Original subtitles

It definitely started off with Adam Wingard asking my band,

Zombie, that's our name, he asked us to score his very first feature film. And

it was a terrific experience. It was a lot of fun.

It was an interesting film because there was a lot of pre -production for this

film.

The pre -production stages were going on for months and months.

And I had just put out a record just of my own music called Light Echoes. And

it's all synthesizer music.

It's very moody and ambient and electronic.

But Adam contacted me because he was really into that album. He really

that album.

And he thought, like, a sound that sort of works similar to what you're doing on

that album would work really well for this film. So that was how it all

We had already been friends for a decade at that point. And he got in touch and

said, we want to try to use you.

You know, would you be available to write some prerecorded material for the

film?

The general themes were developed, some of them, before shooting had even

started because Adam Wingard had really wanted to have

something in his mind while he was shooting, while they were filming.

So some of that music, there were earlier iterations of it that

I had produced a year before the film came out.

that Adam had wanted to listen to and sort of help him, I guess, just sort of

like get in the mood for filming these scenes.

There were a few different stages. There was the pre -record stage and the pre

-production stage.

I flew out and was on set for the first three days of shooting.

Adam wanted me there to sort of get an impression of how things were

gonna look, how things were gonna feel.

So I spent three days on set and I actually got to make a cameo in the

music is very heavily inspired by bands like Tangerine Dream, Vangelis, stuff

like that.

And so I draw very heavily from that.

They were also, they had great, incredible albums and film scores in the

well. So yeah, we definitely wanted it to have an 80s vibe.

And I have, I don't know if you can, you probably can't tell through the video,

but these are all vintage synthesizers. These are all synthesizers from the 70s

and 80s. So I can dial up these sounds with ease.

That is sort of my thing.

Basically, it starts by playing the scene, and if after a number of

usually after watching a scene a couple times, I start getting ideas.

Ideas start populating in my brain.

And I'll start, you know, I have all my synthesizers wired up. I'll start just

trying to sketch things out as I'm watching.

You know, sometimes I just like to do it in a more improvisational way. I have

maybe a foundation.

built, but I want there to be more of a building and a momentum and stuff. But

sometimes I'll end up just like, and this is how I've read that Sean

and Alan Howarth did it, that they would watch the film and just improvise along

until they found ideas that fit, that worked.

And that method has worked really well for me.

When the filming was finished and the editing was done and they had a lot to

edit and they were ready for me to start working, I would wake up early

in the morning. I'm an early riser. I wake up early and I get to work and I

all day.

And then in like the evening, maybe like around dinner time, I make mixes of

everything that I've worked on for that day.

And I send them to Adam because at the time they were, he's out in L .A.

and I'm in New York. So literally I was sending him dailies,

essentially. It was dailies of the score. I would send him tracks that I'm

working on.

And he had, Adam actually is a very, he's a very musical guy. He's

released. some synthesizer albums that are good.

He definitely has ideas when it comes to music. So when I would send him ideas,

sometimes he would come back and be like, this part is really good, but what

about if we took this part and maybe slowed it down by like half its tempo,

know? It was like, hmm, that's an interesting idea. I'll try that.

And it always worked out. Adam's a very musical guy and working with him was

easy because...

I feel like we could communicate on a... Like, we had a good communication,

where sometimes directors literally just have no musical training

whatsoever, no idea how to talk about music.

So when they send notes, they can sometimes be very ambiguous and a little

confusing sounding.

But Adam always knew exactly what he wanted, and he knew how to phrase it.

He knew how to explain it in a way that I would understand.

It was a great time working with him. We had a lot of fun.

That's me.

I wanted something that had sort of a vulnerable and

melancholy feel that we could connect to Micah's

character. And all of these themes, a lot of the tracks on the score are

different motifs for each character interplaying with each other.

And so the main theme was a combination of what I call Micah's motif,

which is just a really simple five or seven note motif. It's

played on my Chord Poly 6.

And it has, like, sort of almost like a synth flute kind of sound. I used my

Sequential Circuit Profit 1, Pro 1, for a sequence that runs underneath

all of that that sort of is meant to underscore the

tension that's building.

The film is very tense, but nothing happens for a while, you know?

And so it was like we had to really make sure that we're ratcheting up the

tension to really get things taped correctly.

It was the combination of what I call Micah's theme and this sort of tension

motif that I would bring back every now and then that underlined some of the

more...

You know, the moments in the film where maybe the main characters are not paying

as much attention as they should, and you worry about them. You worry that

they're getting themselves into trouble.

Thanks for the drink.

You're welcome.

I don't want it, though.

You can have it.

There's a very short David motif.

Um, that is a combination of major -minor tonalities, sort

of, that, that I meant to be intentionally, uh, emotionally

Uh, you, you don't know how you're supposed to feel hearing this. Just like

when, when David first shows up, you're, you're not sure how you're supposed to

feel about this guy. Like, obviously he's beautiful, he's charming.

He's got a backstory and it seems to check out, but it's a very brief motif

only shows up a few times.

Other than that, most of the other themes were sort of situational.

We either spoke on the phone or emailed back and forth literally every day for

the entire...

duration of that production we had what felt like infinite time for pre

-production and then production lasted like a couple months but then like post

-production it was like all these all this time i thought i was gonna have so

much more time and then bam deadline uh but it all worked out you know most most

of my work was already the foundation of all my work was done all of my

After being on set and meeting Dan Steven, meeting Micah Monroe,

getting to see them in their characters, I already had ideas for themes for

them. So essentially the minute I got home, I just started sketching it out. I

just started sketching out ideas so that as soon as they had a locked cut for me

to work on, I could start piecing things together. And I already had all the

groundwork done.

It was just sort of the logistical problem of making it all fit,

making it all work.

Sundance was really great. It was super cool. The film went over, like, super

well. The audience was so into it, you know, because, like, it's just one of

those films that keeps taking these left turns.

The audience was not prepared for it. The audience, you could tell, most of

people in the audience were just like, had no idea what they were watching.

And as things played out, they were just like, what is going on? It was a

terrific, it was one of the better audience responses to a film that I've

on that I've ever seen. I'm firmly against changing anything that I've ever

done. But I would say that if I were to score that film today, yeah, it would

probably end up being a little bit different just because it's been 10

and, you know, you sort of develop as an artist.

So there isn't anything I would change about that score.

I'm very happy with it. I'm very pleased with the way it turned out.

But, yeah, it's possible that if I had to score that film today,

it might end up sounding different.

But I would certainly not change anything that I've done. I'm very happy

the way it turned out, and I thought that everyone else seemed happy with it

well.