Bring Me a Dream: David Buckley's The Sandman
CineConcerts was very fortunate to speak with David Buckley about the score for the Netflix hit TV show The Sandman!
Composer David Buckley
CineConcerts (CC): What is your background and where did you start in terms of composing for picture specifically?
David Buckley (DB): I started my musical life singing as a boy in a cathedral choir in the UK. During my time there I had the good fortune to meet Harry Gregson-Williams. We were only vaguely acquainted at the time, but a few decades later I was able to reestablish contact via our mutual friend, composer Richard Harvey. I had been working in London doing pretty much anything I could in the music business – scoring commercials and tv shows, teaching, playing jazz piano and I also kept up some singing work. When I met Harry, he graciously offered me a chance to help him out in LA for a few months and that’s where my scoring career really began. Another lucky turn for my choir was being asked by Peter Gabriel to sing on his score for The Last Temptation of Christ. That was an eye and ear opening moment for me. I was too young to watch the film (which was extremely controversial in its day, but probably rather tame now), but I do remember being fascinated by how music could intermingle with visuals and create something entirely new.
CC: Did you start composing at that time?
DB: Yeah, aged around twelve I wrote a Christmas carol, and it got performed on BBC television and I wrote another piece which got its premiere in front of some of the British royal family. So, I definitely started young (that’s not to say these were accomplished compositions by any stretch!), and at the same time I began to realize that I was not a natural performer and that if I were to continue to discover and indulge my passion for music, composition would need to play a major role.
CC: Were you experimenting with electronics and synths and different experimental sounds at a young age?
DB: Even though most of my time was spent participating in very traditional musical pursuits, I was also happy to mess around in the music tech building. I remember discovering 4-track tape recorders and synths such as the Yamaha DX7 and Roland Juno. I liked having this range in my musical world, everything from singing Renaissance church music to fiddling around with computers and synths, and in many ways that set me up well for what I do today. When I moved to LA to work with Harry my first assignment was helping out on an animated score, but shortly after, Harry suggested I could try my hand at a few cues on Joel Schumacher’s dark thriller, The Number 23. Like so much of my first year in LA, it was a baptism of fire as I hadn’t before worked on anything with that amount of sound-design, but I came to enjoy it and to appreciate how non-traditional musical approaches can add so much to cinematic storytelling.
Still from The Sandman
CC: Diving into The Sandman. I mean, wow, it's a lot of music. It's over an hour and 20 minutes of music on the released album.
DB: And that's 80 minutes from 8 hours of score. I took a month or so after scoring the show to distance myself from it before returning to the soundtrack with fresh ears and a slightly different perspective. It took a lot of time editing and remixing tracks so that they could live a new life away from the show and hopefully stand up as independent pieces of music.
CC: The Sandman is a well-known comic; did you dive into the comics to try to get a sense of who this character was? What was your creative process for trying to think about such a complex comic musically?
DB: I hadn't read the comics before being offered the job, but I was aware of the character a little because I worked on the DC video game, Batman: Arkham Knight which had given me reason to take a deeper dive into the DC superhero world. Before I started writing any music, I felt I needed to familiarize myself with the source material, so I spent time reading the comics and absorbing Neil’s world. Inevitably that would throw up a lot of questions about characters and plots, and the showrunner, Allan Heinberg, and I spent a lot of time discussing these details. It's rather like learning a new language – you need to know the basics before you can form full sentences and so it was with adding a score to the Sandman: I needed to be intimately acquainted with the DNA of the story, and only then did I think I was able to tackle the score.
CC: What are some of the conversations that invoked a visceral response from you as a composer and made you start thinking about the music?
DB: We discussed specific characters and spoke about their complexities. For example, for much of episode one we see Dream incarcerated and hugely weakened by his captivity. In fact, if you didn’t know the story you might think that this character is doomed and without a future. But as episodes unfold, we learn more about Dream and quickly realize that he is far from a stock superhero character. At different times we might love him or loathe him. I think this complexity applies to a lot of the characters in The Sandman universe. The nominal ‘baddie’ in the first season, The Corinthian, is not a straight-up evil character; Lucifer more closely resembles a fallen angel (like something out of a Pre-Raphaelite painting) than a satanic caricature; and Death, so often depicted as something to be feared, is a vision of warmth and beauty.
It was incredibly important for Allan and me to have these discussions so that I could understand who these characters really are. And then, when I felt I had got to grips with all of this, I got writing. It took a moment to hit on the correct tone and language, but no one expected me to find the answers immediately. But I knew it was critical for me to find Dream’s identity. He needed a tune, and he needed one that could help transport both him and the audience through the disparate story lines of the first season.
