David Fleming's 'Damsel'
CineConcerts met with composer David Fleming to discuss his score to the new film Damsel!
Composer David Fleming
CineConcerts (CC): Damsel. This is a massive score! How did you get it started with this project? Where did it begin?
David Fleming (DF): It began with a Zoom conversation with the director, Juan Carlos [Fresnadillo]. It's funny, I've been doing so much recently that's been very electronic, or textural or “modern”, for lack of a better term. Before my conversation with Juan Carlos, I was led to believe he wanted something similar since I knew he was doing essentially an upside-down take on a fairy tale, a subversion in some ways. I figured he was probably after something extremely synthetic or an ironic take on the genre. Instead, I was so pleasantly surprised to hear him talk about how much he loved the orchestra and how much he wanted this to be a thematic score and something that felt timeless. I think it was really clever on his part. So much of what he does turns the genre upside-down or has a subversive slant on it. By having the music focused on sincerely telling a story and avoiding any hint of winking at the audience, we could allow them to fully embrace it.
I think what makes the fantasy genre so strong is that it is, by its nature, sincere, and it's something that you can escape into. In order to do that, you really need to relate with your main character. I was thrilled to be asked to go unabashedly thematic with the score and do something that 12-year-old me would have died to do. In a weird way, it became a radical approach for me, especially within the context of so many modern films and scores bending over backwards to be subversive in every way possible. To do something that was more traditional and based on more of an “old-school” approach has strangely become a novel take in this classic kind of story setting.
CC: It’s so true, isn't it? It's like completely reverse now. In the 80’s and 90’s you would expect a Jerry Goldsmith-like score. It sounds like you had massive amounts of fun on it. How big of an orchestra did you use?
DF: I don't know the count, but, with choir and everything, there were well over 100 musicians on it, it was massive. The players in London are some of the best in the world. We got to record at AIR which has become a little bit of a home away from home because Hans [Zimmer] loves to record there and I’ve gotten to do a lot of scores with him. Every step of the way I was like, I can't believe they're letting us go this big with this caliber of orchestra, and not just once but twice since there were two bouts of scoring. It was fantastic. It's always a thrill when you get to just go full on like that.
CC: Let's just take a step back for a second and talk about you as a composer. When did you decide to take the leap into film music specifically?
DF: I don't know that there was much of a decision to be made. It felt like I was drawn to music and story and how they work together my whole life. From being a kid and being obsessed—we had this cassette tape of Phantom of the Opera, and I just listened to it constantly, really zoned into it. Even in high school, being in bands, we were playing punk and hardcore shows, but doing these weird concept albums, there was always some story behind the music.
CC: And were there visuals with that?
DF: No, no. Just crazy stories that I made up and there was always something cinematic about it. The whole time I was also working in a video store. I had that whole Tarantino cinema education of just constantly watching films while I should’ve been working at one of those extinct mom-and-pop video shops. At the same time, I was studying piano and knowing I wanted to write music, it didn't really come together until a friend of mine was in an art class where they had to produce mock movie trailers, and she asked me to score hers. It was just something that I got lost in for a couple days. I think that feeling of getting lost in something and losing time is always sort of a sign of you're on the right track, and for me it seemed to bring those two worlds together perfectly. Maybe subconsciously it popped into my head as a possible career path because my friend’s grandfather was John Morris, who did the scores for Mel Brooks films. Either way I started to think, “oh, this could be a job for me.” I had no idea how that was going to happen, but it was something that I started to feel a pretty strong pull towards.
CC: I feel like every composer I talk to has a different definition of what feels cinematic. And for you, it seems like the cinematic experiences were these stories you made up in your mind, and then you would express that story through music specifically without any visuals, but you would have visuals in your mind.
DF: Well, working to my friend’s trailer was the first time I had done scoring to picture. But also, I was always really into geeky dramatic music, like Meat Loaf. I still have love Bruce Springsteen, specifically those early records that are basically working-class East Coast cinema, you know? So, I was always drawn to story in music, but the idea of scoring image just seemed to be an equation that made sense of all these seemingly random interests I’d always had.
CC: So, for this project, were you brought on when the movie had been shot or was it much earlier?
DF: The movie was mostly shot and at first I thought I wasn't going to have much time, because it did seem to be pretty far along. But thankfully for me, they tested lots of versions of the dragon - the look and how much she talks or doesn’t talk. So, the story changed a little bit. I ended up having time to put together a score that didn't feel rushed.
