CineConcerts was fortunate to speak with composer Henry Jackman about his score to the new film Cherry, directed by Anthony and Joe Russo, starring Tom Holland. We discussed his approach to the experimental score, the unusual instruments and techniques used, and the power of score in film!

CineConcerts (CC): Let's just dig into the music, it seems there’s an interesting story to how this started. How did you approach this and what was the creative spark?

Henry Jackman (HJ): I knew that this was going to be really unusual. I’ve done Winter Soldier and Civil War with the Russos and they’d come off the back of Avengers and it was almost as if for them, this project, not that they decry anything they've done but because they already conquered the world in one department. It was almost as if this was the polar opposite in every conceivable regard in terms of filmmaking. So, they were already talking about it, they were excited, we’d have these conversations about upcoming things.

And I could tell they were really excited about it, and I could tell from the way they were talking and the nature of the story, this was going to be their Revenant or something, you know. This wasn’t them saying let’s see if we can do exactly what Kevin Feige does. And then I got the script, I read the script and it was reinforced, the nature of the story, but also you could already tell that was a lot of…an unconventional approach to the filming. The story itself already has challenging themes to it, but it could be told in a straight way. The narrative structure, the way it’s chaptered out into five compartments as it were, I knew it was going to be eccentric. Then I saw the first cut.

At this point I’m not have specific musical ideas, other than Joe and Anthony going “Okay, this is going to be weird, esoteric, we’re just going to go crazy and experimental, but you’re somehow going to have to be diverse and weird and dance the line between all these things but somehow it’s also got to be unifying at the same time.”

No problem, no pressure.

So, then I saw the first cut. I was even surprised when I saw the first cut of the movie to be honest, because those guys are so brilliant, that the first cut I saw really isn’t that far away from the finished one. It was even more unusual than I was expecting. So, I’m glad I didn’t have too many musical ideas. You give a script to five different directors and you're going to get five different movies. And, if anything, the Russos took the opportunity to push every boundary possible during the film making, so the cinematography almost chaptered out. The whole thing is really unusual but not, you can make the mistake of being so stylized that you lose the narrative content of the film.

I saw the first version and I was like, if we’re going to get serious about this being an experimental exploration. I refuse to even get—I’m not going to start writing cues. We need to go like deep into the laboratory for about a month—which is pretty scary ‘cause I could go into the laboratory and it’s a total waste of time. Because I’ve worked with Joe and Anthony before, it could potentially be a scary prospect if you haven't worked with that director before. Just going, “Just leave me alone for a significant period of time while I come up with stand-alone pieces of music with longwinded, pretentious titles that last like 9 minutes long. ‘Cause for all you know, you’re going to emerge from your Batcave and they don’t like any of it.

I think the very first piece, there's something about the ending of the movie that inspired me immediately to try to solve in this jigsaw which Joe and Anthony had given me, in which the brief is “be really experimental and diverse but there has to be some sort of unity.” To me, intellectually, Unity has to come from theme. Because you can you can explore sounds, you can do all kinds of crazy things if you have some sort of theme that can be modified and twisted and distorted in a million different ways. But the unlocking of unity is going to come from some central Cherry idea.

After watching the film, the last track on the CD has this basic theme. So, I spent ages on this big, long winded 9-minute thing that involved that motif but then I developed it using a lot of really old analog synths. It was a mixture of piano, cello, and analog synth and I thought that’s a decent place to start.

I played it, I said, “Look I’ve got this 9-minute piece of music and for some reason, I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, I can’t tell you quite where it goes, probably near the end or maybe in the big if you don’t even like it, but anyway, here it is! Here’s this thing that I just feel as something to do with this film.” And Joe and Anthony heard it and were like, “We love it!”

Well, this process seemed to be working so instead of going straight into cues, how about doing that again, because this theme has so many different aspects.

I’m going to write a piece called “Carnival of Losers” and it’s—in the beginning of the movie he hangs out with his posse. They’re hanging out in the car, arguing, “Why are you letting your brother go sign up with the marines,” and they’re just smoking a bit of weed with their going-no-where lives.

