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Soundtrax 2024-7a: Special Edition
July 2024 –Interview SpecialFeature Interview:
Tyler Bates: Musical Experimentations from
X to PEARL to MaXXXine
Interview by Randall D. Larson
A24’s latest film follows Maxine Minx (played by Mia Goth) after the events of X. Composer Tyler Bates (Guardians of the Galaxy, Deadpool 2, John Wick, Watchmen, 300) has reunited with director Ti West on the upcoming slasher movie MaXXXine. The film is written and directed by West (House of the Devil, In a Valley of Violence) and stars acclaimed recording artists Moses Sumney and Halsey, as well as cast members Elizabeth Debicki, Moses Sumney, Bobby Cannavale, Michelle Monoghan, Bobby Cannavale, Lily Collins, Giancarlo Esposito, and Kevin Bacon.
After first collaborating with Chelsea Wolfe on the score of X and then working alongside composer Tim Williams (Founder’s Day, She Came From The Woods, Agent Elvis [w/Tyler Bates]and more) on the music for Pearl, Bates reunites with West, operating essentially solo this time, to deliver his most suspenseful work of the franchise. The MaXXINE score melds atmospheric horror music, classic Hollywood orchestration, '80s synth and guitar music, bleary jazz noir, and more.
The final installment in West’s X trilogy, which began with X and Pearl (both 2022), is set in 1980s Hollywood and follows adult film star and aspiring actress Maxine Minx who finally gets her big break. But as a mysterious killer stalks the starlets of Hollywood, a trail of blood threatens to reveal her sinister past.
Watch the trailer for MaXXXine, via YouTube:
MaXXXine opens with “My Little Girl,” a pleasing cue for piano or celesta that adds strings and bell, nicely warm, perhaps almost bucolic. It will soon change its tone.
Listen to “My Little Girl” from youtube:
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Q: Coming from X, to Pearl, to MaXXXine, how would you describe the musical journey that you’ve taken over these three films?
Director Ti West with Mia Goth
Photo: Eddy ChenTyler Bates: It has been a very interesting journey working with Ti West back in the day when we did THE SACRAMENT. Going into X, our initial discussion was to create something that lives in the realm of something like, say, movies like THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE, but a bit more avant-garde, like ROSEMARY’S BABY or something, so my thought, after our initial discussion, is that perhaps we create a vocal-centric score. At the time, I was working with Chelsea Wolfe on some other music, and she had expressed that she wanted to be involved in a film score at some point – she loved dark music and dark movies, so we were perfectly aligned. So I turned Ti onto her, and he immediately thought she would be excellent for it, and it turned out to be such. So that was a great beginning, and once we got into that is when I learned that PEARL would be shot, scored, and everything immediately after X. I didn’t know much about what PEARL was going to entail, we just finished X, which took quite a while to do the film, and perhaps because it was the first, Ti was spending more time editing, because he writes, directs, edits, producer – he’s very adept at all facets of filmmaking, which is great, as a film composer, because the way his personality is, he knows exactly what he wants but he also leaves a tremendous amount of space for creative people around him to find their way of interpreting his objective through whatever their detail happens to be on the film – me, obviously, music. So, X was pretty fun for me because there was a lot of experimentation with sound and working with Chelsea and her musical partner, Ben Chisholm – great people, so the camaraderie was awesome.
And then, moving into PEARL, they said, “Ok, we have six weeks to get the score done,” and it’s a homage to, maybe, the Hollywood Golden Era or something there about. I’ve worked closely with Tim Williams throughout the past couple of decades. He’s a very close friend and amazingly talented composer/orchestrator/conductor, and I love any opportunity I get to work with Tim. So, we discussed PEARL and brought Greg Prechel in, who’s previously orchestrated some of my work. So we had a great time coming about the initial themes and, obviously, the concept – which Ti was pretty specific when it came to that, so we all love that era of film music, so that resonated instantaneously. It was a tall order, though. Move through it and produce the final product in that amount of time, especially since it is an indie film. It’s an all-hands-on-deck-at-all-times effort.
“It was great to step into all those different shades of music and see how we could stitch this together to make sense! I think it does – I really enjoyed it. The opportunity to score a movie where you have a color change throughout, as far as your pallet, keeps it very interesting and fresh.”
Q: So with MAXXINE, what did you and Ti West discuss about what this music should be?
