How to Compose a More Chaotic Film Score

Written by Darren Fung

Some 20 years ago, I responded to an ad looking for a composer for a Canadian Film Centre thesis short film. The director was Jeffrey St. Jules, and his film, The Sadness of Johnson Joe Jangles, was a 20-minute short detailing a young family’s struggle to adapt and persevere in the new frontier. It was the beginning of a beautiful relationship, and Jeff and I have worked on every film he’s directed since, including his third and latest feature film, The Silent Planet. Having just premiered at this year’s Fantasia International Film Festival, it had me thinking about what makes a successful composer-director relationship.

The Silent Planet has a hybrid score—orchestral elements tied together with processed samples and a good dose of chaotic “let’s fuck this sound up” processing. We played around with pitch shifting and processing audio amidst a classical palette: recording live strings, a male vocalist, a boy soprano and myself on piano. One particular cue leads us into the mind of Theo, one of our main characters, and are brought into his delusional state of mind and his warped sense of reality by “fucking these sounds up.”

As primarily an orchestral composer, a lot of the things that fall into “let’s fuck this sound up” category fall out of my normal wheelhouse. Jeff’s notes were consistently, “It needs to be more chaotic!” so I needed to reach deeper and deeper into a bag of tricks that I didn’t know I had to present a cacophony of instruments and voices being pitch bent, digitally processed, time stretched, and compressed. But in order to reach into the bag of tricks, I needed to feel like I was in a space where I could take those risks. It goes without saying that mutual respect is the cornerstone of any successful relationship, but what does that really mean?

The first thing that comes to mind is understanding your collaborator’s process. When a composer understands how their director is consuming their music, it goes a long way in terms of saving themselves from emotional turmoil. Are they the sole decision maker? Are they watching a QuickTime movie that you’re bouncing for them or do they like to pull stems into an Avid and experiment? Jeff is someone who likes to play with and shape something before he can really buy into a musical idea. He’ll ask for multiple theme ideas so he can bring them into the cutting room to see what works. He’ll move cues around and he’ll play around with stems.

Knowing how Jeff works with music helped inform my own process. When we first started, instead of writing big themes or cues straight to the picture, I quickly churned out musical building blocks for him to test in the cutting room: small tidbits versus big developed cues. Conversations would happen over which ideas he liked, the ones I liked, and why. Not living in the same city, we used AudioMovers to sync my Digital Audio Workstation to Jeff’s picture remotely so we could experiment. He would have me move percussion scrapes to different hit points, change the direction of a melodic line, rework some orchestration or resolve a chord differently in real time when he was in Toronto and I was in Los Angeles.

For directors, it’s understanding what it takes to make a cue and a score, both before and after approvals. It’s not just about writing the music, but producing, mixing, recording, and delivering the music as well. By inviting their directors to the “fun” parts of the production process: recording sessions, music mix reviews, and the such, they get an appreciation of everything that happens behind the scenes work and all that goes into it (although I’m pretty sure no director wants to sit through a composer bouncing out stems).

Jeff got spoiled on his thesis film—The Sadness of Johnson Joe Jangles saw a very young and naïve Darren finagling 20 of his friends to get an orchestra to play for pizza and beer at one in the morning at McGill University’s concert hall. It peeled the layers of the onion away to see the logistical ballet a scoring session is, and it truly is magical. We’ve come a long way since pizza and beer sessions, but knowing what goes into a score helps Jeff advocate for the music budget to the producers.

Featuring Darren on the right and Jeff on the left

I’m in Toronto often enough that Jeff was able to invite me into the cutting room early on in the process. It helped me understand the film’s aesthetic, what he was looking for from the score and how he works. We experimented with different temp music ideas, and played around with some pre-score that I had written. He would poke fun at how I would probably write these over-the-top epic orchestral cues that were completely inappropriate for the film, countered by comments with how it would take sixteen revisions to get it down to a minimalist drone and piano cue. Even though we’ve been working together for twenty years, hanging out together set the tone for the coming weeks and months where we would work on the score.

In a post-COVID age of Zoom and Frame.io collaboration, we forget how easy it is to send someone down a spiraling path of shaken confidence with a poorly worded email. If pushing yourself outside of your comfort zone is key to achieving something powerful, composers need to be in a position where they feel comfortable taking those risks. Those risks pushed Jeff into thinking about a scene or cues in ways he hadn’t before. That only happens when you honor your collaborators and expect no less from them. Build a relationship of mutual trust and see what incredible things you can make together.