. I've already interviewed
the film's director, Daniel Roa, for Pianist
magazine. But what I want to know is, firstly,
what made him decide it had to be you as the
composer? Goodness, well, I was very lucky to
be involved. I met Daniel, I was introduced to
him by the film's producers, Black Bear. I had
scored two other movies of theirs, one called
Dumb Money, another called Immaculate. And they
introduced me to Daniel. And I think the first
thing that he explained to me was that he wanted
to make a, after the success that he'd had with
Navalny, he wanted to make a movie movie. He
wanted to make a thing that he would want to
watch, that he would want to be entertained by.
And we talked a lot about the kinetic energy
that he wanted, this kind of propulsion. And
I think I got the gig because I, there's a lot
of jazz. in the script, in the story. And I think
I got the gig because I asked the question, what
would it sound like if Bill Evans had access
to all of my analog synths and modular synths
and all my various toys? And he was kind of like,
yeah, do that. I want to hear that. So we just
kind of jumped in and we're off to the races.
And the movie was finished. It was shot. There's
a lot of music that's performed on camera that
was composed by Marius de Vries. so that was
all completed and he he knew that he wanted the
score to be something very different to that
music yes that's what's very interesting because
i have listened to your tracks and and of course
i've seen the movie um and absolutely you're
right very very different and i mean the piano
doesn't really feature but i think it features
in a slightly different way doesn't it if you
could explain that Yeah, it does. I mean, this
movie is about safe cracking. So, you know, obviously
there's piano tuning in it, but there's also
this other larger story. And I suggested this
idea to Daniel kind of early on, like, wouldn't
it be interesting if there was piano in the school,
but it's not really, you don't identify it as
the sound of a piano. So I own these mallets
that are kind of like MIDI. And I have a lobotomized
piano harp in the back of my studio. Basically,
my wife had made it. She's a visual artist and
she built an art piece using the hammers of the
piano and had left me with the harp. I just have
this thing sitting in the back and sometimes
I use it for percussion and sound effects and
stuff like that. So for Fortuna, I attach these
sticks. mallet midi mallet devices around the
harp and started programming these very complex
rhythms and they're almost inhumanly playable
they're very mechanical and and it's very percussive
and quite unusual sounding and it you know it
has a tone it has a pitch because it's coming
from the harp but it's definitely it it served
us really well as the sort of the sound of the
safe cracking Oh, it's so interesting. So you
were really focusing on the safe cracking side
of the story because there are two parallel stories
here, aren't there? There's piano tuning and
safe cracking. So you thought, that's me. I'm
going on to the safe cracking side of things.
I mean, it's certainly where I, that was my jumping
off point. I think that in order to unlock the
sound of the movie, Daniel felt like we needed
to figure out what these heist EQs were going
to sound like. He didn't want it to kind of be.
a generic sort of heist sounding, you know, kind
of funky vibe, if that makes sense. Yeah. Yeah.
He wanted something a little more unusual. So
from there, once we kind of unlocked that, then
there's a whole other side of the story, which
is really Nicky's isolation. And that's much
more of a melodic part of the score. It is fascinating
because you're right when you said percussive,
you know. The rhythms are fantastic. They're
just as important as the sound, really, aren't
they? And having watched the movie, the whole
clicking of the save, it is very, very rhythmic.
