If you’ve been to the cinema in the last few weeks you’ll likely have heard the music of Benjamin Wallfisch. The gifted British composer wrote the music for a pair of blockbuster sequels, Twisters and Alien: Romulus, released almost back to back over the summer.
It’s just the lastest big-screen success for the composer, who is the eldest son of cellist Raphael Wallfisch and violinist Elizabeth Wallfisch, following scores for last summer’s The Flash, hit horror franchise IT and so much more, including working with Hans Zimmer on the scores for Hidden Figures and Blade Runner 2049. And it comes ahead of his next projects, Marvel’s Kraven the Hunter and HBO's IT prequel series, Welcome to Derry.
I sat down with Benjamin Wallfisch for a chat about his blockbuster summer, his journey to become one of Hollywood’s most trusted (and talented) composer and what it was like to grow up in such a musical family...
You’ve had quite the summer, what was your schedule like having to deliver scores for two such big films back to back?
Yeah, they were literally back to back. It was very lucky how that worked out – it often doesn’t; sometimes you have a bit of a collision, but fortunately the schedules on those two worked out very nicely.
And they’re two very different films and scores; how do you pivot from one to the other?
Well it’s good fortune when you have such amazing filmmakers to inspire you. Fede (Alvarez)’s vision (for Alien: Romulus) was so vivid, and he’s such a great musician. Part of the brief was to almost write a love letter to the scores of Jerry Goldsmith, James Horner and so on.
And when I was working on Twisters with Lee Isaac Chung, his sense of what the music would bring was so strong and so powerful. Both him and Fede gave me so much freedom as well. So it felt like I was in a wonderful environment in both cases, and to just try things and be daring.
I guess that isn’t always the case? Having so much freedom?
It really depends. In the case of Alien: Romulus it was very unusual in that from the very beginning Fede went to great lengths so that I would never hear any temp score. When I first screened the film there was no temp music at all; he was adamant that whenever I received a turnover of the film they stripped out all the temp music. That just gave so much freedom to our process, and it made it a little bit harder, but it also meant that we had to dig even deeper to discover what it could be.
In the case of Twisters so much of the music is not scored – there are so many amazing songs in the movie, and I wanted to make sure we didn’t attempt to double-up on that. So there’s a definite disctinction where I wanted to capture the essence of Oklahoma in some of the moments, but then still have it be very much from the point of view of the story, and make sure the tornadoes themselves had a voice and musical identity.
Did you discuss the idea of using Mark Mancina’s theme from 1996’s Twister?
Absolutely, that’s something we discussed. It’s a completely different type of film in many ways; Lee Isaac Chung has got this really unique filmmaking style whereby even when you’ve got the most enormous, epic, visually spectacular set-piece moments, he makes it feel personal. You’re still very connected to the characters, their plight and where they’re at in their own journey in the story. That’s, I would say, very unique in a huge disaster, blockbuster thriller, to have that level of personal connectivity with the characters and the community and the sense of connection between everyone. And so in many ways the score is way more intimate because of that.
When I tried to go down that much more larger-than-life feel, because the Mancina score is such a classic, it somehow didn’t fit. There’s a different tone to this film, while still trying to pay our respects to that style of writing, the movie just needed a different tone.
Do you ever have to convince directors/producers that it’s a good idea to use an orchestra, or melodic music, these days?
I don’t know; I would say it’s coming back with a vengeance. I don’t find there’s music resistance. I tend to go in full force with the idea of using, at least, melody as a driving force. I think when you don’t use a melody it doesn’t necessarily mean its bad. Sometimes a movie requires a very austere approach where you’re using sounds, or the simplest of motifs; you don’t have to have a fully blown melody to be effective.
It’s case by case, and I’ve learned so much in terms of how to use restraint, to be a minimalist but in a maximalist setting. Less is more in the core materials, even if the sound is overwhelming. That’s sometimes the hardest thing to do, and I was very lucky in the years I spent being mentored by Hans Zimmer, and his approach to that is so unique. Coming up with that core material, that kind of killer concept, which may be as simple as three or four notes, or a chord progression, or a particular sound, all these things can have as much weight as a well crafted melody.
I tend to be naturally drawn towards orchestral sounds and, I guess, it’s just where I come from. I always try and push my own comfort zone, and I guess that’s why in Alien: Romulus there was quite a lot of electronics as well as the orchestral material.
There’s always that element of beauty and horror in an Alien score isn’t there?
The idea of deep space is that it’s very disturbing, but there’s also so much wonder. That sense that we have as humans to go into the dark of space, with a sense of discovery and trepidation and fear… but then the fact that it’s endless, when we look up into the night sky. There’s a wonder and a beauty equal to the amount of darkness and terror, which you can try and capture musically.
