It takes a village to make a good film that lives on in the high-quality pantheon of notable Oscar pictures. But perhaps it takes even more to make incomprehensibly entertaining pictures that prove just as popular. In America, the latter examples of lunatically enthusiastic movies include “The Room,” “Birdemic” and “Troll 2.” But in tragedy-wreaked country that stands for some of Africa’s worst political mayhem, picking up a camcorder to create a highly distinctive brand of all-action “movies” goes beyond people who just have to put on a show. It’s about an act of survival meant to pull up both spirit and opportunities as entertainingly and poignantly displayed in “Once Upon a Time in Uganda.”
As directed by documentarian Cathryne Czubek (“GQ: The Grind”), “Uganda” chronicles the literal rise out of the poverty mire by former brickmaker Isaac Nabwana, who enlists the ramshackle neighborhood of Wakilaga to become the ersatz mini-“studio” called “Wakaliwood” – with him as the country’s answer to Roger Corman. Creating narrated, video-shot action epics with the often haplessly humorous aid of American expatriate Alan Hofmanis, Nabwana becomes the universal epitome of a director driven to show the world his frenzied vision. In a similar way, NYC-based composer Andrew Hollander pours on a delightful anything-goes soundtrack. Veering from Spaghetti Western guitars to 70’s soul funk and synthesizer DTV cheese, Hollander’s energetic score conveys a Hollywood-born love of movies that can’t be stopped in its goal of spreading its unique love the globe over.
Beginning his career on such indies as “Wrestling with Alligators,” “I’ll Take You There” and “Anything but Love,” Hollander found his breakthrough dishing out the delightful, down-home score for 2007’s “Waitress.” A directing vehicle for its indie it-girl actress Adrienne Shelly, Hollander’s wistful score, and song would help the film endear itself to Broadway, then ironically chronicle its creator’s tragic fate in the documentary “Adrienne.” Continuing his distinctive, offbeat musical path with “Weather Girl,” “Sleepwalk with Me,” “Meet Monica Velour” and “My Friend Dahmer,” “Once Upon a Time in Uganda” now stands as Hollander’s most distinctively eccentric and style-pushing score. It’s music that’s both humorous and empathetic in capturing the relentless drive and love of a man and his country’s love of testosterone cinema, creating nutty fun pictures that become their no-budget makers’ far more meaningful way of conveying self-worth for themselves and a country where the key note is entertainment.
Tell us about your musical start, and what led you to composing?
When I was a kid, I would retreat to my room and listen to albums from beginning to end. It wasn’t until I was 12, when a few of my friends got together and decided to start a band, that I actually started playing piano. Once I began taking lessons, I was hooked. It was later in high school that I started to compose, but I really got into it when I studied with Yusef Lateef in college. He would tell me how he and Coltrane used to talk about different ways to approach composition and improvisation, never wanting to repeat what had been done before. It would blow my mind, still does, to have insight into these musicians and how they approached their art. The time I spent studying and playing with Yusef really lit a fire in me to compose and create without concern for genres or labels.
One of your first scores was for “Wrestling with Alligators,” which featured Adrienne Shelly. You’d both get your biggest recognition yet for “Waitress,” her directorial debut that you’d score and co-writer the song “Baby Don’t You Cry” (The Pie Song). Years later, you’d score the documentary “Adrienne” about her life and tragic fate. What was it like going personal, and musical full circle in that way?
It was incredibly difficult to score “Adrienne”. She was a very close friend of mine and always brought out ideas in me that I would never have come up with otherwise. Dealing with her death has been an ongoing process. I was only able to work on the film for a few hours a day because it took a real emotional toll on me. I tried to compose a score that Adrienne herself would have loved, but there were scenes that I couldn’t spend too much time on because they were too heartbreaking. That said, I’m glad I was able to contribute to the film and to her memory. The more people who know about Adrienne, not just as a filmmaker but as a person, the better the world will be.
After “Waitress,” you’d find a niche with such character-centric films as “Weather Girl,” “Meet Monica Velour,” “Sleepwalk with Me” and even the making of a serial killer picture “My Friend Dahmer.” What do you think made you ideal for scoring movies like these?
I think in all those films you mentioned, except for “My Friend Dahmer”, I felt some connection to the characters, and I like the challenge of figuring out what the feelings of someone should sound like. Also, they all suggested a sort of songlike approach, which at the time was great because I was spending a lot of time playing in bands and producing records, so the records would influence the scores and vice versa. “My Friend Dahmer” was a different challenge because it was about trying to understand Dahmer before he committed his atrocious crimes, so it was much more of a character study, and the score for that film is very minimal. I didn’t want to push the audience too much in any particular direction. That whole score is pretty much 2 synths through a Space Echo and a Memory Man.