But it’s got a wry humor to it. That might be quite funny, instead of having like a down, blue-collar loser thing, which would probably be a bit bandish. What about if it were like a Chopin etude? It’s a bit witty and somehow there’s got to be something about a little piano sonata, the irony being that it’ll be quite highbrow. So, it’s not a specific cue yet, it’s like a pitch. These young men, losers with their going-no-where lives, are going around in circles and the piece that accompanies that is actually Chopin, Erik Satie, with some tricks so the thematic idea, there’s something about it that’s sort of loser.

Which I thought was quite funny and it’s the same motif and it’s descending. They were like, “I think this is going to work great.” And I was like, I’m two for two, let’s keep going! I wrote some weird piece, wanting to get something going that was really minimalist and extremely odd with odd textures and that seemed to work. And then finally there’s this semi-supernatural character called Black in the film who’s almost not of this earth. I don’t want to give away too much about the story, but then the conversation with Joe and Anthony was like, “Okay, we’ve got this big epic theme, we’ve got this classical theme. Now what about this Black character? Could we introduce something supernatural?”

Yet more vocabulary starts to come in and I said, “What about really gnarly, concert music sounding posh cello but with the Tallis Scholars singing quarter tone clusters and then a whole lot of weird production where I’ll just start messing with bells and reversing bells, let me get in there. And Joe’s like, “I love it!” Now it’s opened up the movie to have, it’s not the Exorcist or anything but is has a vein of something not of this Earth.

I think the only other significant piece of DNA is when Emily shows up, there’s a piece, can’t remember what it’s called on the CD, but you can hear a plucking ukulele and that’s just me. And I am not a guitar player, filling up the garage with an Indian harp, a zither that my dad gave me ages ago that was missing two of the strings, a ukulele that was a really crappy tourist one that I bought in the Rarotonga Airport in the Cook Islands, and some weird circular instrument which to this day I don’t know how I got my hands on it or indeed what it’s called. It just came in a box. I played all that stuff that got turned into a theme for Emily and some of the naiveté it the performance thanks to my incompetence at playing at these instruments probably contributed positively to the kind of naiveté of that piece.

CC: I’d heard that your assistant collected the most random instruments they could find for you and that, in this pile, you found the instrument you call “the Magic Circle”? What was that like?

HJ: It was fun. It reminded me a bit of when I was really young. We had, me and my sister, a dressing up box with all different kinds of costumes and what not. The garage just got filled up with this stuff and I just wheeled them into my room thinking, “I don’t really know where this is going to go or if it’s just completely meaningless.” But, like I said, I don’t know how to play any of these instruments, really. I think I started with the ukulele and came up with this one that I could get my hands around. Once I got that I picked up the next instrument and said, “What can I do here?” And something just started to develop but the thing that really seemed to work very nicely was there’s a motif in there, it’s a really simple, kind of poppy little thing.

In amongst these instruments there was a box with either Chinese or Korean or Japanese writing on it and my assistant said, “No, I didn’t put that there. I found a harp and a…but that’s not me.”

“Okay, so, where did this box come from?”

“I don’t know, but it had nothing to do with me.”

So, I was a bit cautious when I opened it, like maybe it’s a delivery for someone and it’s gone to the wrong place? But it didn’t have an address or anything on it. It didn’t have any instructions so I opened it up and it was like a giant black grapefruit with no markings on it. It had two soft mallets, so it was a mallet based. And I would just hit around it, like a marimba, but nothing marked, so I just got some band aids and marked where the notes were. I could find just enough notes to play that basic motif but it has a really nice sonorous ring to it and in my ignorance—no doubt it’s a distinguished instrument with a proper name but I didn’t know what to call it so I just called it the Magic Circle.

CC: There are traditional orchestral scores and then there are these rich, experimental soundscapes that attenuate certain emotions that people see onscreen in the characters. Would you say this need to experiment with these instruments came from reading the script originally? If not, what was the creative decision you made as a composer to say that you needed to experiment?