So I think you've really created a fantastic
atmosphere there. Yeah, thank you. And it was
also really fun to kind of go back and forth
with Greg O 'Brien, the editor. When we were
doing those sequences, I would start to score
it and I'd... get these rhythms and these sounds
and and you know it's really edited really tight
um with the with the sound effects and with the
music and greg would take my music and he'd be
like oh i just i wish if that frame was just
over here a little bit and was lining up a bit
more with what you've got here that would be
so much better so we kind of went back and forth
it was it was it was pretty great like sometimes
you don't as a composer sometimes you come in
and the edit is completely locked and that's
it but in this case things were still kind of
moving around and he was able to really change
the edit according to so what i was working on
well this is what's really interesting because
on our pianist podcast we don't normally interview
composers for film um so it's it's a rather new
one i'd love to know how one goes about composing
music what is the process do you read the story
first yeah i mean it's every every project is
different we come on at different parts of the
process Sometimes I read a script and I respond
to that and I'm involved very early on and maybe
even I'll have my music being played on the set
while they're shooting a scene. In the case of
Tuna, I came on pretty late and I think that
Daniel and Greg had already tried a bunch of
different things and decided on what they wanted
the score to function as. So in that sense, there
was... There was experimentation on my end in
terms of sound, but it was pretty set what they
wanted the music to say. And sometimes they use
temp score, like they'll take pieces that exist.
Sometimes it's pieces of mine that I've done
for different projects and they'll put those
in there as like temporary music and it helps
them to kind of inform the edit. Sometimes it's
the bane of a composer's existence. It's something
that we call temp love, where a director will
get so used to a piece of music that they've
been editing to, and then you come along and
have to replace it. And sometimes it can be kind
of a little complicated. In this movie, there
was none of that, thank goodness. But yeah, that's
definitely happened in the past. Yeah, I think
with Tuna also, the main thing, when you're scoring
a... a movie like this i think melody is so important
and using melody for story um and i found myself
writing a lot of the melodies i'm a saxophone
player originally um and i found myself kind
of writing a lot of the melodies on that instrument
for some reason interesting so let's say you
don't read the script and think all right I now
have to compose this bit where he breaks into
the safe here and then I now have to is that
is that how it goes you know yeah it's sometimes
absolutely like you know there'll be a I tend
to kind of watch something or or read a part
of a script and then sit behind the piano and
and start thinking about what I've just read
or what I'm watching um and I have this kind
of I call it this eureka moment where I'm I've
stumble on some chords or a melody that will
be a direct response to what i've just you know
absorbed um sometimes it happens straight away
sometimes it takes a minute but um i always have
to have that kind of that moment of of discovering
the melody that you know one thing couldn't live
without the other interesting and i guess like
with a movie one can almost say it's a bit like
a symphony in that you've got to There's got
to be bits that intertwine, that it's got to
be cohesive as one from beginning to end, all
of your tracks. That's right. Yeah. And again,
I feel like for me, the key to that is melody,
like having some sort of thematic breadcrumb
that you can kind of use as a tool. A director
said to me recently that you have to let the
audience own the melody. let them wrap their
arms around the melody and then you can take
that melody and you can take a sledgehammer to
it, fragment it and use it as a tool and, you
know, use it contextually. And that's certainly
something that we were doing in Tuna. Wow. Well,
you obviously know so much about theory and composing.
I mean, how did you get into, did you study composing?
I did, yeah. I mean, I took a bit of a funny...
route to get here I went to the University of
Westminster in England did the commercial music
degree which had a little bit of recording and
composition and music theory and whatnot and
I've always wanted to be a film composer I just
have always been obsessed with film school since
I was a kid and really the only thing I know
the only way I know how to make a living is writing
music and I think I was 20 two I'd come out of
college and I rather naively thought that scoring
commercials would get me into scoring movies
so that would be a way in and of course it wasn't
but it was a way that I was able to get a ton
of experience very quickly and got very good
at different genres and whatnot and then I moved
to America and I became an in -house composer
at a music house there and all the while just
kind of Scoring commercials, being in bands,
always performing, doing all kinds of different
things. And then eventually just I found a group
of indie filmmakers in New York and I started
scoring their movies. And one went to Sundance
and that was kind of the beginning of it all.
Oh, how wonderful. That sounds like a dream,
really. Yeah. Yeah. A lot of hard work. I'm sure.
