Art & Crafts is our series that goes behind the scenes with the artisans who create the film and TV we love. This inaugural composers roundtable is sponsored by A24, Disney, Netflix, Searchlight Pictures and Universal. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts.
When John Powell was writing the score for both Wicked movies — last year’s Oscar-winning blockbuster Wicked, for which Powell was a nominee for best score, and this year’s Wicked: For Good, a top awards contender once again — he started with a slight disadvantage.
“This came fully loaded with millions of people around the world knowing way more about what tune was supposed to go with what character; they know every eyebrow movement,” Powell told Ankler Media deputy editor Christopher Rosen during the inaugural Art & Crafts composers roundtable. Wicked, a musical prequel and expansion of L. Frank Baum’s 1900 novel, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, features some of the most recognizable musical theater songs from the last 25 years, including “No Good Deed” and “For Good.” But Powell had to write the film score from scratch and expand the stage music by Stephen Schwartz.
“It was almost hellish to try and comb that apart and see what I could do,” Powell, 62, added. “I know that was the complicated thing about this score. I’ve never done anything like it. I definitely couldn’t have done this score 10 years ago. I think my ego and my technique wouldn’t have allowed it.”
Powell, who was also Oscar-nominated for 2010’s How to Train Your Dragon, was one of five top composers to participate in the composers roundtable (watch above), alongside The Testament of Ann Lee’s Daniel Blumberg (an Oscar winner this year for The Brutalist), Train Dreams’ Bryce Dessner, Marty Supreme composer Daniel Lopatin and Captain America: Brave New World’s Laura Karpman (an Oscar nominee in 2024 for American Fiction).
“I want to praise John for acknowledging that it takes a setting aside of ego, and it also takes real compositional technique to figure out your way around these things,” Karpman said. For Captain America: Brave New World, Karpman was tasked with writing new music and themes for Marvel’s relaunch of the Captain America franchise, with star Anthony Mackie as Sam Wilson picking up the superhero’s shield from Chris Evans’ Steve Rogers.
“With Captain America, there’s a lot of history that goes behind it, and frankly, sometimes some pretty scary malice that comes up,” added Karpman, 66, who also worked on Marvel projects Ms. Marvel and The Marvels. “People have an idea about the way these characters should function, and frankly, if they’re women or Black people, they get pretty upset. I turned off Instagram and Twitter at that point, because you don’t want to read that stuff. It’s too upsetting.”
While composing the music for Brave New World, Karpman tried to embrace the franchise’s past — which featured an original theme by Alan Silvestri — and its present, including references to New Orleans-style music to tie the score into Sam’s canonical birthplace.
“I did do a little tiny reference to the Silvestri theme that nobody has noticed at the very end of the Brave New World theme,” she said, noting that Silvestri’s score utilized ascending fourths as part of its melody. “That actually is the end of the new theme, which now everybody will notice, but I did that as a kind of acknowledgement to his mastery and of the thematic world.”
Still, Karpman said being a composer on a project with global fans (many of whom often have unreasonable expectations) is “really tough to navigate.”
“You have to approach every project with your own compositional integrity and with your own sense of what the music needs — bringing in, in my case, many, many years of experience as a film composer,” she said. “It’s a privilege to be a woman working on these kinds of projects that have been traditionally the domains of males in every way — composers, filmmakers and all of that. So I appreciate Marvel being open-minded and bringing me in on these projects that take a little bit of guts to do.”
Courage was also on the docket for Blumberg, 35, who not only had to write an original score for The Testament of Ann Lee, Mona Fastvold’s musical biography about Ann Lee, the founder of the Shaker movement in the 18th century, but several songs as well (including “Clothed by the Sun”).
“I usually start from the script and write before they shoot, but this one I really had to because there was so much singing on the set,” Blumberg said. “I was trying to find my way into the project with Mona. It’s sort of like a puzzle at the start, because you’re trying to find a center — even just remembering what happens in the film is quite challenging until you read it a million times.”
With a tight production timeline, Blumberg had roughly three months to research the Shakers, write music that would be appropriate for the film and prep tracks to be played on set for the cast, including Amanda Seyfried as the title character. “It was pretty bonkers, from the start, really, till the end, doing lots of things at the same time,” he said.
Blumberg has worked with Fastvold and her professional and personal partner, Brady Corbet, several times (including on The Brutalist, which Fastvold co-wrote and Corbet directed), something both Dessner and Lopatin can relate to. Dessner, 49, has worked on four films with filmmakers Clint Bentley and Greg Kwedar — who often write scripts together and trade off directing duties — including last year’s Sing Sing (directed by Kwedar) and this year’s Train Dreams (directed by Bentley).
“I often work on movies like this, where I get to be part of it really early,” Dessner said. “We’re old friends now, so Clint and Greg were sharing scripts all along, and I’m one of the first people who sees anything.”
For Train Dreams — about a railroad worker (Joel Edgerton) who experiences tragedy and loss during the early part of the 20th century — Dessner said he took cues from the Denis Johnson novella on which the movie is based. That meant searching for an “analog” approach to recording the score, including finding studios where he could use “old ribbon mics and old, out-of-tune upright pianos” to capture sounds that might have come out of the film’s era.
Lopatin was briefed with a different task for his period piece, the 1950s-set Marty Supreme. On his third collaboration with filmmaker Josh Safdie, after Good Time and Uncut Gems, Lopatin said their early conversations were about defying expectations of the era.
“In my experience with Josh, we really have to understand the essence of the film, emotionally, philosophically and poetically, and then everything just starts kind of falling into place somewhat magically,” Lopatin said.
Marty Supreme is focused on Marty Mauser (Timothée Chalamet), a shoe salesman on New York’s Lower East Side who harbors dreams of becoming the best table-tennis player in the world. But rather than create something totally era-appropriate with the music, Lopatin’s score includes several elements that would be at home in an ’80s-set drama, too (think Rain Man or After Hours).
“He’s a kid in his 20s, in the early 1950s. We assume he might make it to the early ’80s and mid-’80s, in which he might look back and think about how he got there,” Lopatin said, noting the neoclassical approach he took to the score. “The new world that he’s envisioning for himself is music of the new wave of the ’80s — and so when they enter into conversation with each other, that’s the magic of the film. That’s sort of why it works, even though, on paper, it sounds completely bizarre. But it actually works because it really is keyed in to the heart of the character.”
A24’s Marty Supreme is out on Christmas Day; Disney’s Captain America: Brave New World is streaming on Disney+; Netflix’s Train Dreams is streaming; Searchlight Pictures’ The Testament of Ann Lee is out in select theaters on Dec. 19; Universal’s Wicked: For Good is in theaters now.