HJ: There’s a grain of truth to saying that if you use the western symphonic orchestra then there’s a degree of the palette being established. So, I guess there’s a degree of conservatism in that because you’re not creating the sounds from scratch. But I would be careful saying that because if you think about the history of symphonic music how wildly different—there have been things done with symphony orchestras that are so wildly diverse that it’s almost an infinite resource to do hugely different things.

But nevertheless, there is a small grain of truth. Like the Emily track or the track called “Your Fate is Darkly Determined” is simply not executable with a symphony orchestra, it’s just not because of the nature of what it is. If you’re going to cook a meal, it’s not that you don't want to buy from a restaurant or get it delivered, it’s that you’re not even going to go to the supermarket and get the ingredients, you’re actually going to grow the vegetables in the garden. And then the next step after that, you're actually going to genetically modify them. So, you’re actually making vegetables that don't actually exist today and then cook them. Which can go horribly wrong a la Frankenstein.

Because I’ve done a lot of animated, because I haven’t done many movies like Cherry, I haven’t gotten to show this kind of behavior as it were. Before I did film music, I did a lot of drum and bass and odd electronica, I'm a bit schizophrenic. I’ve got quite a few different sorts of pockets of background. If you listen to Wreck-It Ralph or Puss in Boots or some of my animated films, you might be a bit surprised by something like this, but actually it allows me to do a whole lot of—you need more time because there’s a lot more engineering involved. I actually did have a background in the record industry.

One of things I haven’t had much time to talk about for Cherry is the engineering became part of the art of it and I got seriously geeky and obsessed by—there’s hardly any plugins I was using digital recording but there was an awful lot of taking of sound and taking an analog synth, no sequencing of it, playing it live like it’s Pink Floyd or something. Then taking that recording and pumping it through the filtering it through a half broken, late analog 70’s synth and really trash it up a bit. Then once it got to the PTSD and the oxycontin area of the movie, I was doing things like, I got so obsessed with needing texture to have an inherent instability, that I was doing things like shoving it through a Roland Space Echo that had an old tape in it and the tape itself was quite damaged. So, when you record the signal you wait for it to hit the bit of the tape that’s damaged so that it goes unstable and then catch that part of it, blend that back into the sound. It’s just something you can’t do with plugins.

You’re picking up all these, and though it sounds very technical and mechanistic the initial impact of using, laying things on to cassette and back again, like dodgy wow and flutter the capstan can’t hold its tension properly. It sounds very technical but the emotional impact is that you get all these anomalies and human…It just feels more human to me. You get noises that you weren't planning. It just feels more like the kind of accidental crummyness and scruffiness starts a bit—you know when you watch a movie from the 80’s and the credits can’t quite hold? They move around a bit.

So, I start deliberately using wow and flutter, which is normally, in the 80’s they were trying to get wow and flutter down to nothing so that when you play off tape it’s stable. So, I messed up the tape machine so it was all wonky and then deliberately used wow and flutter so I get a bit of those 80’s credits not quite being able to hold their stability.

CC: It’s fascinating that analog manipulate really brings you into the mental state of the character. Going back, I believe the track is called “The Comedown”, that 9-minute song you referenced earlier. It sounds like you wrote that before you saw that footage, is that correct?

HJ: There’s a piece of music that I wrote before I saw the epilogue that heavily influenced that piece. It’s not exactly the same thing but it was definitely inspired from the main Cherry piece I wrote.

CC: “The Comedown” was really the most emotionally significant for me because there’s no dialogue for that whole stretch of the film and I don't feel like that’s something you see very often anymore in film.

HJ: That’s a really good point. I remember Joe going, “There’s not a lick of dialogue here. You better get going, Jackman.” It sounds like an abdication of duty when I say it like that, but the reverse is true. It’s filmmaking bravery.