Yes, I'm sure. You say you've always loved. um
wanted to be a film composer so you obviously
have watched so many movies and so many are there
are there some composers that write for film
like legendary black and whites to the present
that you're just like such a big fan of of course
yeah i think i i sang the whole score of star
wars to my parents when i was six years old and
then they went off and bought me a violin that
i tortured them with for a while um but i yeah
i mean when i i think i was a When I was a kid
and I realized that one person had been responsible
for all these movies, all these tunes that I've
been humming in my head, it was kind of like,
oh, I want to do that when I grow up. That's
amazing. The first record I bought was Enya Morikone's
score to The Good, The Bad and The Ugly. I still
play that to my kids. I kind of can't believe
that someone invented that language that's such
a... Pea shade at this point, but all of those
colours. Morricone is amazing. Did he do Cinema
Paradiso? He did. That's right. He did do. And
The Mission that he should have won the Oscar
for. And Bernard Herrmann as well. Oh, yes. Yes.
Oh, I'm sure. How wonderful. I'm looking at you
on screen here and you've got a lot of keyboards
behind you. I do. Yes. You've got one, two, three,
four that I can see at the moment. Maybe tell
us a bit about them. There's dozens. Well, this
one here is called a Mellotron, which is famous
for being the Strawberry Fields device. The Beatles
used it a lot. This one was built by the sons
of the original inventor. They're based in, I
think they're in Sheffield. And it's basically
the world's first sampler. Each key activates
a... a tape head and there's a tape that's revolving
around inside and the sound is kind of activated
by playing the the tape head up against the the
tape that's going around so it's kind of like
it can play all sorts of different sounds yeah
this thing is called a parlor organ that's next
to it which is like a very old Hammond organ
kind of thing and then that's my my piano over
there that um my wife rescued from an estate
sale oh my goodness Looks good. Isn't there something
like a glockenspiel too or something? Yeah, that's
a vibraphone. Vibraphone. Yes, I can hear that
quite a bit in the music. Is that right? Yes,
there's a couple of cues. It didn't make it into
the movie, but on the album, I ended up going
back to some earlier versions. It's one of the
nice things about making a soundtrack album for
movies. You can kind of, you get so obviously
you're... slave to the story and slave to picture
and when you remove that and go back to the kind
of just the music it's kind of fun to just be
like oh I've always wanted that piece of music
to be 30 seconds longer and now it can it can
breathe a bit more so yeah amazing amazing I
think there is another interesting instrument
that we should know about in the movie a German
piano oh yes that is also somewhat piano related
It's called a Stemgerat and it's a, it's a sort
of a 1960s East German piano tuning device. I
guess the idea was that you would put it on top
of the piano, has 12 buttons on the front that
play pitches and it has a tiny speaker and it
plays a, I guess it has an oscillator inside
it and it plays a tone and you would use that
as a reference to tune the piano. But it has
just this lovely sort of slightly ghostly wonkiness
to it that I, was really into. And I built a
lot of the chords in the movie around layering
these tones up together. Daniel started calling
it the Stasi synth because, you know, East German.
Oh my goodness. Yeah. Oh, East German tuner.
Goodness. Yeah. Wow. Weirdly appropriate. And
then also just I would run that thing into tape
delays and other pedals and whatnot. And it became
this kind of the sound of. Nicky's trauma, like
his kind of jeopardy. Yes. When the tape's going
around, I'm like playing it with my fingers,
like as the tape is hitting the tape head, giving
it this kind of tape slip sound, I guess. Interesting.
And did the, when you were composing, did you
know who was going to be the actor? Did you know?
I did, yeah, because it was, the movie was shot
and. The edit was pretty much finished. So of
course, yeah, I was like, oh my goodness. Are
you kidding me? I got to meet a couple of times
at screenings and he's just an extraordinary,
lovely man. What an inspiration. And I think
I've met him once in a restaurant in London.
