Clark Douglas: We're joined by composer Nathan Johnson. His previous work includes Brick and The Brothers Bloom, and his latest effort is Looper, a sci-fi thriller directed by Rian Johnson and starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Emily Blunt and Bruce Willis. Nathan, thanks so much for taking the time to join us today.
Nathan Johnson: Yeah, definitely, thanks for having me.
CD: Well, this is your third collaboration with your cousin Rian Johnson. I know that every director/composer relationship is different, so I wanted to ask you what your process is like when the two of you begin determining what sort of musical sound is required for a movie.
NJ: It's really fun with Rian. The one great thing about working with Rian is that I come onboard really, really early in the process, which is actually really rare. The composer is usually brought on at the last minute. Yeah, so we start really early talking back and forth about what the world's going to feel like; the sounds that Rian has been thinking about. A lot of times he'll give me references sound-wise; even other composers or musicians and we kind of just dial it back and forth from there.
CD: As you said, composers are generally brought on pretty late in the process, but since you get such an early start on it... do you ever start writing before you've had a chance to see any of the film, or do you prefer to wait until you've seen some footage?
NJ: Yeah, yeah, no, I actually do start writing early sometimes. I will have read the script a number of times. For instance, with The Brothers Bloom I was out in Serbia while they were filming it; hanging out on set. But then, during the day back at my hotel room I'd be working on themes and showing those to Rian. So with Bloom, we actually established the main melodic themes really early on before they even had a rough edit of the film.
CD: Now that's really interesting - you get the opportunity to spend some time on set, and that's something most composers don't get to experience on a regular basis. Does that help you in any significant way during the writing process?
NJ: Yeah! It's really nice to just kind of steep in the feel of the world. It's also really great to see the performances live as they're happening, to see the sets, to be on location... I think it's sort of a luxury, but the more you can put that into your musical world, the better.
CD: There are quite a few distinctive sounds present in this score. I understand you essentially created some new instruments for this movie. Can you tell us about some of the musical experiments you've conducted?
NJ: Yeah, one of the first things Rian and I talked about for Looper was, "How can we create a score for a big action movie without going down some of those well-trodden roads?" So we talked about the idea of gathering field recordings. I actually went down to New Orleans where they were shooting the movie, and I just wandered around the city with a field recorder and a pair of headphones recording anything that I thought was interesting. Some of that was on set; recording mechanical things around the set, but then also wandering around the city recording industrial fans... I did a lot of stuff with the treadmill in our hotel. Then we took all of those sounds, manipulated them, sped them up, slowed them down and spread them across the keyboard so we could actually create the core fabric of the score from these organic; real-world elements.
CD: Those sounds seem to play a particularly dominant role early in the score, but as it moves along you seem to transition into more traditionally musical material.
NJ: Yeah, and it kind of parallels the feel of the movie. A lot of the movie happens on a farm as we go on; that sort of dominates during the second half of the movie. The first sound you hear - the first cue - doesn't have any real instruments in it. It's all stuff that we created from the field recordings. That sort of develops and by the time you get to the very last cue, the last thing you hear is a live celesta being played alone in a room. So it kind of moves along and eventually strips everything back; which sort of operates in parallel with the emotional core of what's going on.
CD: I'm curious, what's the total size of the ensemble? Because at certain points, it does sound like a very big score but for the most part has a more intimate feel than many traditional thriller scores do.
NJ: We kind of split it half and half. The main fabric - what we started with - was built from these created things, but then we worked with the Magic Magic Orchestra (which is this great modular orchestra in San Francisco) and we worked with 14 amazing string players, 3 horns. We had them play like normal string and horn parts, but also had them create textures and atmospherics. There's piano and celesta, and another violinist that I worked with just to create sounds from his violin that I could use atmospherically. Then there's percussion and drums... so it's fairly small, probably twenty-five pieces when you add everyone up. But it's definitely approaching it in a constructed way rather than just a purely capturing than a room approach.
CD: It does seem you've got a pretty diverse array of ways to capture this music. As you say, not just putting a bunch of musicians together in a room, playing and recording and then you're done - there's a lot of additional production involved in an effort like this.
NJ: Yep. Yeah, definitely.
CD: When you begin a project, do you tend to start with your thematic material and then work from there, or do you prefer to figure out the general tone before you start hammering out themes?
NJ: Yeah, I almost always start thematically, but Looper was the first time that I didn't start thematically at all. It was completely tonal and atmospheric on Looper. Rian actually sent me two scenes when we were really early in the editing process, and said, "Hey, we're having trouble finding temp music as placeholder stuff for these. Do you want to just dive in and see what you come up with for this?" So I did that, but that actually felt very much like going down a dark, unfamiliar path for me. Usually, I have the whole thematic arc sketched out and all the different melodic themes, but I knew that this was gonna be so different. I kind of just dove in with those. The demo sketches that I made for those two scenes are almost without change exactly what you hear in the final cut. Rian listened to them and said, "This is it. This is what Looper sounds like; you've found it. This is what we start from."
CD: Is this the first time that you've started on a feature without having some sort of temp track in place to reference at any point?
NJ: Well, those were only a couple of scenes that didn't have temp music. There was temp music for everything else. But yeah, so far all of the features I've done have started with temp music.