I think you make a really salient point and in fact the discussion we were having at the beginning of this conversation, when you were saying the reason behind what you’re doing and to educate people about music and everything. A lot of iconic cinema experiences I would almost guarantee that more than 50, 60, 70, 80% of the iconic moments that people really remember from movies are actually where people aren’t talking. There are iconic moments where they’re visually stunning and you’re being affected by the visuals in such a way that it’s more abstract and, in certain cases, mythic. So, the mor pedestrian mechanics of dialogue and exposition and explanation are never as powerful or as important as powerful, cathartic moments or redemption moments or moments of motivation where you’ve had the expositional information you need and you’re just having a more emotional or abstract experience that doesn’t need too much talking.

So far from giving up on it, I actually think, I wish more people would have the confidence in movies to realize that there can be a section where much can be understood by the audience without the need for excessive talking. And of course, there are so many different types of movies, some movies would absolutely fall apart without talking because it’s just not that kind of movie. When people talk all the time I just think, well I’d rather see this at the theater, to be honest.

CC: The opposite is true too, there are films that rely heavily on the score to move the story forward. If it was only music, well, that could potentially be an awful film.

HJ: Rather than see that as, “it’s only because of the music” that the story’s moving forward, as if that would be in some way lesser filmmaking, people need to have more confidence. No, no, that’s one of your tools to do it with. It shouldn’t be seen as “if there wasn’t music we’d really be screwed here” because, well, there is music. That’s part of the weaponry at a director’s disposal. And I know it’s a bit over the top but the beginning of Terry Malick’s New World is…

Anytime someone’s worried about “Hang on, we haven’t had any exposition for two minutes” well try watching the beginning of The New World. It’s basically a river and Wagner for about 6 minutes. I’m not saying every movie needs a 6-minute shot of a river as an establishing shot, but just in case you’re panicking, “Oh it’s not moving quickly enough” just bear in mind that there are people who spend 6 minutes on a river and all you’re hearing is Wagner and seeing a bit of Virginia. It’s genius. You don’t need to panic necessarily.

So, I was very grateful, it puts more onus on the music, if you only have three days to write a 9-minute piece of music and it was really important that would be a real shame but we had the time. So, when you get an opportunity like that, where you have to rise to the occasion, I was just really grateful that they, the Russos, have the courage to have a coda or an epilogue to the movie that has the necessary ambiguity and doesn’t crash down with some sort of judgmental—or even a narratively clumsy, wrapped up ending that’s too obvious. It has all the necessary ambiguity and the license for the audience to basically form their own impression in this summation at the end without it being overly specific. I guess that makes some people panic a bit.

I remember seeing the special features of a DVD once, it might have been 12 Monkeys, I think. Terry Gilliam was watching the ending and I think certain reactions were like, “the ending’s a bit ambiguous, people are saying they don’t quite understand it.” And Terry Gilliam was like, “Great! Fantastic!” Meanwhile Bruce Willis and Brad Pitt were like, “No, no, not fantastic! We need to reshoot to make it really clear.” ‘Cause there’s so much weird manipulation to do with going back in time.

To be fair to whoever it was, Bruce Willis, Brad Pitt, or the producers, wanting to reshoot it’s a slightly different case because you’re messing with time. But I just really enjoyed Terry Gilliam’s reaction, with people saying they’re not exactly sure what is the meaning of the ending, and his reaction is like “Fantastic!” I love that reaction because literary criticism is a part of my education. Imagine if you were doing an analysis of a poem and someone went up to the teacher and goes, “I read it but it’s not precisely clear what’s going on, it has a certain ambiguity.” Well, of course it does, it’s a poem you idiot.

So, I wouldn’t take it as a compliment if someone said, “I watched this movie you made and it was entirely clear to me, not only as I watched it, but even predictably before you even got to it exactly what was going on.” I think I’d be quite disappointed. I would rather make a movie where two people have a discussion and someone goes, “I didn’t read it like that, the way I read it was…” and then the other person goes, “Well, yeah, but…” If that isn’t there, you’re missing the poetic element.

CC: I recently saw a different movie with a really ambiguous ending and I loved it but my friend didn’t, she really needed an answer.