As soon as I got involved, I started writing suites and it was really about taking as much time as they would allow me to sort of explore that world. Because you're right, it was fun world to inhabit.
CC: What's your process like? Do you sit down a piano and start experimenting? Do you just do you play the guitar? What’s step one?
DF: It's different depending on both the project and the timeline because, for instance, with Mr. and Mrs. Smith, which is the show I just finished for Amazon Prime, we had no time at all. So, it was all experimentation and scoring simultaneously. There was no time to write suites. It was just like, I'm going to pick a couple scenes that I think would help to discover a main theme through doing so. Sometimes it's like that but with something like Damsel, where I do have the time, I always like to do score suites first, which is just exploring the characters through solely music and purposefully not engaging with the picture.
At the point where you’re writing suites, hopefully you've seen the movie, and you have some ideas of how they will find their place. It's an approach that I've learned and embraced through working with Hans, of getting away from the picture for as long as possible, if you have the time to, because it allows you to conceptualize the character without getting sucked into the minutia of cuts and scene lengths. It's sort of the same approach as you mentioned, of doing a concept albums. If you can just internalize the story and then go and figure out musically what these characters mean to you, you’ll hopefully have this vocabulary that you can draw on rather than get sidetracked by logistics.
In this case, when I got the job I was in Australia visiting my in-laws for the holidays, and I didn't have my whole system with me. And my mother-in-law had an electronic keyboard, like a Casio at her house. And so, all of a sudden, I'm not able to go full arrangement crazy or get sucked into making a sound or any type of procrastination I might typically engage in it. It was just being with the keyboard. And especially for this film, where I knew we wanted to do something thematic, it was nice to just be stuck with a Casio and just concentrate on, “okay, what are the tunes?” And that restriction, I think, really paid off in the sense that I wasn't able to flesh things out right away and it was just forcing me to really key into the story and just figure out simple tunes that could translate to whatever production I wanted to apply later.
CC: Thinking about the music and the themes without picture, which you said you learned from Hans, was that something that was difficult to learn, or does that come pretty easy for you as a composer?
DF: No, that's very natural for me. I think some of it is just the music I would produce for myself when I was younger. Whether it be in bands or on piano, I would always be drawn to things that were a little more programmatic or metaphorically describing something literal. I was always drawn to music that tried to do that.
It's great, if you can afford the time, it saves you a lot of time later. If you have strong identities, you don't need to guess at scenes. Or maybe if a director is stuck in a temp track, at least if you have a strong melody you can shake him or her out of that by applying a theme that they've already gotten used to. It's great to get them to know the suites away from picture. Sometimes they're not accustomed to that. And saying, "I just want to play you some music and I'm not going to tell you where any of this goes,” sometimes can pay dividends and other times it can work in different ways than you expect. Maybe you write a suite intending it for one thing, but the director hears it and says, “oh, it's actually perfect for this other character.” That's happened a couple times too. So you do have to be malleable and flexible in that way and let the film surprise you.
CC: When you write these themes do you get emotionally get attached to them? And yet the thing about collaboration is you have to be malleable as a composer. Is that difficult to do?
DF: Yeah, I've had a lot of experience killing my babies at this point. It's something that was definitely hard for me at first, even writing additional music for other composers and feeling very strongly. Especially when you're younger, you have your own fascistic control of your craft and your art, and no one can tell you what to do. All of a sudden you're in film, which is such a collaborative art and it's not really your art above anything. It's how do you fit into the story? What role do you play? How can you help a director's vision? It's not only an important thing to learn, I think it's a crucial thing to learn for what we do. At the end of the day, at best, you are a collaborative partner, but there is always a director's vision and a story that needs to be served. Sometimes you can convince a director that maybe your vision is the right one. If you have a very open person, then sometimes they can see that. It's a great thing about this craft that I really love and have learned to embrace. But yes, it was very difficult at first.
CC: That’s just something you have to learn with experience. And the more you do it, the more comfortable you become with knowing it's not personal. It's for the greater good of the of the project, right?
DF: I think so, but I think some people are also naturally good at it. Other people have to learn it. Some people never learn it.
CC: How do you balance the barriers of temp music and also break free from that?