Photo: Justin Lubin Tyler Bates: When I learned that MAXXINE was happening, that, too, was very exciting because much of it was shot here in L.A., in the Valley, where I was born, so I was happy to be working on something that was shooting here. We thought it was going to be king of an electronic score at the very beginning – not like a STRANGER THINGS vibe, because, you know, that’s terrific, but it’s inspired many off-shoots, and we did not want to do that, so we moved away from it. Ti spoke about music in detail, thinking about what could work, and he brought up introducing some Jala vibes, which I love. I don’t know what it was when I first heard it when I was much younger, like with DIRTY HARRY, some of the Lalo Schifrin stuff, and some of the Italian composers at the time, and it expanded from there. Then I suggested we introduce saxophone to the score; Ti was reticent but willing to see what the vibe was when I introduced the music, and he ultimately loved it so much that he asked for it to be engrossed[absorbed?] throughout the film. That was great for my friend Frank Macchia, who played the sax. Frank and I have been friends for a long time, so bringing him into the film in such a prominent role was great.
But there are also bits of jazz, electronic music, and some throwback vibes that would not be unlike something you might find in an old Charles Bronson movie. We wanted to do something a little off-kilter and different from slick in its final production. And then, the way the film culminates is a different vibe, which is true to the ’80s, like ’80s lead guitar melody playing – kind of a bitter-sweet, almost triumphant feeling at the end of the film. It was great to step into all those different shades of music and see how we could stitch this together to make sense! I think it does – I really enjoyed it. The opportunity to score a movie where you have a color change, as far as your pallet throughout, keeps it very interesting and fresh. Even when we were revisiting music from Act One, when we were already at the end of the film, it made even that fresh because you’ve traveled through so many different styles since the beginning of the project. It was enjoyable, overall, and rewarding to step in there and have that close-knit communication with Ti and work with many soloists who contributed their talent to the score, as far as the color work. Then I got to play a lot on the score – a lot of GuitarViol, guitars, and other instruments.Q: It’s been said that MaXXine is your most suspenseful score of the franchise, and I’m pretty inclined to agree with that estimation. How did you conceive and create the score’s unique sonic elements aside from what we’ve discussed so far?
Photo: Justin Lubin Tyler Bates: It is a matter of experimentation. I’ll get a feeling for whether I want something to be warm or cold or create juxtapositions, a manner of depth, so I’ll experiment with different instruments. And in some cases, we recorded a B3… I recorded Tim Williams playing his B3 guitar [an accumulation of classic shred guitars merged with some of today’s more modern features]. I’ll steal a hell note out of that, and then I’ll re-synthesize that into something, but it has that living, breathing element baked into it that comes from the speaker cabinet. That creates an exciting energy, even in a hell tone. And, really, just through experimentation, we develop color palettes and sounds that the picture likes; it kicks them back in your face pretty readily if it doesn’t feel that the picture likes it. It’s an exciting process because it’s not like a one-size-fits-all motif. You know, it’s very interesting – orchestral scores are very challenging in their own right, but the one thing that is simple in orchestral scores is that they’re harmonically balanced – the whole ballet of traditional orchestral instruments, and so the harmonic sum of those makes sense in usually almost any combination.
In contrast, electronic elements, combined with acoustic and electric instruments, can be very challenging to serve the picture and then have it register as music or sound design, depending on the music’s intention. So it does take a considerable amount of time, and a lot of mixing and production work goes into it as you’re working because we have to prove the concept as we go. It’s not like we know all the colors; we’re going to score the movie, and then we’re going to mix it. We have to mix as we go to find out if something’s working. When I’m working with so many individual instruments like that, I have to be mindful of what tonal register I’m in so that I can carve space for the dialogue; depending on who the actor is, I need to work around their voices and treat them like a melody instrument. So, again, I find it a fun, exciting challenge to do when you have such a hodge-podge mish-mash of instruments that are compiled to make the score. But at the end of the day, I enjoyed it. It was a very energized collaboration with Ti.Q: What about your variance in instrumentation, both orchestral, electronic, or uniquely unusual, that gives the story what I think is a splendid mix of sounds and keeps the tale eerie and chilling throughout?