HJ: Yeah, I mean everyone's different and there are certain kinds of movies where if basically all the previews say nobody even understands what the hell is going on, okay, you probably have a problem. But that sort of ambiguity is a great invitation to music because one of the things I'm quite proud of in that last cue, “The Comedown” as a film composer, and it’s also highly enjoyable, you will be required to write a piece of music that is undisputed in its heroic tone. Or unquestionable in its tragic tone or unmistakable in its sense of tension. That last piece, it definitely has a window open so that you can have some sort of cathartic, emotional feeling but it doesn’t exactly tell you…you wouldn’t necessarily listen to it and say, “This is definitely a funeral, tragic piece.”

It does have some melancholy to it but it also weirdly uplifting, but it’s not like “yay!”

It’s not the easiest thing to do. It's a slightly more philosophical approach to an emotion pieces that’s not narratively prescriptive. It’s in this weird area where, if you get it right, then it’s the sort of music where whatever it is that someone’s feeling gets amplified. And so, if someone feels like the end of the movie is all about redemption, it will amplify that. It’s a bit more like a mirror, whatever is your strongest feeling is projected onto the piece and won’t get contradicted because the piece has too much prescriptive information. Like, no, no, this is a heroic piece.

And that happens because of the ambiguity in the filmmaking so another thing to be grateful for, Joe and Anthony being sophisticated and brave and artistic.

CC: The Score is awesome as just a standalone album. It’s a wonderful soundscape of emotion. It reminds me that you used to do electronic music, like on your early album Transfiguration. The synth and soundscape type stuff is rooted in these cues. Would you say that this score was going back to that?

HJ: That's a really good point. I hadn’t actually thought of that. There’s an element of that combined with what I’ve learned in the last 10 years. So, for example, yeah, part of the getting really detailed and exploring engineering and making all of these weird sounds, it was a bit more like going back to the record industry days. Certain aspects of the score did feel like making a really cool, indie record where you spend like two years on an album where you really sort of—imagine like Radiohead with a few more mushrooms and PTSD and a few more drugs thrown in. Radiohead is way more genius than me but the reason I mention Radiohead is just more to do with it not being like a symphonic score.

You what album, just to name a couple of other influences, along the lines of but not the same as Transfiguration but not a million miles away in terms of not coming from the history of western symphonic music but a different area. The 80’s band Talk Talk having had some pretty big hits then made two ludicrously artistic albums called Spirit of Eden and they even called the other one Laughing Stock in readiness for the absolute critical savaging they knew they were going to get. Because it was a beautiful art album with these 8-minute-long extemporizing tracks of unbelievable beauty that was a million miles away from the 80’s hits.

I've always found that a great inspiration along with, every now and then, Brian Eno and Harold Budd would team up and make an album, one of which was called The Pearl. The collaboration between Brian Eno and Harold Budd produced this weird spiritual stasis where there’s a combination of really simple piano but with just enough technological voodoo.

So, I guess it did take me back in as much as you know, when you're making an album that isn't—if you’re a recording artist and you’re more on the experimental side, it’s a long way from worrying about what your third oboe is up to, what your woodwinds are doing. All of that is somewhere different. It’s more like working on a Björk album, it’s a different approach.

CC: It’s really fun that you’re able to go from traditional score music to really experimental stuff. I don’t think people realize that as a composer you’re putting yourself completely out there. “This is me through two speakers, please let it be good.”

HJ: And there's nothing you can do about it, yeah. That’s a really good point. If you’re doing something like the score for Cherry and you have that experimental ambition, the only thing that gets easier, in terms of getting a bit older, is recognizing that when you start to have a feeling of epic insecurity, instead of panicking, it’s actually a good sing. Because I've been there before.

Even a world-famous concert pianist, imagine one who still gets heavy butterflies and still gets really nervous beforehand, is probably not going to have an existential meltdown six years into their career. Because they go “Oh, this is that bit, 12 minutes before I go on, that happens every single time, where I get the butterflies and I start thinking…” And of course, as soon as they start playing, they’re tearing through Rachmaninoff’s third piano concerto. And it’s all fine.

