100 episodes

Film and TV critic Clint Worthington (Consequence, RogerEbert.com, The Spool) talks to a new composer every episode about the origins, challenges, and joys of their latest musical scores.

Right on Cue Clint Worthington

    • TV & Film
    • 4.7 • 7 Ratings

Film and TV critic Clint Worthington (Consequence, RogerEbert.com, The Spool) talks to a new composer every episode about the origins, challenges, and joys of their latest musical scores.

    Vince Pope (True Detective: Night Country)

    Vince Pope (True Detective: Night Country)

    This week's guest is RTS winning and BAFTA-nominated composer Vince Pope, a London-based composer who cut his teeth on scores ranging from Misfits to episodes of Black Mirror. But his most exciting collaborations of late have been those with filmmaker Issa Lopez, starting with her 2017 magical-realist horror film Tigers Are Not Afraid. Now, the pair reteam to put a supernatural spin on HBO's seminal crime thriller series True Detective.
     
    Inherited from Nic Pizzolatto's three-season anthology series, Lopez's new season, subtitled Night Country, follows a precarious period of darkness in a small Alaskan town as the town sheriff (Jodie Foster) and her ex-partner (Kali Reis) investigate the mysterious deaths of the members of a corporate research station on the outskirts of town. The case may well be tied to the unsolved murder of a Native woman that tore their partnership asunder years prior, and sends the pair down an ominous road filled with tough moral choices and events that lie beyond their understanding.
     
    Pope's score blends elements of horror and murder-mystery atmosphere with a deep swell of psychospiritual torment, to say nothing of the addition of Native American elements like throat singers and collaborator Tanya Tagaq to incorporate the show's exploration of those cultures. Now, Pope joins me on the podcast to talk about True Detective: Night Country.
     
    You can find  Vince Pope at his official website here.
     
    You can stream the entire season of True Detective: Night Country on Max, and listen to the score on your preferred music streaming service courtesy of WaterTower Music.

    • 30 min
    Carlos Rafael Rivera (Griselda, Monsieur Spade)

    Carlos Rafael Rivera (Griselda, Monsieur Spade)

    Grammy- and two-time Emmy-winning composer Carlos Rafael Rivera has spent the last decade building moody, complex musical worlds around complicated characters. His earliest prominent work was with regular collaborator Scott Frank on films like A Walk Among the Tombstones, and the Netflix miniseries Godless. But it was his mercurial work on Frank's miniseries The Queen's Gambit that earned Rivera breakout status.
     
    Since then, he's worked on a host of films and series both with Frank and elsewhere: Apple's Lessons in Chemistry, HBO's Hacks. But his two most recent scores, and some of his best, have him dealing with different ends of the prestige-crime-drama ecosystem. Take Netflix's Griselda, in which an unrecognizable Sofia Vergara climbs her way to the top of Miami's drug trade as the real-life Cocaine Godmother; scored like an opera, Rivera's sound is full of harpsichord, lone voices, big breathy melodramatic moments.
     
    On the other side of the Atlantic lies AMC's stellar miniseries Monsieur Spade, in which Clive Owen plays an older Sam Spade solving a mystery while spending his retirement in rural France after World War II. There, the usual noir trappings are leavened by a distinct sense of melancholy, lonely guitar strains underlining the postwar fragility of its French setting.
     
    This week, I'm thrilled to have Rivera on to talk about these shows and so much more, from his musical journey with the guitar to his philosophies on which perspective to score from. It's a brilliant chat (maybe one of the best this podcast has ever enjoyed), and I hope you enjoy.
     
    You can find Carlos Rafael Rivera at his official website here.
     
    Griselda is currently streaming on Netflix, and Monsieur Spade runs weekly on AMC and AMC+. You can also stream each soundtrack at your music service of choice.

    • 41 min
    Anthony Willis (Saltburn)

    Anthony Willis (Saltburn)

    This week, we're catching up with one of the Oscar-shortlisted Best Score nominees -- Anthony Willis' score to Emerald Fennell's lavish, mysterious thriller Saltburn. Fennell's second directorial feature, after Promising Young Woman, is a kind of Brideshead Revisited by way of Tom Ripley and mid-2000s party culture: A mysterious young bloke named Oliver Quick (Barry Keoghan) follows his irrepressible attraction to fellow Oxford pretty-boy Felix (Jacob Elordi) all the way to Felix's palatial mansion, Saltburn. There, he immerses himself in the hedonistic lifestyles of the ultra-rich, all the while hoping to catch a glimmer of Felix's attention -- or does he?
     
    Reuniting with Fennell for his second score with her, composer Anthony Willis crafts a suitably Gothic sound for her idiosyncratic class thriller. Opening with romantic strings, transitioning into classical choir, then electric pianos and additional layers and textures, Willis draws the listener in like one of Oliver's obsessions, before disrupting the film's jagged classicism with rough modern electronic textures and a sense of sweeping orchestral doom.
     
