The Invitation by Dara Taylor
CineConcerts was very fortunate to speak with Dara Taylor about her score for the new film The Invitation - hitting theaters on Aug 26!
CineConcerts (CC): What got you into to composing for film specifically? Was there something that you listened to that inspired you or was there a moment in your life that you were like, “I have to do this!”?
Dara Taylor (DT): Yeah. I grew up in music. I was a vocalist; I grew up in the bands and the choirs and the show choirs and the musicals.
Composer Dara Taylor
My mom was the choir director of her church, so [being] around her and listening and picking out harmonies and that sort of thing. So, I grew up with that. And then in school, I studied voice because that's what I knew, I was training as a mezzo soprano. I was singing art songs and arias and then I became kind of increasingly drawn towards composition. So, I was learning, doing kind of contemporary classical composition and concerts and stuff there. But there was a moment, there was definitely an “Aha!” moment, and this was sophomore year of undergrad. I was listening to Harry Gregson-Williams, The Lion Witch and the Wardrobe, I listened to a bunch of film scores, but for some reason I was listening to a track from that and it just kind of clicked. It was like, “Maybe this is it,” because I knew I wanted to be in music, but I wasn't really keen on performing for a living.
CC: When you were listening to the score, was it because the cue reminded you of the scene that you really loved? Or was it the music itself?
DT: Yeah, I think it was evocative of the scene. It's the scene where Mr. Tumnus puts Lucy in this trance and the fire starts to dance. I think that the visuals plus the music really portray that, because you don't really see her go anywhere, but you see, you know, that she's…
CC: You know that she's going somewhere because of the music, right?
I feel like you must have been such a sponge at a young age - just taking in everything. Inherently you were taking in this musicality from your mom and that inspired you to just compose. Were you always just composing on your own and privately?
DT: Little things, yeah. I was doing it without even really noticing that I was composing things. I mean, I guess on some level you know, but it was just a fun thing to do. I'm like, I'm just going to play in Finale for a little bit. I guess I thought of it more as an outlet then.
Film Still from The Invitation
CC: And here you are making music for film! So, let's just dig right into your score for The Invitation. How did you get started on this project?
DT: I had some great preliminary meetings with Jess Thompson, the director, about the fact that it's obviously a horror movie, but there's also a romance element. There's this gothic element and finding ways to combine all of those, because I think that the visuals do a really great job of combining those.
So, finding the right musical palette to match that. It was finding which instrumentation worked best for the romance portion of it. We use a lot of kind of acoustic guitars and harps and some vocals and that sort of thing to still kind of make it feel modern in a way. Then we used the orchestra in a more grand gothic sense to talk to the manor in England and the multi-generational aspect of the film and the characters in the story.
And then it was taking those two things as a basis and then finding ways to corrupt those and adding in weird synthetic, processed stuff. We leaned a lot into female vocals, which are things that both of us really were keen to add in there. I mean, I will add a vocal to anything that will let me just because it's my instrument. So, it's fun to think in that way. And I think this was definitely one of the scores of late that I've been able to use vocals as more of a pronounced element instead of a texture.
CC: You hear the vocals in the first 10 seconds of the score. Can you talk a little bit about that? It's almost like a warped scream and you're immediately unsettled.
DT: We had three female vocalists come in and—what helped make it feel unsettling is the fact that I recorded them forward and then I reversed them. It took a lot of extra work to get that across. When I did my first temp vocals, that's what I did and I recorded something and then I reversed it and then I added a whole lot of distortion and fuzz and these other things that are usually kept for punk rock guitars.
CC: What made you want to reverse it? Was it just an experiment?
DT: Because it’s unsettling, even if you’re not sure why. I tried listening to it both ways. I think we love to listen to human voices because you connect to it. And there's something about like the breath of it all, but hearing it in reverse, I think, creates some sort of visceral and unsettling loss.
CC: It immediately reminds me of all these demonic possession movies where the demon starts talking in Latin backwards or something, and it sounds like gibberish and it's weird. I didn't realize that it's backward, but you're right that that's the whole reason why it's sort of subconsciously unsettling at the onset.
What’s your creative process for scoring just generally? Can you start with a conversation and start sketching out stuff or do you really need picture to score to?
DT: It depends on when I'm brought in and I was fortunate enough to be brought in pretty early on this film and after those first initial conversations with Jess, I did a suite of ideas. Some of those ideas are in the final, as far as the magic stuff. Some of them were just like, “I'm just going to throw a bunch of stuff at the wall!” Jess said that she really likes to listen to that, especially while she's filming.