Whereas the first time that happens it’s, “Oh my god, what’s happening?!” So, the one thing that does get easier, the times were you’re starting to experiment where, I don’t even know where this is going, and your subconscious going, “This could be a bit of a disaster.” Instead of going with it you’re more self-conscious and you just have to have the confidence to say, “No, I’ve been here before.” Because if you don't feel like that than you probably haven't gone anywhere.

It’s like going out in a boat and saying, “Let’s go to some part of the sea we’ve never been to before” and then just going and hugging the coast. Then you’re not going to get the feeling of “Where the hell are we?” To get that feeling you just have to go and see what happens. You get to a point where you become a little more accustomed to the vulnerability that comes with, “This could be terrible but who cares.”

It also helps if you know your directors really well. And the last thing to say about that is, it’s one of the memories I have of Hans [Zimmer], I’m very close with Hans. Such admiration for him, because to me he’s someone who was sort of invulnerable—because he was the biggest living composer, him and John Williams, the most legendary film composers. So, you can imagine my surprise when—he’d been working really hard to come up with something super original on Dark Knight for the Joker which he entirely succeeded in doing. I don’t know the exact details but having spent forever on this thing, he’d just sent it to Chris and I swear he looked like a ghost. That’s so admirable, meaning, despite endless success and however many millions of posters on the wall and how many record platinum albums, he’s such an artist that it makes no difference in the dynamic of “I’m trying to do something that I’ve never done before, no one’s ever done before” and had the sort of humility to have the same creative anxiety because Christ just went, “This is absolutely amazing!”

And I think if you lose that, supposing anyone, even if they’re brilliant, walking around going, “Oh, I’m just brilliant. I’ve done another brilliant thing and as soon as everyone hears it, they’re going to say it’s brilliant.” Then you’re not going to find those places and I remember trying to learn from that thinking, that’s the guy at the top of the mountain and he’s still having his own self examined desire to keep pushing to make himself explore something that leads to a feeling of humility and vulnerability. If you, any master craftsman of any kind, if you lose that you’re going to get some dreaded complacency that’s going to sneak in. I don’t mean to say it’s necessary to have an existential crisis every time write; you don’t want to go too far the other way and have a debilitating meltdown every time you want to write a piece of music. But that sticks in my mind as something where you learn something and where my admiration for the composer was already really high but this was a new level.

CC: It keeps you grounded. The fear must help you focus in on things that matter to you creatively. Is there any scene in particular that you want people to distinctly pay attention to with respect to the sound, the music, and how it relates to the image?

HJ: There are a couple of examples, because one’s a really sneaky one where hopefully by then you’re so locked into the movie that you won’t notice. There’s a scene towards the end where after an increasingly messy situation, he turns to crime and a bit of bank robbing is at hand. And one of those really long, it’s like a 7-minute cue, that’s really minimal, that is a counterpoint to the unfolding action of what goes down, which I won’t say much about. But instead of individually describing all the flurry of events that surround this bank robbery, it sort of does the opposite and wraps the whole thing in one minimalistic tableau and I’ve always wanted to do a cue like that. It’s very different, look out for that.

I guess the other thing I would say is when the scene the leads to the shot where you see Emily and Cherry getting together in the church, there’s a cue that starts there that has a lot of the stuff we talked about with my semi-hopeless playing of marimba and ukulele and all that. It’s a very unusual cue which I think could have been pretentious and distracting but I think it was sufficiently honest and heartfelt. It actually works because it wasn’t motivated by trying to be weird, it was motivated by me trying to write something really heartfelt but just not having great playing chops for these particular instruments. So, the honesty, hopefully, wins the day.

CC: What’s next for you?

HJ: All I can say is that it’s Marvel related.

Cherry premiered in select theaters on February 26th, 2021 and will premiere globally on Apple TV+ on Friday, March 12, 2021. The score is currently available via Apple Music.

Cherry: A Wonderfully Experimental Score by Henry Jackman