Oh, really? Yeah. Yeah, I think he lived in or
lives in London. Yeah. I believe. I believe that's
where Daniel met him for the first time. It was
a little local Italian restaurant, you know,
but. we were all like in awe you know but um
and i believe he also plays the piano he does
yes that's right he uh from what i understand
he he was going to become a musician and then
acting kind of took over but yes he's a very
accomplished jazz musician yes fantastic and
of course leo goodall woodall why did i say goodall
leo is such a star at the moment i mean he's
hypnotic on sprit on screen you know Yeah, it's,
what a charisma. And I guess I gather he did
a lot of work to, he's not, at least at the beginning
of this process, wasn't necessarily a pianist,
but he did the work, did three months of training
to be able to perform that piece at the end,
which is quite, quite amazing. That piece at
the end is amazing. And obviously that was composed
by Marius de Vries, wasn't it? That's right.
Yes. And did you work with Marius a bit? This
is what's interesting to me. He is the executive
music producer and you're the original score
composer. Correct. Do you work a lot together
or you don't need to? Not really. Yeah, it was
pretty separate. So Marius was involved in...
picking the music that's basically in what we
call the diegesis, what's in the universe of
the film. So anything that's on camera, music
that's coming out of a radio, that kind of thing.
So by the time I came on board, that was all
kind of locked. So I had Marius's music when
I was watching the cut and I would just have
to make sure that there are certain moments where
my music overlaps with his and, you know, I have
to be in the same key. I have to make sure it's
not a... A dog's dinner, as they say, when the
two things collide. So, yeah, that was something
I had to be mindful of. How interesting. Being
in the same key. Yeah. Or at least related. You
know, I can't be like G and G sharp. You'll have
to modulate very carefully. Totally. Yeah. Or
be minimal. You know, there's a couple of sequences
towards the end where the score is kind of already
established itself. We already understand. the
palette that it's in um and there's like a lot
of music that's happening on camera and i just
kind of have to provide tension and stay out
of the way you know it's it's um it's a dance
sometimes this movie obviously is about a piano
tuner and music but don't you think i mean has
it been different for you composing for a film
where music is an important part of the plot
or Don't you think almost that music is sound
is such an important part of any movie? I mean,
it is, isn't it? Yeah, I guess I kind of do feel
like that. I've always felt that music can be
such a driver of story. But of course, because
this is such a music driven story, you know that
it's going to have a different level of focus
on it. And particularly with sound, I think it
was really important for Daniel to... to have
it's never really underscore it's always like
even if the score is minimal it's very much front
and center and the same with the design where
he's using johnny burns of sound design to really
be its own character and really draw out a certain
kind of characteristic of nikki and his identity
and his his hearing problems and all of that
it's a it's a huge storytelling device in the
film And the score is working in concert with
a lot of the design. And he obviously knew you'd
be perfect for that role. Yeah. Interesting.
Yeah. Yeah, no, he did say, he said that with
Tuna, he wanted to invite viewers into a world
where music, sound and silence shape a man's
identity. What do you think to that? Yeah, I
mean, that's really, I think. After doing the
safe cracking cues, the first important cue that
I had to write was we started calling it the
lonely boy cue. And I really it's to do with
because of Nicky's condition, he's just really
isolated from society and having this hearing
problem has made him kind of close off from the
world. So, yeah, that was really. I think that's
really what Daniel's talking about. And that
piece of music was something that I had to kind
of really uncover Nicky's identity, like really
get to know his lost dream. Yeah, because there's
a lot of pain there. And there's also pain in
his condition, in his hearing condition, that
it causes intense pain. So there's a lot of sadness
and pain in Nicky, isn't there? There is, yeah.
And it certainly begins that way. And melodically,
we start. with it feeling very kind of lonely.
