Composer Zack Ryan (photo by Chris Violette)
There’s an omniscient symphonic entity haunting “Presence” that powers filmmaker Steven Soderbergh’s Steadicam spook, and it’s not what you’d expect – especially given a lower budget that has to rely on acting and atmosphere as opposed to “Haunted Mansion”-level effects. Yet within walls where an intimate approach would be just fine, there’s one giant musical upgrade worthy of a symphonic castle. It’s courtesy of composer Zack Ryan, whose lush score sells “Presence’s” property like no specter’s business. Keying off Soderbergh’s desire to fill out the invisible titular character with emotion to spare (yet to keep it dramatically sparse), Ryan makes a cinematic level up impact that’s essentially one big, powerfully subtle scream.
You might not know it recently, but Ryan has been haunting Hollywood for over two decades. Scoring his first feature with 2004’s “Bettie Page: Dark Angel,” Ryan has amassed over 50 credits in every sort of genre. Indie biopics of tormented figures from Michael Jackson to Anna Nicole Smith mix with numerous Santa-themed pictures, teen lifeguards, mom drug addiction and resurrecting the dead. But beyond his recent ventures to Fraggle Rock and a witchy Waverly Place, it’s Ryan’s meeting with Soderbergh on the documentary series “Leavenworth” that placed him in the series “Full Circle,” with all roads leading to a suburban house whose biggest problem might seem to be a daughter’s guilt-ridden teen angst.
However, when you hear a quite beautiful piano and string theme, you start looking for the person who’s possessed with the great, lushly melodic ghost scores by Alan Silvestri (“What Lies Beneath”), Michael Small (“Audrey Rose”) and James Newton Howard (“A Stir of Echoes”) in the best way. When a lot of horror scoring has descended into dissonance, Zack Ryan shows that it’s the power of melody that can truly command us with the emotionally haunted presence overseeing a family becoming undone. Yet it’s not an even an old school ghost score at that as it starts and stops in some truly unusual places, not even screaming “Boo!” once. Floating about with eerie poignance, creepy vibes and yearning suspense, it’s music as character that makes a strong, eerily soothing impression in its relative briefness. It’s the definition of a less is more musical “Presence” that embodies a talent to take notice of.
Composer Zack Ryan (photo by Chris Violette)
Tell us what made you interested in music and composing?
One of my earliest memories was that my parents had a CD player and our only CD was Paul Simon’s “Graceland.” We had no amp or speakers – just headphones – and I would go into the living room every night and listen to that album. A few years later, I got a drum kit for Christmas and started taking lessons. Things really clicked for me when I was about 12 and a family friend came over with his guitar and we stumbled through some Zeppelin and Hendrix songs, which was the first time I actually played music with another person. From then on, I was hooked, and two years later I was playing with my own band in rock clubs in LA. The composing bug came later, when I was in high school and had been collecting film soundtracks for a few years. Besides all of the Williams, Horner and Silvestri scores I was a fan of, the one that really made me want to actually pursue composing was James Newton Howard’s “Wyatt Earp,” and not just because I really nailed it as an extra in that movie carrying a lasso in the background.
You’ve scored any number of real-life subjects from Anna Nicole Smith to Michael Jackson and Amanda Knox.
Those three films really presented different challenges and experiences. With “Anna Nicole,” I had the opportunity to work with Mary Harron, a director I’ve always admired, and she was such a wonderful collaborator. That film was so beautifully directed. With “Michael Jackson: Searching for Neverland,” I only had about two weeks to write the score, so that one was pure instinct on my part – I had to just hit the ground and go. Seeing the story of such a mythical artist’s final months told through the eyes of his bodyguard was quite an experience. The ”Amanda Knox” film was exciting, as I had followed the case closely when it was happening.
What brought you to Steven Soderbergh’s attention?
Steven and I first worked together on a docuseries he produced for STARZ called “Leavenworth.” Shortly afterward, I sent him some orchestral pieces I’d written and recorded, and a few months later he reached out about working on “Full Circle.”
What was it like segueing with him into that multi-character kidnapping drama?
When “Full Circle” came around, Steven reached out and said he needed a traditional orchestral score. He didn’t want anything modern or trendy. One of the best aspects of working with him is being hired early in the process. He was about a week into his shooting schedule, so once he sent me some dailies with temp music I got a sense of how he wanted to approach the score, and I just started writing music – complete thoughts, complete compositions, not for specific scenes, but music that just felt like it belonged in that story. He would then start dropping things in and cutting with them, and it became this truly collaborative back-and-forth. We really communicated solely by showing each other what we had done.
When Steven told you about what he was attempting with “Presence,” what did you think about the musical possibilities?
Funny enough, he didn’t prepare me with the visual concept at all. I saw a cut, which was a really smart thing to do – to have me experience the film as a premiere audience would, without knowing anything about the POV aspect. So my first impressions were instantly embedded into my approach.
What was your collaboration like here? And did it differ from your previous work together?
This was a similar process to “Full Circle.” Send him music, get a cut back from him with the score dropped in. There were some creative tweaks here and there – varying one of the themes a bit, tweaking the orchestration on another – but overall it was a very similar process.
Tell us about coming up with themes of “Presence,” as well as the instrumentation, particularly when it comes to the piano and electric keyboard.
Steven really led the way on this – he wanted a traditional orchestral score, but one of the things we discussed was how well Michael Small was able to incorporate an electric keyboard into “Marathon Man” – a score we both love – and whether that could be a nice color for this story, so we tried it and it really felt right. The piano solo at the beginning of the film was kind of an afterthought after I had written the orchestral version of that theme. I had some extra time and thought maybe that piece would translate well to solo piano. Steven then had the idea of bookending the film with it.
