Mark Tewarson's 'Assassin'
Composer Mark Tewarson spoke with CineConcerts about the score to the new film Assassin!
Composer Mark Tewarson
CineConcerts (CC): What was the thing that made you realize that you wanted to be a film composer? You've been a musician but composing for film is a very specific path that you have to decide you want to follow.
Mark Tewarson (MT): I had been studying and performing music since I was a little kid. There's a couple of things, though, that I remember. I was studying jazz at NYU. I was a guitar student and at a couple of my first gigs where I was playing my own music, (which were intended to be contemporary jazz gigs) I remember some totally random person who was at the club or whatever, came up to me and said, “You know, your music would be good for film.” And it's something that had never crossed my mind at all. And I was like, really? Okay. And that kept coming up over the years. The other thing that I noticed is that when I was in bands, anytime there was an opportunity to work on something where there was a story, even if it was like, “Oh, let's do a little theme album or a theme track about this story” or something. I got really excited. I lit up as soon as the idea of writing music to a story came up, and all of a sudden the ideas started firing. It was like, “We could do this!”. Eventually, I got into composing for commercials and TV, and film just seemed like the natural next step.
CC: Is your natural process of composing always to visuals? Even if you're not composing to a commercial or a film, are you visualizing things as you compose?
MT: No, not really. I don't think that way. But there must be something. I love creating soundscape and mood. So, I think that that maybe sounds cinematic or has a cinematic bent to it. And I actually released my own record for the first-time last year. I got this one write-up and without any prompting, or me talking about being a film composer, the reviewer said, “This is very indicative of cinematic music and he sounds like a director.” So, I don't know exactly where it comes from, but I think maybe it is just that I love movies, I love TV. I love reading. I'm a sci fi nut. Particularly working on a sci fi film, it brought me back to being a kid.
CC: Because you get to play. I mean, you get to make all these different of sounds and experiment, right?
MT: Totally. And it's something that I loved, just purely because I love it. I think sometimes when you have a career in music, after a while, you spend a lot of time thinking about what's cool and what's modern and how am I going to push the envelope and what's intellectually stimulating. I just love sci fi action movies just because I always have, you know, it's like a guilty pleasure. So, getting to score this is like being a kid in a sandbox. You just have your cake and eat it, too, you know?
CC: The album that your references is Coastal. Every track on that album does have a very storybook method. Your imagination can start going crazy with different visuals, there is like an inherent cinematic quality to your music.
MT: Yeah. Thank you. I guess maybe you put it right, I do tend to think of story arcs. I do think that music has to go somewhere and then it has to come back.
CC: Where does that come from? Is that from your training or is that just something that developed over time?
MT: That's interesting. I don't know. It's something that I've supplanted in my mind. From a long time ago, that that's how you tell a story. It's your minute to tell a little story so, you start here and you get here, and then you bring it down. There's an Indian music saying that a friend of mine said that comes from some of the masters. They say, even if you're singing one line, you're telling a story in this one line, even if it's only four notes, it starts here, moves there, it goes there. So yeah, I guess it just has always been in there somewhere.
Film Still from Assassin
CC: How did you get started on this project, for Assassin?
MT: So, Jesse Atlas, the director, is a friend who I met at preschool. Our kids went to this preschool and we started hanging out and I found out he was a director. Then I found out he was into science fiction. So, we just started hanging out and talking and after a few months, he was doing a short film. This was like 2018, or maybe it was 2017 when we started talking about it, which was the short version of this movie.
I scored that short and it ended up going to Tribeca, then he used that to get the funding to make the full feature version. Even then, once you get into that, you never know whether you're going to be the [composer], because it’s not just up to him at a certain point either. There's a lot of other people when it gets to that point. But thankfully they all agreed, and let me come on board.
CC: How did you start thinking musically about the story? Did you start from the script? What was the creative process that you went through?
MT: I did ask Jessie for a script, and I did read some of the script, but I didn't really start composing until he was done shooting and had a rough cut. But all along I knew the story and I had this one main idea, which is, in the story, these people with the use of this new technology can supplant their minds into other people's bodies for covert operations.