CD: One of the interesting things about this score - as we talked about a little earlier - is that while there are those large parts, it often feels more intimate and personal than typical scores along these lines. Was there ever any pressure from the studio or others to create a bigger, more traditional action score or were you free to do whatever you wanted to do?
NJ: Rian does a good job of - if there is that sort of pressure - of insulating his team from it. So if there was, I wasn't that aware of it. We were up in Toronto recently for the premiere, and someone asked me if I felt nervous. At that point, I actually truly didn't feel nervous; it was just excitement. For me, when I'm working on something like this, the director is the only person I'm concerned with satisfying. I get nervous when I'm sending music to the director, and once it feels to them like it's the right tone and like it's telling the story that they're wanting to tell... that's the main thing I care about, helping them advance their vision.
CD: So you're writing music for an audience of one, essentially?
NJ: Yeah! I know that theoretically it's more than that, but I really feel like - even in a way that's different from writing music for my own projects - this is all about bringing one director's vision to the screen.
CD: How much do you think about or worry about creating music which is a satisfying experience on album divorced from the movie? Is that something that enters your mind, or are you just focused on creating something which is effective when married to the images in the film?
NJ: I mean, I definitely think about it. You kind of want to not think about it too much. The thing is, I know there's going to be a soundtrack album. The soundtrack album is kind of a secondary thing, but it crosses my mind. One of the things we did on Looper is once we had mixed the movie, we took a break and came back to revisit everything. I kind of stitched things together and expanded other things so that it worked a little better as an album that you could sit down and listen to; so there weren't twenty thirty-second cues on the record.
CD: Are there any film composers past or present who have influenced you or been a source of inspiration for you?
NJ: Yeah, yeah, quite a few! I mean, Morricone and Nino Rota are two of my favorite classical-type composers. Obviously some of the big boys like John Williams. I grew up loving Star Wars as a kid, and John Williams was kind of my first exposure to film music where I was really aware of what was happening and how into it I was. There are lots of guys working right now, too... I really enjoy some of the stuff the guys who come from more of a songwriting or band background are doing. Obviously, Jonny Greenwood; I'm a big Radiohead fan, anyway. Jon Brion. I thought Trent Reznor's scores for The Social Network and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo were really fantastic, as well.
CD: You've mentioned that you've written music outside the film music world - was film music always the dream, or just sort of something you slipped into?
NJ: No, I actually came from a performing/songwriting/producing/band background. When Rian was doing Brick, I had just finished this concept narrative record with my band. It told a story and had a graphic novella that went alongside it that my brother had illustrated. Rian actually heard that and put two and two together in his head and asked if I'd be interested in taking a stab at doing the music for Brick. I had never thought about the idea of being a film composer. I was obsessed with the idea of narrative storytelling and I grew up just loving movies and music, so looking back I can see the thread, but it wasn't something I dreamed of being when I was a kid.
CD: Just over the course of the three feature films you've score for your cousin, you've the opportunity to explore a pretty wide range of sounds and styles...
NJ: Yeah (laughs).
CD: Is there a particular type of score or project you're eager to try your hand at someday?
NJ: I'm not sure. I guess the answer is that I don't really have a checklist of, "I'd like to do this type of score." The great thing about working with Rian is that when I get a script, I know it's going to be a new, different world. What goes hand-in-hand with that is figuring out a totally new, different approach to the music - which has been really fun and challenging on all three things we've done so far. I guess the "sort-of-answer" to your question is that I'm a lot more interested in the quality of the work than the genre or style of film music.
CD: So as long as it's worthwhile, it doesn't matter what type of music you're doing.
NJ: Yeah, totally. It's so thrilling to be involved with something that you're really excited about artistically. I guess it's a bit like an actor; you get a chance to put on a different hat. Your stamp is always on the music, but it feels really fun to step in and out of different worlds. That's one thing which is very unique to film music which is different from being a performer or in a band.
CD: The comparison to acting is interesting, and perhaps particularly apt in your case and your cousin's case given the diverse nature of your work so far. Brick, The Brothers Bloom and Looper are such wildly different efforts that the average person wouldn't look at them as a group and think, "Oh, all of this came from that guy."
NJ: Right! (laughs)
CD: Was one of those projects more satisfying than the others, or have the experiences been pretty comparable?
NJ: I don't know if as a sum total one was more satisfying, but they were definitely satisfying in different ways. Bloom was extremely satisfying in terms of melody and a songwriter's perspective, whereas Looper has very little of that. But Looper was very satisfying in terms of trying something brand new and seeing where that went. I mean, there isn't much melody in Looper, but it feels very satisfying to have gone down this rabbit hole of building new sound and taking a tonal approach to the world.
CD: Looking ahead, what's next on the horizon for you?
NJ: I've got a couple projects that I'm working on that I'm really excited about, but I don't think I can publicly talk about them yet. They will become apparent very soon*, and I think they're gonna be really cool. (Laughs)
CD: Fair enough. Nathan, thanks so much for taking the time to talk to us about your work.
NJ: Thank you so much for having me, I appreciate it.
*Mr. Johnson is scoring Joseph Gordon-Levitt's forthcoming directorial debut Don John, which hadn't been announced at the time of this interview.
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