Composing Music for Rondo and All the Wonders It Would Bring to Ryan Franks
Making movie music with Drew is always a twist. We often get to do something a little different, bizarre, quirky or outright strange; and usually steeped in a genre-specific sound. There are no rules about how we approach writing the score, but we do have a few ideas guiding us from the outset.
After Murder Loves Killers Too and even going back to Herbie!, we learned that we love doing at least 1 or 2 songs that are generally as much for our own amusement as for the sake of the film. With MLKT it was "Naughty Mittens" and "Let's Hole", in Rondo it's "This is My Violence" and "It's a Crime". 'Crime' was particularly fun because we got to write some ridiculous lyrics that also described what we're seeing on screen, Never Ending Story-style. We had the pleasure of working with a fabulous French singer-songwriter named Laure Zaehringer to transliterate the ideas into something that made sense for her to sing in French.
When it comes to the score, my partner Scott Nickoley and I really follow Drew's lead. With MLKT the direction was quite specific, to the extent of looking at particular songs and scores that we wanted to follow. With Rondo Drew was a little less specific but had more of a general sound in mind that could be summed up as a cross between Pino Donaggio, Cliff Martinez and Alexandre Desplat - specifically when he's working with Roman Polanski. In this case we were both fascinated by the music to Venus in Fur, and some of that sound crept into the main theme in so much as the use of a lot of augmented chords and pitched percussion.
Additionally, like many of the movies scored by the above composers, Drew creates these big moments where we can do some entertaining music features. My favorite in this movie is the B&E and murder of….well, someone. You know who if you've watched the movie. The chase that ensues around the house was shot in a manner that gave us a free range to go nuts with the score, and the mix of noise, thematic elements and big 80s synths was huge fun to play with.
After Murder Loves Killers Too and even going back to Herbie!, we learned that we love doing at least 1 or 2 songs that are generally as much for our own amusement as for the sake of the film. With MLKT it was "Naughty Mittens" and "Let's Hole", in Rondo it's "This is My Violence" and "It's a Crime". 'Crime' was particularly fun because we got to write some ridiculous lyrics that also described what we're seeing on screen, Never Ending Story-style. We had the pleasure of working with a fabulous French singer-songwriter named Laure Zaehringer to transliterate the ideas into something that made sense for her to sing in French.
When it comes to the score, my partner Scott Nickoley and I really follow Drew's lead. With MLKT the direction was quite specific, to the extent of looking at particular songs and scores that we wanted to follow. With Rondo Drew was a little less specific but had more of a general sound in mind that could be summed up as a cross between Pino Donaggio, Cliff Martinez and Alexandre Desplat - specifically when he's working with Roman Polanski. In this case we were both fascinated by the music to Venus in Fur, and some of that sound crept into the main theme in so much as the use of a lot of augmented chords and pitched percussion.
Additionally, like many of the movies scored by the above composers, Drew creates these big moments where we can do some entertaining music features. My favorite in this movie is the B&E and murder of….well, someone. You know who if you've watched the movie. The chase that ensues around the house was shot in a manner that gave us a free range to go nuts with the score, and the mix of noise, thematic elements and big 80s synths was huge fun to play with.