I knew what you would be seeing is a character in the body of someone else and in this alternate perspective and disoriented world. So right from the beginning, I was like, I want to start creating sounds that will help facilitate that and make you feel like, “Oh, this person is not quite themselves. They're in a different place.” And so, I started making a lot of sounds. I started off by just using my modular synthesizer and these tape delays to just start, not even to picture. Creating these soundscapes that are either undulating in pitch or tempo or just things where you can never quite find the center of it and it keeps you off balance.
And that's how I started. Then, I was also like, let me also try writing in a more traditional orchestral style. I did a five-minute cue of action orchestra stuff, and when the director came over, I played him both. He was firmly in the category of the synthesizer weirdness. He was like, “Yeah, that's the stuff.” And so, that became the basis for everything else. I used that as the base and then added things like piano and strings for melody when it was needed, for emotional dream sequences or the love story between the two main characters. But this overall kind of gnarly simmering sound goes throughout the whole film.
CC: At the beginning of the album there's this sort of undulating wobble. Is that purely synth, or did you actually add other instruments and tweak them or manipulate them?
MT: It actually technically isn't synth, a lot of it is samples of stuff I made. I have those singing bowls. Some of those I don't even tweak, some of those I just left. And then I use this one type of granular sampler. So, there's a lot of human voice samples, I also used strings and other things, and then you run the synth components through it, so it takes the sample and you can pitch it way down. It doesn't sound like a voice anymore, but it was rooted in an earthly sound at some point.
CC: If you have all these tools, as an artist, do you know exactly what you want to do when you sit down to compose? Like, I want to use my synth or these bowls, etc.?
MT: I mean, that works. I think that's one of the hardest aspects of writing music for film or writing music in general. This one happened to come easy. This one, from the get go, I was like, this is what I want for this.
CC: And you're saying that's rare?
MT: I would say those are the good ones. And the other ones, I actually learned this a lot making my own album, you have to create rules for yourself. Because it's true, someone like me, after a certain amount of time, I have a whole recording studio. I have instruments and synths, there's no excuse. I have no excuse for not being able to make a bluegrass album, a country album, etc. But then you have to say no, I am going to do this.
Jesse, the director, was super helpful by saying, “These sounds are the ones I like.” Now you're starting to create the rulebook. And then I came up with that piano melody for Alexa's theme and one other string melody, and now you have three signature melodies for the film. And at a certain point, you can only put so much in the film. You have the sounds, you have the three melodies, and that’s the book now, you know. You have your medium and you just go. I mean, sometimes it's the opposite. Sometimes it's like throwing things at the wall.
CC: I imagine that it's harder when you have a director or a creative team who may not know exactly what they want. And so, you're left to come up with that yourself. And I imagine that can be really nerve wracking. Yeah, especially if you're in a time crunch.
MT: Totally. I think those are some of the toughest moments, and when people can get fired! When a team doesn't know what they want and then they're looking at you., they're kind of giving you one direction or the other direction and often you're the last one, you know, everything is done now and if something's not working, it's like, well, maybe it's the music.
Film Still from Assassin
CC: Have you ever had an instance where the editor is cutting to temp music? As a composer, do you want to get sounds to the director early so that they can use it early in the edit?
MT: I've tried it before, sending some playlist ideas, yeah. It's never really panned out because I think there's so much back and forth. The editors often themselves have their own stuff, and they're used to cutting to their own tracks. They have the idea of what they want to cut to. In this particular instance it was great because they did have temp music in the rough cut, but Jesse was super cool about the fact that we could put that away, and not worry about it at all. Like a clean slate, which is exciting, but it's also more nerve wracking because now it's on you, right? When someone gives direction, and then they don't like it, it's like, well, “you told me to do that!.” But it can be a definitely less creative, fulfilling experience when people are really married to the temp.
CC: Did you discover new things musically that surprised you?