CC: Would you say that everything started from Dream’s theme and then you expanded from that musically? What was your creative process like? Did you sit at the piano and sketch from that theme?
DB: I normally start my writing process on the piano which I have in a room adjacent to the studio. I like being there as it makes me feel things a little differently. When I'm sitting in front of a computer, I'm aware that it's connected to the Internet, and that's my vessel to getting music to the people who are going to say, yes, we like it or no, we don't like it! Whereas the piano room is a totally analogue environment and because of that I don’t feel like I'm chasing a deadline or waiting for a verdict. On the other hand, the studio offers the opportunity to be more experimental with sound. For example, the warped bells that represent the Dreaming: they began life on the piano, but when I started programming them on a celeste in my sequencer, I felt I wanted to make them weirder and less conventional. Not in an irritating or attention-seeking way, but by being slightly off-kilter and surreal. It was important for me that the sounds of the score had an organic heart. In other words, they began with something played by a human, but when recorded I felt inspired to mess around with them and try and add an unusual spin.
I wanted to balance the modern audio manipulation I was doing with something ancient sounding. I felt Dream’s character needed this range – the old and the new. For that reason, I used a viola da gamba (a popular 17th century instrument) and I really enjoyed mixing its plangent tone with that of an analogue synth. I can’t fully explain why, but I felt that combination helped bring Dream’s character to life.
Enveloping these soloistic instruments and sound design was a full orchestra and choir. It’s the first television show I’ve scored where I’ve replaced every sampled orchestral instrument with a real live version, and what a privilege it was to do that with some of the greatest European musicians in some of the finest recording venues in the UK, Vienna, and Hungary.
CC: Did you have to reframe the way that you approached composing because of the episodic nature of the format? Or did you approach this like you do a feature film?
DB: I approach television scoring just as I would a feature score. I don’t see any difference. I have heard composers talking about using a more modest pallet for a television show than they might for a movie, or for the mix to be more restrained, but I don’t get that. Dynamic range is crucial in all storytelling mediums, and I certainly found that to be true here. There are moments where I knew the score had to be incredibly intimate, just with one or two instruments supporting the drama, and there were other times where I had to unleash the full fury of the orchestra and choir. With such disparate stories to track (certainly in the first six episodes) being nimble was the name of the game. Trying to shoehorn cues from episode 1 into episode 2 would have been a disaster and some episodes (think episode 5, “24/7” set in the diner), needed a very distinct musical language. Because I had spent the first part of the writing process cracking a theme for Dream, I felt more secure navigating these early episodes. I think without that initial work it would have all felt a lot harder and possibly even unmanageable.
Still from The Sandman
CC: Did you see all the footage before you started composing?
DB: I scored to whatever was available at the time. The visual effects team were doing incredible work, but they had so much to do and for me to stay on target for music deliveries, there were times when I simply had to use my imagination as the final effects were not fully rendered. It’s part of the job, but it can be difficult to bring the right musical tone to a scene if you aren’t stimulated by the images.
CC: There’s a track called “The Threshold of Desire”. It's the theme for both the character and the realm. It's got an almost poppy quality that fits Desire’s personality well, but it’s also foreboding and really stands out from the rest of the score. How did you approach making that theme?
DB: It’s interesting because Desire is probably in no more than five minutes of the entire season, but they are a standout character. I can’t recall why I landed where I did with that theme, but it was something I got too late in the writing process, and I guess I felt more confident to try something different here.
CC: The second half of episode six goes into the journey of Gadling. I think it starts in 1589 and features the two cues “Every Hundred Years” and “Return to the White Horse.” You mentioned that you're really into Renaissance music. That must have been a really fun sequence and a couple of cues to write?
DB: Yeah, I love episode six. The first half was all about Death’s warm embrace, and it provided a moment for me to write an unashamedly heart-tugging theme. And then we move on to this fun journey through the centuries with Gadling. Even though the score in the second half alludes to historical idiosyncrasies, I was never trying to write period-accurate music. For example, there’s a moment where Gadling observes Dream talking to Shakespeare and I have a bass recorder (old) playing alongside a bass synth (new). I’ve always enjoyed messing around with music and sounds from the past, and this seemed like the perfect episode to have that sort of fun.
CC: Especially because it's sort of from Morpheus’ perspective, remembering these things happening as well.
DB: Exactly.
CC: Is there any music from the cereal convention on the soundtrack?
DB: There is, it’s called “God Tells Me to Do It.” It’s one of the weirder tracks on the album.