To celebrate the release of Carmen and to tie in to his work on the on air fourth season of Succession, Chris Connor spoke with renowned composer Nicholas Britell about re-interpreting Bizet’s ppera for the 2020s, how he approached the Star Wars universe with Andor, and how the score for Succession has evolved over the course of its four seasons.
What was your first step in approaching Carmen?
It’s interesting. I’ve been friends with [director] Benjamin Millepied for a long time, I think we met about 14 or 15 years ago. I remember the first conversations we had together. Obviously, he’s such a phenomenal choreographer and he has many different talents. He’s an amazing photographer as well. He was making lots of short films. I remember from our earliest conversations, we talked a little about, you know, if he was going to do a feature, what would it be? I was going back through my emails, and I found the email it was 10 years ago, he sent me an email that said, ‘I want to do Carmen, but I want it to be totally different’. I remember my first reaction to him was, there have been so many amazing adaptations of Carmen over the years and I said, ‘you know, if you really want to reimagine, and we really want to do something different, I don’t want to rearrange Bizet’s incredible work, I actually want to do a totally original score and I think we should have original songs as well’.
I think from the very beginning, we were really on the same page about that. And that was kind of the beginning of the process. In a sense, it was thinking the way we thought about it was Carmen was really a touchstone almost like a starting point for a story that Benjamin was going to reimagine and then see where the music took us. So, there was a very long period of time, many, many years where we talked and I wrote some pieces that might be in the film dance pieces. And then when we started talking about the songs themselves, I was really lucky to bring on a group of incredible collaborators. Julio de Venegas, Torres, Stinson, and the DOC, each of whom brought their own unique vision to the songs that we worked on together. So, it became this kind of wonderful collaborative process to figure out the music in the film itself. And then obviously, much later came the score, which itself was its own sort of journey of discovery, I would say.
How did you find scoring the dance sequences and moving between those and the main narrative?
It was interesting in so many ways, to be honest, it was very natural in a way working with Benjamin, he has such an incredible facility with dance and with choreography, and I was curious, I’d worked with him on many other projects in the past before that, but nothing like this. Wiykd Benjamin would want me to make a lot of changes to his vision, or would it be something else entirely? What was fascinating was, that once he heard the pieces that I was writing, instead of asking me for changes, he didn’t ask for any changes. He said I want to match the scene to your music. So, it was really kind of phenomenal in that way. That it was very important to him that the music has its own kind of integrity in a way and its own life. I kept marvelling at that, there were certain sequences, for example the climactic sequence with the DOC as the ref and the match, and that was something where the DOC and I had written that that track and he had put all the lyrics together and performed this thing. This was all before the film was shot. And I remember thinking to myself, I’m sure Benjamin is going to, you know, ask for it to be changed some, and it wasn’t – he just fully matched it to the music, which is kind of incredible as a composer to see that happen, where you write a piece of music and a film comes out. That’s not the usual. That’s not the usual order of operations.
If we move on to Andor. How important was it for you to re-interpret the sound of Star Wars?
What was interesting in the sense that for me, it was about following Tony Gilroy’s vision from the moment that I was brought on, I’ve always been a huge Tony Gilroy fan. Michael Clayton is one of my favourite movies and it was really wonderful because right from the outset, both Kathleen Kennedy and Tony said that they really wanted the soundscape to be something very unique. They wanted it to be uniqueto this world that we were crafting this part of the story. So in my mind it was less about reinterpreting it and sort and more about just saying, if I’m imagining this world with Tony, and just dealing with exactly what’s in front of you, what would we do?
What was wonderful was we had a really strong way in, which was actually in a parallel to Carmen, there was music that was going to be in the show. This was months before they started shooting. So, Tony said to me, here’s, here’s what’s happening. Here’s the sequence, which was the funeral sequence in episode 12. And he basically said, y’ou know, we must figure out this music. What is the music of Ferrix? What is this music, which will mean so much to this community, that when Maarva gives her speech, this will be the music that we imagine has been performed throughout the ages, at this moment, in a person’s life at their eulogy, essentially, the funeral?’ So it was really beautiful in the sense of bringing a sense of emotion and a sense of tradition, to a world that I was only imagining. But what was exciting was that once I played that first idea for Tony, he immediately said that that was it and it gave us a framework for beginning to approach Ferrix certainly. And then the overall story and then, you know, from there, okay, well, if this works for Ferrix and is obviously so central to our story, where do we go from there, and Maarva and Cassian, and thinking about all these elements. So, it really was the on-camera music which gave me my sort of foothold in a way into it.