So, I sent that to her while she was still in production so she kind of can feel what it might sound like. I just wrote like a 12-minute suite of vomit-draft of ideas. And that's where Evie's Theme came from and Walt’s Theme came from.
Composer Dara Taylor in her studio
CC: Some directors like to play music while they shoot certain scenes. Did she do any of that with this early 12-minute draft that you had sent her?
DT: I don’t think that she played it during the shoot, but it was just, you know, things to percolate and to digest and to see that we're on the same page of how we're feeling. And then once picture started to come in, we fine-tuned that and saw what was the most useful.
CC: So, the process was, you put all this stuff down and say here are all of my creative, musical ideas. And then she came back and said, yes, just kind of hone in on an emotion or a theme. And then once you know that as a composer, do you do you start extrapolating from there and sort of taking off musically?
DT: Yeah, and other ideas came in. So actually, the vocal thing, there were a little bit of vocals. There was a little bit of whistling in my first that’s not in the final as a whistle.
Well, it is whistled but it doesn't sound like a whistle by the time it's done because it's all of these distortion effects. Again, it sounds like a really high scream. It's featured in a couple of cues, including, on the soundtrack album, “The Cellar”. There's like a really quick thing at the end.
As you're writing and experimenting with things, sometimes I forget where these sounds started from, especially because now I have to get things to my mixer and reprocess. You know, when we rerecord things and I'm like, “What was this originally?” And then I took all the effects off. I'm like, “Oh, this is just a whistle.”
CC: It seems like there's a lot of experimentation and distortion with sounds which, you're saying a whistle can ultimately be like an extended soundscape almost, where it's not even a whistle anymore.
Do you experiment with a bunch of different sounds and just see what happens and then pick and choose what you want to keep in there?
DT: Sometimes, especially early on and then I see what I think is working. I've got this wall of instruments and stuff behind me, but a lot of them I don't necessarily use for their intended purpose. I wanted to play around with like using instruments wrongly and playing with sounds. And that was one thing too, because Evie is an artist. She's a visual artist,
So, it's finding weird kind of scraping sounds. I think a lot of it is just a sandbox and a playground. And then I see what's working, both for the film and for Jess and for me and for everyone.
Film Still from The Invitation
CC: Would you say that the majority of the themes are confined to this main character? Is there an undercurrent theme that continues through her journey through the film?
DT: Yeah, I would say so, but I think there are a few. But they all relate to her in one way or another, and it's either something that's more evocative of her or things happening to her, things that happened before her.
CC: There's definitely some jumps scares. You’ve got to have fun composing for a horror movie because you can do some crazy stuff. Obviously, there's some orchestral stuff and dramatic stuff, like a normal score, but you're able to really have fun with a bunch of different sounds and just be as creative as you want.
DT: For something so terrifying for her, I had a whole lot of fun. It's weird because I've been doing a lot of animation recently as well. They're very different genres, but I think that the commonality between animation and horror is that you get to be the loudest version of yourself and just try to see if that's too silly, see if that's too weird. Push some limits and work backwards.
CC: What was the weirdest thing that you experimented with sound wise?
DT: At one point I was up here writing, because I have a writing room at home, and I was writing and I just kept on hearing something. And I'm looking at all the meters like, nothing is playing. And then I turn everything off and I follow the sound and it's actually my boyfriend in the garage sanding something. So, I grab my phone and I go downstairs and I’m like, “Can you do that again?”
He’s seen me do some weird thing, like unsheathing knives very quickly to hear which one sounds best. So, I recorded him sanding and I took that recording and I put a bunch of effects on it. And again, I think and when you listen to it, it sounds like a pad but it doesn't sound like a pad that you've heard before. That's actually at the beginning of “The Cellar” and it happens in a few different places.
CC: That's amazing. I feel like this is really like an accumulation of real-life sounds and textures that you yourself had heard just in your environment. Do you do that for animation, too?
DT: Sometimes, yeah. Just finding little moments, especially percussive things that I think are fun like, the character is a chef using some knives and those sorts of things. It gives it a little extra character than a sampler.
CC: It's interesting that you that you that you say animation is very similar to horror because you're so right. Do you prefer to work for a specific genre or type of film or television or do you just love being challenged based on whatever theme is presented to you?
DT: I think variety is the spice of life. So, there's a lot of things I like. I worked on a horror film, a romcom, an animated film, and a comedy within the span of a year and kind of jumping from one headspace to another and again, seeing what the commonalities are, story storytelling wise, more so than what you’re watching.