    Today, we talk to Willis about all of that and more, including his longtime collaboration with Fennell and his early life as a chorister at Windsor Castle.
     
    You can find Anthony Willis at his official website.
     
    Saltburn is currently available for rental or streaming on Prime Video. You can also listen to the score on your preferred music streaming service courtesy of Milan Records.

    • 34 min
    Dave Porter (Echo)

    Dave Porter (Echo)

    For nearly fifteen years, composer Dave Porter has been the musical voice of the Breaking Bad universe -- having scored every season of Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul, and the film El Camino for good measure. Now, he plies his penchant for atmospheric, guitar-driven thrills to the MCU, with the new Disney+ series, Echo.
     
    A spinoff of Hawkeye, Echo hearkens back to the grittier, more violent climes of the Netflix Marvel shows, centering on deaf Choctaw assassin Maya, played by Alacqua Cox. Last seen betraying and shooting her boss and father figure, Vincent D'Onofrio's Kingpin, at the tail end of Hawkeye, Maya rides home to her small town in Oklahoma to reconnect with her roots and finish the war against Wilson Fisk that she started back in New York City.
     
    To score Maya's blood-soaked journey across Echo's five episodes, Porter made use of his signature mixture of guitar and synths to build a suitably neo-Western noir feel to the series. On top of that, the show incorporates many aspects of Native music and instrumentation, literally giving voice to the legacy of Native women Maya finds herself connecting to throughout her journey.
     
    Dave Porter joins us on the podcast to talk about the rigors of scoring for television, the role of music in a show about a Deaf protagonist, and the careful treatment of Native musical elements in his music for Echo.
     
    You can find Dave Porter on his official website.
     
    All episodes of Echo are currently streaming on Hulu and Disney+. You can also listen to the score on your preferred music streaming service courtesy of Marvel Music.

    • 32 min
    Paul Leonard-Morgan (The Pigeon Tunnel)

    Paul Leonard-Morgan (The Pigeon Tunnel)

    This podcast has had a long and fruitful relationship with composer Paul Leonard-Morgan, the man behind the scores of films like Dredd and Limitless, among countless others. But two commonalities have permeated the scores he's discussed with me: Errol Morris and Philip Glass. For the former, he teamed up to score Amazon's Tales from the Loop; for the latter, he's scored A Psychedelic Love Story among many other Morris docs, many of them alongside Glass.
     
    Now, both have teamed up for yet another of Morris' deep probes into an intriguing figure, this time famed novelist John le Carre, the author of books like Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. Framed as the prototypical days-long sitdown between Morris and his subject, The Pigeon Tunnel takes us through le Carre's childhood and early days with his abusive father, to his time in the spy service, to the ways those experiences informed his legendary novels.
     
    In so doing, Glass and Leonard-Morgan had to build a whopping eighty minutes of score, a propulsive effort that keeps the spy-thriller momentum of the doc going with cimbaloms and other features of the '60s espionage caper. And this week, we've got Paul back on the podcast to talk about his collabs with Morris and Glass, and building a score for the most mysterious man in the world.
     
    You can find Paul Leonard-Morgan at his official website here.
     
    The Pigeon Tunnel is currently streaming on Apple TV+, and you can listen to the score on your preferred music streaming service courtesy of Platoon.

    • 35 min
    Emilie Levienaise-Farrouch (All of Us Strangers)

    Emilie Levienaise-Farrouch (All of Us Strangers)

    This week, we're joined by Ivor Novello and BIFA-nominated composer Emilie Levienaise-Farrouch, a Paris-born artist who has made quite the name for herself in the last few years. Getting her start building scores for friends in film school who needed music for their short films, Emilie quickly cut her teeth on films like 2018's Only You and 2019's Rocks, before breaking out big in 2021 with her devilish score to Prano Bailey-Bond's British horror film Censor, and 2022's Living, for which she won a Hollywood Music in Media Award for Best Original Score in an Independent Film.
     
    Now, she turns those two instincts for exploring death and longing to the latest film from Andrew Haigh, All of Us Strangers, in which a gay man approaching middle age (Andrew Scott) finds himself with the opportunity to spend time with his long-lost parents, who died in a car crash when he was little. Still as young as the day they died, Adam clings to this newfound chance to spend time with his parents, as he navigates an uncertain new relationship with a boy in his apartment building (played by Paul Mescal).
     
    Leviennaise-Farrouch's work here is stripped down, bare, as spectral as the ghosts who make up at least half of the film's cast. She combines electronic with acoustic instruments, flitting between analog synths and deep, warm strings to sell Scott's alienation from the world around him and the deep loneliness he feels. Now, Emilie joins me on the podcast to talk about the process behind scoring All of Us Strangers.
     
    You can find Emilie Levienaise-Farrouch at her official website.
     
    All of Us Strangers is currently playing in theaters. You can also listen to the score on your preferred service courtesy of 20th Century Studios.
     
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    • 26 min

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