You reference themes from prior Alien scores in your music. Were you tempted to use more?
‘Less is more’ was important because we had a new story to tell, and you don’t have to do very much to be clearly tipping your hat and lovingly quoting, or at least taking the essence of these scores. In the case of the Prometheus theme (by Harry Gregson-Williams), that happened in an incredibly time-metered way, in one moment, and it was incredibly important to Fede that it happened that way. When you watch Prometheus and you watch that moment in our film, it really hits home. And also when we’re introduced to Rook, the Science Officer, of course we had to have that iconic trumpet melody from the Alien soundtrack (by Jerry Goldsmith), because it’s so iconic to that world.
I think back to my childhood and for some reason I had the cassette of James Horner’s score for Aliens, and it just happened to be something that I would listen to now and again on my walkman. Sometimes I just wanted to feel scared, and all it would take was this. I had no idea what was going on but it was fascinating to me, the extended use of the orchestra and also the Bartók pizzicato sound delay, something as simple as that. It doesn’t take very much and you don’t want to overdo it. Also, more importantly, we needed to do something very new and fresh as well.
Was there a moment in the film that was really memorable to score, or surprising?
Everything was a surprise when I first saw it. There were so many moments where I thought we’d reached the peak and then we had to go a stage further. Probably the final act was the most difficult, but also the most challenging, in the best way. We’d finished the story in many ways – not wanting to spoil it for anyone who might be reading this, but we have a very traditional ‘hero conquers the great dark entity’ in the story and we could easily cut to black and we’d be done.
But instead there’s a kind of coda section, which is totally insane, unlike anything you’ve seen before, and Fede very clearly said to me that it needed to be a totally different sound to the rest of the score. We’d already gone to every extreme length the orchestra could go to, and we’d done that with the electronics, so we had to do something completely different.
For whatever reason the first thing that came into my head was that we should have no more than two instruments, so I ended up coming up with this suite of material for solo cello and prepared piano. I wanted to completely channel Boulez, Xenakis and a bunch of other contemporary classical composers I hugely admire, like Berio and Cage, and do something unlike anything we’d done before.
A very close friend of mine called Tristan Schulze, he’s based in Vienna and an incredible cellist, I just gave him the brief of ‘I want to hear everything the cello should never be asked to do…’ and he sent me back about two hours-worth of material, just the most off-the-wall, crazy stuff you’ve ever heard. We made our own prepared piano bank, nearly broke my piano doing so, and came up with this really bonkers piece which then I gave to Fede. He asked for some pulsing, throbbing synths, which I gave to him and he laid that in with the music editor to create that whole sequence. That was a really exciting collaborative moment.
It's 18 years since your first film score, Dear Wendy… what has the journey from that to Alien: Romulus been like?
I’ve been very lucky and very fortunate to work with filmmakers who have been heroes of mine, really from the beginning. The opportunity at the very start to work on Dear Wendy with Thomas Vinterberg and Lars von Trier came completely out of the blue. It was based on a piece of music I’d written in my student days at the Royal Academy of Music, for string orchestra, and somehow it got in front of them on a showreel. That was a really important moment, because I only had two weeks to write that score!
Thomas Vinterberg was incredibly generous, because he realised I had never written a film score before, and it almost turned into a masterclass with him giving me a lot of freedom, but also learning so much in those two weeks about dramatic scoring.
That score led to Dario Marianelli hearing my music and inviting me to become his righthand man for maybe six or seven years. That was a true apprenticeship; I was very lucky to learn from Dario and his very unique and beautiful style of scoring and working with dialogue. His melodic and harmonic sense is so stunning, and we did about 20 scores together during those years. I would orchestrate everything and almost all of them I would conduct, so I got to develop that side of things as well.
During that time I was trying to forge a dual career in the classical world – which I’m on a semi-permanent sabbatical from since the last eight or nine years; it was just impossible to do both. But I was really lucky to have those years with Dario.
Then at age 30, having done all of those, I realised that could easily be my entire career in film, as an orchestrator, and realised I had to do something really bold to move into what I really wanted to do, which was to write the scores. So that’s when I decided to move to Los Angeles and start again, from zero. It wasn’t really from zero because all of those years I’d learnt with Dario were incredibly valuable, and I was so grateful for that time.
A couple of years after moving to LA, Hans Zimmer very kindly reached out and I connected with him. The years I spent learning from him were the most valuable of my life; it was five or six years at his ‘Remote Control’ studio and I was so lucky to just watch and learn from Hans, his whole philosophy behind filmmaking, music and production, and how to really get inside the storytelling process, musically. He was the person who realised that I had almost no experience as a filmmaker, when I first came to LA. I had a lot of experience with orchestral composing and so on, but really getting inside the fluency of storytelling that you need as a filmmaker, that just takes time.