I think in a lot of ways, the soundscape was something that, to me, because this is before Rogue One, which is obviously before Star Wars: Episode IV, I wanted there to be a feeling that it was older in a sense, you know, and perhaps it’s because I’m a child of the 80s, I was born in 1980. But to me, if I wanted something to feel more retro, like, there is something about that sort of sound of analogue synthesizers that to me have a sense of the past, a sense that evokes to me a feeling of history, or an established idea for an earlier time. And so there was part of me that felt like, okay, these analogue synthesizers, this sound, I want to bring that in somehow to this story, which takes place before these other stories, you know, and so that was kind of part of that. And the other nice thing that happened with the synthesizers was that the story, in the beginning, is very gritty, there’s a futuristic noir kind of sound, that we see cityscapes and certainly on Morlana, and that sound felt like it matched well, early I sort of went from there and obviously, that was just very much the beginning of the sound barrier and then it evolved. It basically evolved every episode all the way through the 12.
The theme changes slightly across the course of the show, was that something that was always planned?
So that was an interesting thing, too. I remember the theme was an early idea that I showed, I think some of the first things I really played for Tony were certainly the funeral music and the signalling sequences, we had to figure that out for the third episode and then working on an early theme idea, and timing it out. It’s 35.2 seconds, exactly. What I remember. I couldn’t really do and until I knew the time, you know, that’s the thing with these opening sequences. And what really happened there was that I remember, the story has such a vast scope and it’s so important I feel with anything dramatic that it reflects the story and the characters. When I started putting that idea together. I remember saying to Tony, there are so many ways that I could approach this. There are so many ways to orchestrate it. It could be very intimated would be emotional for Cassian’s journey, it could be a very large scale for the scope, you know., I remember coming up with a few of these versions, and we sort of looked at each other and said, well, maybe we don’t have to choose. Maybe we could actually tailor the opening for every episode. So that it would be it would reflect where we’ve been and where we’re going. That was what happened. So, it was a little bit of a realisation that you didn’t want to have to just choose one.
Filming is underway for season two. Have you got some ideas for where the score might go for season two?
I do and I’ve already been working on some things with Tony so far. So, there are definitely things that are in the works. I do have some very, very strong ideas for hopefully where we can take this.
How do you think the score for Succession has evolved over the course of the show, with the journey the characters have been on?
So every season, it’s been interesting, because early on I think it was at the beginning of the second season when this idea coalesced to me, I remember saying to Jesse, you know, many, many years ago, ‘what if I approached each season score, like a movement of a symphony’? I remember was on the second season at that point where the first movement of a classical symphony usually is an Allegro movement, where you sort of introduce ideas and the pace is quicker and there’s an energy to it, of course.
The second movement of a classical symphony is oftentimes an Adagio, or slower movement, where it’s perhaps a little more inward. I remember at the time that really matched what I was imagining for Kendall’s, melancholy journey, and season two has this sort of slow Adagio kind of concept. Not that all the pieces will be that way but as a starting point, for my thought process, season three of a classical symphony was usually perhaps a Scherzo, which actually comes from the Italian for joke, but they were the sort of fast and fleet kind of movements that might have a minuet, in them, as well, there’s different sometimes they were in three, four time or had a triple kind of, you know, meter. Then the fourth movements of symphonies could be a lot of different things, you know, sometimes they were a presto, really fast, sometimes they could be a rondo, where, you know, you enter, you know, introduce an idea and go away and keep coming back, you know, to an idea. So, there are a lot of different ways to approach a fourth movement.
I think, for me, that’s kind of how I thought of this fourth season. It does just so happen, that the four movements line up with the four seasons that we’re having but that was not planned. If it had gone to a fifth season, I would have had to imagine a fifth movement of some sort. But for the fourth movement, there’s a lot happening in season four. So, I wrote a massive amount of new things for season four, as you can see, so far we’ve introduced some of those things. I think, at the end of each season two for sure and season three, there’s almost like kind of a metaphorical bomb that goes off in a way and then we’re left reeling from that going into the next season. So, I really started thinking, you know, for season four, about just the fact that it’s more and more unclear where the power will go and what is going to happen, the “succession” is even more up in the air, and I let that kind of feeling of heightened drama and the battles that may emerge. That was some of the early feelings that I had about the music.
Thank you so much for your time Nicholas and congratulations on Carmen, Andor and Succession.
Chris Connor