Photo: Justin Lubin Tyler Bates: Surely, I’m no stranger to heterodyning tonalities (laughs), where tones pull apart, away from pitch. I don’t find myself to be scared in movies much other than watching the news (both laugh). But, as a composer, I try to help prime the audience to receive the emotion that the film is about. Sometimes, it’s a jump scare, or sometimes, it’s the building tension or suspense in a sequence, and in that case, I might experiment with some atonal elements in the background. Still, I do find when we draw a correlation to a human-expressed element, whether it’s a voice or it’s a very notably performed solo instrument, I find that the effect of that can be rather chilling because there’s something in it that we relate to within ourselves when it’s human. It’s not just foreign, so I’m trying to find a way for each audience member to tap into their own thoughts and psyche to relate to something in their own life that empowers the emotion that the director is trying to convey. So, instead of saying, “This is how it is, this is how you feel,” I’m just trying to find a concentric point between the audience, material, the sound, the music that might get them to look within themselves and draw some emotional relationship to the picture from their own life experience. I try to do that with a combination of sound design and musical elements – and sometimes, it’s just noise! And I’m cool with that, too. I love it when noise clusters build, and then we cut into silence. No score is precisely as a composer intends it to be; it’s not as we composed it, so we try and account for every possibility because once we deliver a score and they’re on the dub stage mixing the film, there are executive decisions made at that juncture in the process, to serve the picture the best it can, whether that’s coming from the director or editor, music editor or recording mixers – and we’re at their mercy! So I try to plan accordingly for any possibility, but that also can diminish… let’s say, the first idea if you’re trying to come up with alternative ideas. Still, we have to do that because that’s the nature of film scoring these days – at least for genre films like this, it’s not a purely orchestral film. And that’s cool; I’m perfectly happy if some of the motifs are manipulated, repurposed, and applied to another part of the film where it might be effective. I’m always intrigued to see how it turns out in the end!
Q: Listening to the soundtrack album, I found your music tracks uniquely intriguing and effectively worrisome until the engaging finale. I went through each cue, taken from my notes as I’ve found them, and I’m curious what you can tell me, briefly, about how you developed and completed some of those tracks. For example, in Tracks 2-3-4 and 5, you’ve got what sounds to me like almost concrete music in there, very spooky, eerie rising tones and going on from there; in Track 6, you’ve got this guitar pluck that twangs away to set a mood there; Track 8 has some more electronic bends. Can you tell me about some configurations and how you created them and put them into their corner in the score?
Tyler Bates: When I watched the film, after having read the script, the script gave me the impression that it was much different than if I saw the movie first, and the film will conform or dispel my initial take on the material. Once you know the film and see the actors in the character roles and hear their voices, and see how it’s shot, how the scene is blocked, it’s going to provide a whole wealth of information that the composer draws upon to refine their ideas if they’ve already been contemplating what the score can be, and then, of course, there’s a discussion with the director. So, I try and create, for a movie like this, almost like a painting that is a scene. It’s not just the side of a red barn or something like that; it’s a whole scene, and there’s a story from one side to the next of it. And then I draw from each part of that painting that I have in my mind to develop these musical characters that, I hope, in the end, will tell the story that I’m thinking of and then also satisfy the objective of the director and the film itself. That’s where I start. Things change from there, but I do think about textures, almost like you would clothing or fabrics, how they will embrace or isolate a character, how they can encapsulate a particular emotion with the juxtaposition of the characters in a sequence. I know this sounds esoteric, but I have circus music inside this skull of mine all the time (laughs)! I see color, and I try to develop ideas based on that, so there’s an association from my life experience with music and sound that I don’t want to call synesthesia. Still, an element of that comes into play when I think about this on a granular level.
Q: Track 16, “The Night Stalker,” intrigued me. There’s a lot of tension there, a lot of synth tones, it becomes very frightening, then you’ve got a saxophone over some eerie tones, some drums in there, some wind sounds, it’s really creepy. Ultimately, it has a soft melody over something that might be a xylophone or something like that.