He very brilliantly thought that the one person I should learn from is Gore Verbinski, a great filmmaker, and he set up an opportunity where I scored this movie A Cure for Wellness. I learned later on that it was for the reason that Gore required the composer to be with him in his cutting rooms every single day for a year, because he didn’t want to use any temp score. And so that’s what happened, I set myself up in a storage cupboard pretty much in his post-production facility in Pasadena and it meant that every single day I was with the filmmakers, the picture editor, the effects supervisor, the sound designer… we’d all have lunch together every day and while I was writing the score I would just learn from all the other departments and watch them construct this movie from scratch. It was one of the most exhausting and intense experiences I’ve ever had, but I learned so much about it. I came out feeling like I was more of a filmmaker than a composer, or at least equally so. I remember seeing Hans at the end and he said, ‘I just sent you to film school!’
Hans is incredible at helping young musicians find their voice and give them opportunities, to meet them where they’re at and to challenge you in the most extreme way and help you get to the next level when you’re ready. He’s an amazingly generous person and artist, the way he has done that for so many of us, and I’ve been so lucky to be on the receiving end of that.
After that just the collaborations I’ve been able to build up over the years, these incredible filmmakers I now consider some of my closest friends and brothers and sisters in arms. We’re so fortunate as composers to come into the process of a filmmaker where they really are crafting a movie after it has been shot, and we’re able to bring another point of view, hopefully one that helps enhance what they’re doing, and I’ve been very lucky with the filmmakers I’ve developed relationships with.
Like all great film composers you’re something of a chameleon, stylistically. Your scores for the likes of King of Thieves and The Starling, for example, are so different; what do you put that ability to write with such variety down to?
Well I always approach every film score with a beginner mindset of it being truly a blank piece of paper and ‘what does this movie need, and what can I bring personally to it?’ I’ve always, from a very young age, been fascinated to take on a voice I’m not really familiar with, but try to learn the inner workings of it. Also I just happen to love all music, whether it’s big band or very intense, aggressive electronic music, very intimate music for piano and strings or very complex symphonic music, aleatoric music.
Whatever it happens to be, I’ve always had that fascination with all these different flavours that music can inhabit, and in my own personal way I want to bring something of my own to it. I try not to think too hard about that. It has to be driven by the movies, the tone.
You bring up King of Thieves, and I remember watching the diamond heist sequence and there were these old geezers kind of dancing around like ballerinas, and it just occurred to me that it would be fun to have the most geezer-swagger version of ‘The Dance of the Sugar-Plum Fairy’. Like what if The Rat Pack got their hands on the Tchaikovsky? You think of a heist movie you think of Las Vegas, Ocean’s 11; it’s the glamour of it and yet it’s these geezers from South London. It’s just a crazy, ‘what would happen if we put these things together and these worlds collide?’ A good friend of mine, Chris Egan, who is an incredible artist and musician, helped me with that arrangement and we presented it to the director and he loved it. Moments like that you can only really do in a film score, because the story demands it.
It’s the same with Alien: Romulus; there’s a certain tone and a certain sonic that you kind of have to capture, and you do it with great reverence and great love, but then you factor in primarily what the story and characters demand and go from there.
The piano tends to feature quite prominently in various scores; is that your instrument?
Yeah, piano is my main instrument. I’ll never forget those early years with my grandfather Peter (Wallfisch) teaching me piano and watching him rehearse with my Dad. Unsurprisingly, cello also tends to be in there quite a bit as well; but the piano is the only instrument I would ever confess to playing. I dabble in a bunch of other instruments, but only for myself.
Are you the only composer in the family? Was that a conscious decision as a way to stand out from the rest?
It just happened to be what I loved from the very beginning. I was always drawn to the piano and I just hated learning reading music. I was always drawn to doing things by ear and improvising more than learning the dots – much to all my piano teachers’ great exasperation! I would just sit down and improvise, discover chords and figure out my own version of how music works, what chord progressions worked, why they made me feel a certain way. I would get obsessed with certain chord progressions; it’s all about harmonies.
For example in the ’Moonlight’ Sonata, the Neapolitan sequence there, or the Bach Prelude in C major; I had no idea back then, when I was eight or nine, technically why it was that they altered the chemistry of my body whenever I played them. But without fail they would. Then over the years as you discover other ways of doing it, you make it your own. And it all stems from that, just a fascination with just how potent music is.