There’s very interesting musical “spotting” in “The Presence,” which is structured around these black scene breaks. Sometimes the music stops with them, and at other times it plays right over them. How did these “ellipses” play into the score, especially when it came to marking the progression of time?
One thing that I learned from Steven on this project is that you can approach a score almost entirely without using it to comment on specific actions on screen. Meaning we’re not “hitting” someone’s look, or a jump scare, or books rattling off a shelf, but rather we’re using music to comment on the emotional part of the story. We can come in after a scene, where the audience can take a breath and process what they’ve just seen, and bridge us into the next one.
What do you think ghosts are? And if you do believe in them, how did that influence your score?
I must admit, I have never experienced a supernatural occurrence first-hand. That said, my mom was VERY interested in this world, so there were a lot of Ouija board nights at our house. So I’m very intrigued by it all.
This definitely feels like it could take place in the same universe as the haunting of “Stir of Echoes” between a script by its writer David Koepp and your orchestral score which nicely brings to mind James Newton Howard’s approach to that film. How big a part did “Stir” play in that way?
It wasn’t a direct reference for “Presence,” but I am a massive JNH fan, so I definitely can’t rule out a subconscious influence. David is such a fantastic writer/director, and it’s no stretch to see how that film came out of the same mind as “Presence.”
On that note, were there any lyrical ghost scores or films that influenced you here? What are some of your favorites?
While not direct influences that I was referencing for this film, I would say the ghost/horror scores that have had a lasting effect on me would be Charles Bernstein’s original “A Nightmare on Elm Street,” which left me unable to sleep for two weeks as a kid, of course John Carpenter’s “Halloween” which is truly one of the most effective scores ever written, and Alejandro Amenábar’s“The Others” is really beautiful.
This is one the most symphonically traditional scores that a film by Steven has ever had. Given that the film is set in a house, where you worried about that the lush style being literally “too big for the room?” Or do you think it serves as a contrast to a minimal score that another composer might have taken?
We certainly didn’t want to burst out of the house with a huge symphony orchestra, so we utilized a smaller ensemble of about 40 people, which of course can sound huge, so there was a certain amount of scaling back the performance during recording and having the strings use a lighter touch. For the final cue in the film, we were able to have them lean into it a bit more, and hopefully we earned that more expressive moment.
Your “Presence” music is practically all about, lyrical, lonely emotion and rarely about musical “boos!” as such. Do you think that makes the score even eerier? And what kind of personality did you want to give to the ghost, especially with its connection to a troubled young woman?
If it does make the film more eerie, that’s a very fortunate side effect. The idea was really to provide support for the emotional part of the story, particularly Chloe’s loss and grief. For the ghost, the score really only reflects its perspective in the opening and closing cues, and the rest of the score was really geared towards the family’s story as they experience the presence along with their own dysfunction and tension.
Steven definitely does a bravura job with his Steadicam moves here. How did the camerawork play into the score?
He really does incredible camerawork, and every subsequent viewing allows you to really see how the ghost learns how to eavesdrop around the family as the story unfolds. His moves clearly show its curiosity, shyness, fear and determination – just with movement. It’s quite a performance, and I’ve never seen anything like it. What that did for the score was liberating – we didn’t have to use music to provide an unsettling atmosphere or constantly tell the audience that something supernatural was present – that was all taken care of visually by Steven and with David’s script. So that freed us up to focus on the emotions.
A lot of your work tends to be for more youthful, and way happier subjects like Christmas movies, “Fraggle Rock” and “Wizards Beyond Waverly Place.” Was this a nice break for you in shifting from functional to dysfunctional families?
I earn major points with my kids by working on those projects – they’re really fun and they allow me to break out the guitars and get back to my roots. Having grown up playing everything from metal to classical to singing in the school choir to playing drums in big band, being able to switch genres and musical styles is the best part of this job.
This score is the definition of “short and sweet,” along with the film. Do you think music can be just as impactful when there’s not a lot of it? Would you have liked to have done even more music here?
One of the things I loved the most about this project was the judicious spotting. We just don’t need to be in all the time, which makes it so much more effective when it does creep in. Steven also isn’t going to use music where it will be redundant to the drama. If we’re already seeing it, we don’t need music to say the same thing. He has a keen understanding of how to use music to convey what the visuals alone cannot.
Do you think that your “Presence” score helps bring old-school melody back to horror scores?
Melodies are tough – they are an instant declaration of an emotion and if you’re off by just a little bit, they can yank the audience right out of the moment. So it’s easy to see why there has been so much success in the horror world with more ambient, sound design-driven scores. They really effectively accomplish the job of providing the thrills and scares that the audiences are looking for. I don’t know if my work will have any real impact on the genre, but if it does, I would be delightfully surprised.
What’s up ahead for you? And if there’s a musical haunt you’d like to take, what would it be after “Presence?”
I just put the final touches on the season finale of “Wizards Beyond Waverly Place,” and I’m discussing a couple projects with previous collaborators, so there should be some exciting stuff coming out at some point this summer. As for types of projects that I’d love to tackle, there are just so many – a war film, a western, a jazz score, and of course what composer wouldn’t want to go into space?
See “Presence” in theaters and buy Zack Ryan’s soundtrack on Milan Records HERE. Visit Zack’s website HERE
Special thanks to Christian-Gabriel Endicio at White Bear PR
Leave a Reply