He's very isolated, but then he meets Ruthie
and taking that same melody and injecting some
romance into it and some, you know, it brings
him to life. And I think, again, that's kind
of where using melody to shape the story arc
is so helpful. Interesting. And having... now
this is now over you've moved on what have you
what have you learned from composing for tuna
um goodness that's a great question I just thought
of it yeah I I think that it's funny you bring
up silence I think that um something that I've
I've had to sort of really train myself and I
think all of us are victims of this a bit that
sometimes I can throw a lot at something um and
I think Less is more. It's been really important
to kind of understand the power of silence and
the power of where you can just kind of let something
breathe. And it makes music more impactful, I
think, when you're more spare with it. And I
do find myself doing that a lot with my work.
I tend to write a lot and then use the sledgehammer
approach, just kind of tear it apart and try
and figure out what is this thing? how can i
say the same thing with with less you know and
i i think especially with melody that's that's
really important i was listening when i was making
the record and listening to the those original
versions of lonely boy when i'm obviously just
stumbling around trying to find the melody still
there's always a lot of notes and i think that
the more experience you you have the more you
start to kind of train yourself to really just
less you know just try to try to be more articulate.
It is amazing. I guess it's, you know, also with
classical music, some of the most beautiful melodies
are the simplest. That's right. Yeah, absolutely.
I agree. And where are you going? What's next
in store for you? Are you already working on
another project or two? Yeah, I had another movie
at Sundance with this one back in January called
Knife, which is the attempted murder of Salman
Rushdie. So we're... getting that one out there
soon um and then I'm on a I'm about to start
a tv show um which is very exciting lovely lovely
oh god we're nearly at the end I was just thinking
actually any advice for listeners who want to
follow the same that same career path um I think
yeah just listen to your heroes I uh I find myself
still just buying all those records and you know
consuming film scores and sometimes listening
away from pictures is really helpful and being
able to kind of identify what what the music
is doing sometimes it's it's hard to kind of
divorce it from the picture sometimes and just
being able to listen to it isolated is uh it's
a good thing to do and i guess also it's it's
hard to know when inspiration will hit isn't
it you you know you can't just go and sit in
a room and say right now it's i've got to find
the melody right well I do yeah it's a job isn't
it it is yeah my my wife like I said is a visual
artist and she she borrowed a a theory or a concept
I guess from Francis Bacon that there's like
there's no such thing as inspiration like it
just comes from work like you just have to get
into like a rhythm and you have to just wake
up and do it every day and And then the inspiration
will naturally come. I kind of share that same
mantra that you just, if you treat it like a
regular thing that you do all the time, good
things start to happen. Are you like a nine to
five person? I mean, I tend to be. I have kids,
so I sort of have to be in that sense. And my
studio is, we bought the house next door and
my studio is nearby. Brilliant. That's very key,
I think. Otherwise, my kids wouldn't remember
my name. Well, you seem to have it really well
sorted there. You said you're in L .A.? Yes.
Yeah. Perfect place. Yeah. Yeah. I was in New
York for a long time and I realized I was just
I for a long time felt like I was in the wrong
town. So we rather than moving upstate when we
decided to have kids, we were like, OK, time
to head west. Wow. Go where the film community
is. And a good decision. Seems to be, yeah. Great.
Oh, great. Well, listen, Will, it's been great
speaking to you. Yeah, great to chat to you too.
Absolutely. And, you know, I've seen the movie.
I think it's brilliant, sound included. And I'm
sure a lot of listeners now will go out and book
their tickets in the cinemas across the UK. Yes,
indeed. Please do. Yeah. And thanks so much for
joining me. Thank you for having me. Great to
chat. Thank you. Okay, I think that was fine,
don't you? Awesome. Yeah, great. Awesome. I'll
let the guys know when it comes out. It should
be very soon, within a week. Okay, awesome. Good,
because it's now just out today in the UK. It
is, isn't it? Yeah, this is our big day. Yes,
yes, yes, yes. So, you know, thanks so much for
joining me. Of course. Thanks for having me.
Lovely to meet you. You too. Take care now. Ciao.
Bye. Bye.