My great grandfather Albert Coates (my mother’s grandfather) was a composer. He was more well known as a conductor in his time, but he wrote some really cool music; an interesting opera called Pickwick, which was I think the first televised opera back in the day. He sort of looms large in my mind, sometimes; it’s wonderful to know it’s in the family there. But equally, having working musicians in my family, both my parents, my siblings – my sister is a very accomplished songwriter, she writes beautiful lyrics, melodies and songs, there’s a lot of creativity in the family for sure when it comes to music.
Also my Dad, the way he worked with composers; I’ll always remember that as a kid, he constantly commissioned and gave world premieres of new works. That sense of it being important to work with composers; and my grandfather as well, he was great friends with Kenneth Leighton and other composers, so there was always that sense of a creative act being as important as the re-creative.
I wonder if growing up in a musical family is a double-edged sword? Opportunity and support vs comparisons and competition?
Honestly I don’t know any different, so it’s hard for me to say. I can look back now with incredible gratitude. And the opportunities I had, which I’m sure I would not have had were it not for growing up with so much music in my family, and the way it kind of permeates your mind. Every single day, from the day I was born, there was music being practiced. It can work both ways, but it was always a very benevloent thing and something done with great passion and love by my parents.
I think in my teens I was certainly very conscious of being the Son of my Dad, and being introduced that way. But I came to just be very proud of it, I mean my Dad was a badass cello player and I’m really proud of this guy, and by the way he works really hard and there’s a reason why he’s achieved this level, because he gets up at six in the morning and practises for seven hours. He still does to this day, in his seventies. It’s that level of sheer dedication and athletic application of a craft that stays with you, that work ethic; it’s very potent and it made a big impression on me.
Of course there’s a downside; my parents were always travelling and it was unpredictable when Mum and Dad would be home, and that has a lot of challenges, too. That’s why I try to not do that, and that’s why I stopped my career as a conductor in my mid-thirties to focus on composing, because I didn’t want to be on the road all the time. It was almost impossible to have that career unless you’re going from continent ro continent, week to week, and that just wasn’t for me. I was much more interested in building a family and being in one place. I might return to it one day.
It must still be challenging to balance composing with raising a family?
I’m very dedicated to the time with my daughter, so I try and create a very strong balance with my hours. The routine I try to just be very strict about; I’m at my most creative in the mornings – it used to be the evenings, but as I got older it just wasn’t happening. So if I can find four or five hours during the day of very intense, creative time I can get a lot done. Often when deadlines heat up that has to increase, but having a kid has changed everything for me and I carve out a very generous amount of time to be a dad as well.
Your next score is for Marvel’s Kraven the Hunter, can you tell us anything about what we might expect, musically?
I honestly can’t say anything about that! At this stage, whilst all the detals are being kept very secret, I would have to say ‘let’s talk about that in a couple of months!’ I think anyone who is a fan of that character and that storyline is in for a huge treat when they see this movie, though, and I’m very lucky and very excited to be a part of it. I’m still working on it and have been for quite a long time now.
And you’ve a full schedule I imagine; what else is coming up?
Yeah, I’m very lucky; there’s been some very interesting projects that have come along for the next year or so. One of those is Welcome to Derry, for HBO, which is the prequel TV show to the IT films. I’m very excited about that and getting to revisit that world with my dear friends Andy Muschietti and Barbara Muschietti, and all the other showrunners and everyone behind that. I can’t wait to get into that.
Are there differences for a composer writing for the big and small screen?
These days TV, especially episodic drama, is so cinematic; I don’t really have a distinction in my mind between the two. I’ve been focusing on features and just haven’t been offered many TV shows; but it’s really fun to do them. I’m quite excited about these, the shorter form, but I think there isn’t really a huge disctinction between the style. It depends on what each piece needs of course. I guess in a way there will be more the generate, thinking about the number of minutes.
Often you have a delivery schedule where it ends up with consecutive weeks, or every two weeks, where you’re delivering an episode. But I think you just need to balance the writing schedule very carefully so you don’t exhaust yourself creatively, but also make sure the deadlines are being hit. A big part of my process is to write a lot of material away from picture, just to give myself a bank of themes and core material to draw on, even if it’s free-formed at the time. I try to capture that lightning in a bottle away from the picture, where you’re freer, I suppose.
Is it easier to return to something you’ve written for before? A sequel, or prequel in the case of Welcome to Derry?
I think so, but I’m very conscious that we shouldn’t repeat ourselves, so I want to do something very fresh and very new for the series, as does Andy and Barbara. I think it’ll be fascinating to imagine what it’s like to lead up to the events of the movies. It’s almost like what’s the pre-emptive DNA, musically, to the melodies in the films. Where does that come from, what’s it’s origin? That’ll be fun to answer.
You can listen to Benjamin Wallfisch’s scores for both Twisters and Alien: Romulus wherever you enjoy your music.