DF: I'm not somebody who finds temp tracks to be the bane of my existence. It's often that directors don't know how to talk about music, so temp is a clue into what they feel about something. There are times where it can be very frustrating, especially if they have gotten glued to coincidences that happen to work with a picture and it's no longer about something important to the story. But generally, and I think this is an attitude I've learned from Hans, it is your duty to come up with something fresh and something that hopefully shakes them of being used to it.
There are other times where it's just impossible to beat. I remember, I was working on Wonder Woman 1984 with Hans and Patty Jenkins had temped in John Murphy’s Sunshine. Right off the bat I think Hans sensed that this was not a beatable situation, that she really was in love with that specific thing. And both myself and Steve Mazzaro tried to come up with versions that would beat it and Hans ended up being right. There are those times where they have edited to that picture, and there's something about it that is loved and you can do an imitation, you can do something close, but you're not going to beat it. It's also important to know when to admit defeat.
CC: Has there ever been something that you've really pushed for, whether it be an instrument or theme? Something musically that you were like, we really have to have that “thing” in there?
DF: I know there were things that I pushed back on. I'm struggling to think of a specific, but with JC, he was a very open person and would always hear me out, but if he had a strong feeling then it was a very strong feeling and I respected it.
I will always go to bat for things that I feel strongly about. But at the same time, there is a certain point at which you can't defend something. You can't force somebody to see it your way. And who would want to, honestly? It's a film that a director is making and all you can do is come into it with a strong point of view. But if any part of that is not part of their vision, then it's not worth forcing.
CC: There's a ton of music for this, you said you had a lot of time, but how much is a lot? Did you have months to work on this or weeks?
DF: It seemed like it was going to be only two months going into it, but I don't know exactly. I would say on and off, around six months. I can't complain about that at all, I had plenty of time to figure out.
CC: Is there any track in particular from the soundtrack that you're particularly proud of?
DF: I'm definitely proud of the of the first track, “Elodie’s Maze,” because that's the first suite I presented. And I'm also proud of “End of Your Story,” which was something I promised JC at the beginning. I wanted both of Elodie’s themes to come together with the dragon theme. I promised something I didn't know if I was going to be able to deliver on, but I feel like hopefully I did.
One thing I wanted to do early on was a track called “Phantom Princesses.” You were asking about something crazy. Elodie has these visions of other women who have been sacrificed during this ritual in the past. And they're these spirits that appear to her in a dream and what I wanted to do was create an element to the score that would represent them and help guide her through and warn her in situations. So, through the film you hear this thread of ghostly voices. We had a giant choir for all these grand moments, but we also took nine of those women and brought them into a room and had them sing together, barricading each other so that we could close mic them. Usually with a choir, the goal is making a big, homogeneous sound. In this case, it was like, let's embrace the individual voices and almost do character voices. So, on that track, “Phantom Princess” they're all singing in a room, but because they're all close mic’d, we can do interesting things with the stereo image and have them move around. And that was really fun to test the limits of these incredible singers and tell them, “not only are you singers, but you're also actors and you're going to have this part of the story.” That was a fun bit of experimentation.
CC: This is definitely a movie that I would love to have seen in the theater, it sounds like a theater experience just from the score.
DF: Hopefully people have good home theaters. I'm sure there are a lot of people watching on an iPhone, but I got to see it in the theater at the premiere, which was great. Hopefully, because the score is melodic, it's not entirely reliant on the system that you're listening to it on. And hopefully, even on an iPhone, it can be a satisfying experience, even if it's not the way I would prefer.
CC: You’ve worked with some really incredible people. Can you talk about how important that's been for you as a composer navigating the film world?
DF: I've been really lucky with both Hans as a mentor and also Atli Örvarsson, another fantastic composer I worked with for many years. I would say I’ve learned things from the two of them and tons of other mentors and teachers in the past. But with the two of those guys especially, there's so much about this business that's not just about the music. Of course, everyone has music that they want to get out of themselves and get out of the stories that they work on. But music is hard to teach, there's so many things that you can learn from a great teacher about this business, this craft, this industry. So, to be around people executing at a very high level, it gave me the experience that when things are asked of me, I have some reference point to engage whatever the problem is, because it is a problem-solving job.
CC: What’s coming up next for you? Do you have any projects you can mention?
DF: Yeah, I have a Barry Levinson film called Alto Nights that I just recorded the score for this weekend. It's a mafia film starring Robert Deniro in dual roles. And then a documentary about Jim Henson that Ron Howard directed. So those are both close to finishing and I'm excited about both.