To me; I just like to work with good people.
CC: Is there a particular track or theme that you want people to listen to a little bit more carefully? Is there something that you're particularly, as a composer, really proud of?
DT: I think a lot of the more sound design adjacent elements are fun. And I think especially watching the film and seeing where these certain things take place, like the vocal motif that happens kind of throughout and that represents again some of the more nefarious nature.
So, it shows up throughout the film but it shows up at pretty specific times. And then again there is the Walter and Carfax Manor theme that happens and that will come back at other moments.
CC: You talked about the main character, Evie, and there's another character, Walter, who is the host of this manor that she goes to. And you created a theme for each. Can you talk about the differences between the two and the two themes and sort of how you approached each one?
DT: Evie’s theme, I think, has a slightly more modern feel as far as chord progressions. It's a little more subtle, it's a lot more bass and kind of acoustic guitar and things that are more of the present day.
Walt’s themes are a little more ornate. Because her life is simpler in some aspects as far as like her apartment and what she does for a living and Walt owns this giant manor and the English countryside. So, it's a little more ostentatious, I suppose, but kind of larger leaps in the strings and that sort of thing. And Evie’s is a little more, I guess, homegrown and Walter's.
CC: Would you say there's more complexity in Walter's theme? How would you define that musically? Or is there a specific instrumentation or instruments that you used in one and not the other?
DT: Yeah, I use more ensemble strings than, you know, big thematic cello or violin lines that happened like the “Carfax Manor” track in the album is when we first get to his place. So that theme plays when we're first introduced to this whole other side, because this is something completely different for her to witness. And then that is brought up in different times in film.
CC: So, without giving too much away, Evie sounds like a strong character. She obviously gets manipulated into this situation and realizes that this is more than she bargained for. I assume that there's some element of her getting herself out of this conflict. Is there a specific thing you did to heighten the tension in the action?
DT: I actually do address that, again kind of thinking of this as a vocal forward score, when things are sort of happening to her it's this eerie, reversed, really futzed sound. But when she takes charge and, you know, she tries to make things happen for herself, the vocals are first of all, they're forward. And I think they're more earthy and not guttural, they're grounded and stronger versus verses being unsettling. That’s in “Evie’s Escape”.
CC: Even though this is a horror movie, I feel like you've got comedy, you've got love, you've got the whole spectrum of emotion. As a composer, that must have been so liberating to be able to compose for.
DT: It was definitely like a much more multifaceted horror film to work on. So it was, it was great to kind of stretch all types of muscles.
CC: Is there anything that you're working on right now that you can talk about that's up and coming?
DT: Well, one thing that that will be coming out soonish The Noel Diary for Netflix. It is a holiday themed romance, drama, comedy directed by Charles Shyer, which was a lot of fun to work with. He's one of the greats. So, it was it was a really great experience to work with him. And it stars Justin Hartley. And it's a very different film than this, but to just be able to kind of try some stuff out. I love anything that will let me write from the gut too, even if we tone that down or we change directions, it makes it feel very collaborative.
CC: Do you have any solo work or do you compose just for fun and do things on the side or do you just mainly compose for the project that you're working on?
DT: I mostly compose for the project that I'm working on. But usually at some point in my writing process, like way down in the session, bar 780, they're just like noodles. “Oh my God, this isn't right for this, but this is fun to do. Let me just get this idea down.” Maybe I'll use it in something. Maybe I won't. Maybe I'll lose it forever because I don't remember which cue I wrote it in. But yeah, there's definitely a lot of that noodling around. I mean, I always threaten to write more choral music and that sort of thing.
CC: I feel like there's few composers I've talked to that have had choral backgrounds, and there's something unique about that music. Maybe it's just the multiple parts and the harmonies and it sets your brain up to hear music and think about music in a completely different context. Almost like you can start simply with a color or an idea start to build.
DT: I think a lot in colors and in instrumentation. I think a lot of times when I write the first thing, especially if I'm coming up with thematic things and melodies, the first thing I try and find is the instrument because I think it's best to write in the voice of a character once I know what that voice is.
CC: So, step one is to know who the character is, then you take that character and start thinking about the instrument that defines that person.
DT: In a way. Not so much in a kind of a binary Peter and Wolf way, but it helps for me to at least get a kernel going because I can be messing around with the theme and the piano. And then I put that theme on the clarinet and then it allows for more expression in one way or another. I guess I think more in melodic instruments versus harmonic instruments. And then I add in the harmonics later and that's probably a lot of from studying voice.