Photo: Justin Lubin Tyler Bates: In Track 16, we’re deep into the second act at that point, and there’s some modular synth stuff that, over time, I’ve developed a million ideas – we’ve created so many sounds that we host on a Logic EXS24 sampler, so I always have that as part of my tech arsenal here. Again, what we’re trying to create here – I think we’re in a house there, I’m pretty sure, but at that point, we want to make it terribly uncomfortable – we’re seeing the demise of one of our young actresses in the film – I’m not 100% sure, but I think so, and if so, again that’s more of those heterodyning frequencies. They just stuck with me; like 20 years ago, I began diving very deeply into the psychological effects of tonal frequencies on the brain at rhythm. It started with this German scientific study from 1969; they tested the impact of specific frequencies on the brain and then frequencies modulating or pulling out of pitch. Because once we hear something in pitch, a tone, we want to reconcile it with its tone. It makes us feel uneasy when it’s pulling away from pitch because our brain is trying to reconcile what the root of it is. Same thing with rhythm – if you introduce a rhythm, even just a pulse, and then there’s a pulse that starts to fall out of rhythm, it gives you that sneakers-in-the-dryer feeling, right? Our heart begins to try and find the beat, and when it’s challenging to find the beat, it can be agitating or make us a little uneasy. So, I’ll do stuff like that frequently to see if it has the desired effect. It doesn’t always. But this movie has elementary motifs, just simple, low drum pulses; these are all things we record in the field. Footsteps that might be an octave lower than they were initially recorded. So, an element of sound design is always applied in my music to movies like this because, again, when I studied the effects of frequencies on the brain, I was also looking deeper into the potential of a sound. So, practical sounds have a fascinating effect, as voices do, when they are altered from their original pitch and tempo into another pitch and tempo. There’s something in the space of a percussive instrument that’s slowed down or sped up that can become a little unsettling. And I love the sound of breaths when a voice is slowed down and pitched down, especially a female vocal, which can be engaging the more it becomes androgynous, and a male vocal, way low, can conjure up some satanic vibes! So that’s always fun to do! So, I’m always looking at how to defy any rules musically. I am always happy to write melodic, emotional music. I love that. But I have just as much fun in this sandbox.
Q: Your conclusion is given a very nice resolution, with a soft orchestral touch and a long play-out with what appear to be new sonic elements as the music concludes. What can you tell me about your end music, “The Puritan Credits?”
Tyler Bates: Ti West wanted something that would sound like the credit music of an old horror movie. We’re thinking THE DEVIL’S RAIN type of music, like that movie with John Travolta, Shelley Winters, and Ernest Borgnine? It’s a classic movie, entirely fun and cheesy! It was music like that! They still recorded orchestras for almost everything, most movies back then, so this was a nod to that era. It would have been on a Betamax or VHS if they existed then!
Q: What is coming next for you that you can talk about?
Tyler Bates: That’s the thing, we’re never able to talk about much…! We will get into PRIMAL, Season 3, which is excellent. TRACKERS is returning, and we had a lot of fun doing that TV show - CRIMINAL MINDS as well. Both are great people to work with. I have some movies and records coming out, but I can’t say specifically what they are and when they will be out. I’ll be off and on this summer, so I’ll be hitting a tour a couple of weeks from now, and what exactly that is will be revealed at the time of our first show! A lot of great things.
The MAXXINE soundtrack album is available now from a24 music: https://a24music.lnk.to/maxxxine
I’m excited to be working on a Video Game right now that’s fun; it’s rock-themed. Also, I did a TV show called HYSTERIA!, which I believe will come out in October. That show is so fun, and the people are amazing to work with. I just went to a screening of the pilot episode the other night, and it’s awesome! It’s so much fun, and it embraces 1980s heavy metal; there’s a coming-of-age element to it, there is a religious cult element to it and a whole mystery behind the show, and it’s fantastic. And I think the people behind making this are great; the cast is terrific. I think it’s not just for people who are into dark entertainment or heavy metal or anything like that; it’s for normies, too! It’s well-done storytelling, and the acting is really fun. As I said, there’s a coming-of-age element that I think anyone can relate to, and I look forward to that coming out.
Special thanks to Cory DeFalco at Terrorbird Media for facilitating this interview, and to Tyler Bates for taking the time out to answer my questions in such fascinating detail.
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Randall D. Larson was for many years publisher of CinemaScore: The Film Music Journal, senior editor for Soundtrack Magazine, and a film music columnist for Cinefantastique magazine. A specialist on horror film music, he is the author of Musique Fantastique: 100+ Years of Fantasy, Science Fiction & Horror Film Music, and Music from the House of Hammer. He currently writes articles on film music and sf/horror cinema, and has written liner notes on more than 300 soundtrack CDs. He can be contacted via https://musiquefantastique.com/ or follow Musique Fantastique on Facebook. Follow Randall on Twitter at https://twitter.com/randalldlarson and https://twitter.com/MusiqueFantast1
Originally posted at https://musiquefantastique.com/