MT: Yes, there was a good moment where, without giving anything away, Bruce is giving this monologue after something dramatic had just happened, and it could have just been another minute of talking. I wrote this string quartet cue, which could have been almost too serious, but it suddenly gave weight to the conversation. I remember Jesse was initially unsure about that moment but then he said, “Now I really like this moment.” It felt a little bittersweet. It felt like it just brought out this other emotion.
CC: Was there a time where the director was like, I don't want any music here, and then you threw in something?
MT: Not consciously. If anything, he probably would have asked for something minimal, to just set the tone and then leave it alone. And I don't think we had talked about it ahead of time. But I would imagine that if he had heard that piece of music separately, he might have been like, “No, this is too much. This is too emotional.” You know?
CC: Alexa’s theme, there's a reprise at the end of the album that sounds different than the beginning. Is that something that you play with throughout the album?
MT: I think there is some montage going on during the reprise and there is this double play between an assassin story and then this kind of love story between the two characters. And then sometimes they're both happening at the same time.
CC: So how do you balance those creative differences between you and the director? How do you, as an artist, balance that when collaborating?
MT: Particularly in film, the truth is, the story is the hero. The story is always the hero in the film. So, you have your own artistic impulses and I try to bring that to them, but ultimately, for the storyteller, the writer and the director, this is their story and they have to tell it in the way they want to tell it. Ultimately, I feel like I have to listen to them and sometimes you pick your battles, sometimes when you feel like you're on some strong footing—let’s try it again and try to do something.
It's a slippery slope, it's something that comes up a lot. You hear the story all the time where someone will hire an artist who's not a film composer, like an artist they love, and the artist does their thing, and the director will ask for revisions, and then artist is like, “What? You can't tell me how to write music!” It's something that is inherent in the job of a composer. You know, you take revisions, you take notes. Hans Zimmer is always talking about whenever a director says to him, “This isn't working,” and the first thing he says is, “How can I make this better for you?” It's just part of part of the gig.
But, ironically, what I discovered while writing my album, which took me so long to make, is that it’s so much harder when it’s just you because suddenly you have to provide all the inspiration, it's very nerve wracking. As a composer or a musician in someone else's band, someone else is doing that heavy lifting.
CC: It’s not like you're putting together the movie. You're taking something that's been cut, even if it's in its rough form and stamping your artistic compositions on that, on this package that's been created for you.
MT: Yeah, the parameters have been set already, to some degree, you know.
CC: How many musicians did you use on this score?
MT: Just me, I’m a one-man band.
CC: Anything you can talk about that’s coming up next for you?
MT: There's another film, a documentary called Ice Man. This is going to be on Netflix in May. I believe they're about to announce the date. But it is a basketball documentary about a player named George Gervin who was an early star in the NBA. It's the same production company that made The Last Dance, that Michael Jordan doc. And so that was super fun. It was about the early NBA days. And so, I got to do a lot of seventies funk and disco and I love that and doing that kind of music. So that was super fun.
And then I have this kids project that I've been doing for years, this music project called Puppet Holiday, and we also shot videos of actual puppets and had animated music videos done. And we were actually considering it almost as a TV pilot for a minute, but we decided to put out that album and released a video. So, that's also coming in late spring.
CC: Any solo albums that you're thinking about in the future?
MT: Totally. As soon as this one was done, I was like, now I'm ready for part two, for the next one. At the moment, the idea is I want to do a study of rhythm. My whole life as a professional musician, I was as a guitar player and in particular a funky guitar player, like rhythm guitar and R&B, funk, reggae, afrobeat. I learned all this jazz, but I ended up just doing this. And I think it's because I feel like my sense of rhythm is one of my strongest suits. And so, marrying classical music and funky or rhythmic music has always been this thing I want to find.
I became interested in the idea of grooves and why, with certain songs, does everyone nod their head? What is it about certain rhythms that make people nod their head or lift their hands up or dance a certain way? It's like, innate. So, I want to do this study of that, and then write music that tries to reflect that. So, we'll see where that goes.