Another impressive recent score of yours was for “Words on Bathroom Walls,” about a young man who dreams of being a chef but is tormented by the hallucinations. Tell us about that experience, especially given a character who’s mentally ill.
Thanks. That was a great experience. I scored it with The Chainsmokers, and we had a lot of fun working together. That’s another example of getting inside a character’s head—in this case, someone who has very extreme mental illness as you mentioned—and figuring out what that sounds like. We used a lot of analog synths mixed with vocal samples, along with more traditional elements like strings in a few cues. At times it was very dark and other times euphoric, but it was important that it always felt like the world as seen and felt from Adam’s (the main character’s) perspective. The director, Thor Freudenthal, gave us a lot of creative freedom to craft a score that we felt was really unique to the film and specifically to Adam.
One of your first documentary scores was for the Emmy winning “It’s a Hard Truth Ain’t It” about male prisoners. What makes that genre different for you as a composer?
I approach documentaries the same way I approach any other type of film in that I want to get to the heart of what the story is and find a way for the score to balance what you’re seeing on the screen. If a documentary has a lot of interviews, it creates the unique challenge of staying out of the way while having the score present enough to evoke the feelings the director wants to be sure come across. That film in particular needed a lot of the cues to be very sound design-oriented so as not to distract from the stories of the prisoners. That and “My Friend Dahmer” both pushed me into exploring much more ambient music. Since then, I’ve been doing a lot more sound exploration and learning new technologies in ways I never did before.
Had you heard of Wakaliwood before getting “Once Upon a Time in Uganda. And if not, what was your reaction when you first saw some of them and their trailers?
I had not heard of Wakaliwood before. My first reaction to seeing some of the films was how completely insane, fun, and unselfconscious they were. They’re totally their own thing. I binge-watched a few, and it really took me to another place. In this day and age, it’s so hard to do something truly original, and those films are wildly original.
This is certainly unlike any movie you’ve scored before. Did that challenge make you nervous, or enthusiastic?
Totally enthusiastic. I’d composed some music like this before, but never for a film. Being a huge fan of Ennio Morricone, I was excited to create a score that, in part, came out of a style of scoring that he originated. I would joke that it was “indie orchestral” because it wouldn’t have made sense with the film to record a full orchestra (and the budget didn’t allow for that anyway) so it’s a combination of a few strings and French horn along with old cheap synths and handmade percussion for the bigger cues. It’s a good example of certain limitations benefitting the artistic approach. The rest of the score is more minimal, a lot of guitars and percussion mixed with some ambient elements, many of which I created from things the sound recordist recorded on location.
How did you want to capture Isaac, the impresario of Wakaliwood?
I wanted to capture Isaac as someone who was incredibly determined, a dreamer, and a family man who cared about his community. He’s a big personality in some ways, but also very reflective. You can feel the weight of the world on his shoulders at many points throughout the film, and his resilience is remarkable. I found him to be so inspiring, and I wanted to support that as well. In truth, I think he would come across as an inspiration with or without music.
The often-hapless Alan Hofmanis is the “white savior” of sorts here. What did you think of him, and how did you want to play his fish out of water travails?
I just wanted to play him as a man with good intentions doing the best he can for a cause and for people he believes in. I think everyone can relate to believing in something or someone and being frustrated with how to get them the recognition and platform they feel they deserve, and he works tirelessly to do just that. Interestingly, though, there were several earlier cuts of the film, and in each one Alan leaned a little more in one direction or the other, which would cause me to rethink the musical approach for him. Once the director and editor locked picture, I think he was portrayed in a very honest and transparent light—the good, the flawed, and everything in between.
The movie starts out with a humorously portentous shot with Alan that appears to be from some fantasy movie about a falconer. How did you want to set a deliberately cheesy tone in general for the movies within the movie?
That’s a great question. The director, Cathryn Czubek, and I had so many conversations about what to do in this scene. Ultimately, the idea of creating this kind of Bernard Hermann-inspired score and recording it in a way that felt kind of older and lo-fi came from another scene I had scored, but that scene was later cut from the film. We tried it in the opening, and it suddenly felt like, “Oh, this is how Alan sees and hears the world”. We use a slight variation of that cue when he’s running through the market as well. Again, it just felt like this is how Alan sees things. And this film was interesting in that there was the score for the documentary itself, the score for scenes where Isaac is filming his films, and then the above-mentioned “in Alan’s head” score. A lot of this wasn’t really planned. It just unfolded that way.
What did you think of the way that Wakaliwood films were “scored?”
I think they’re great. Every element of those films contributes to the insanity, joy, and pure energy that you feel when watching them. It’s like a good pasta sauce, every element is necessary to balance every other element.
There’s a deeper level of seriousness to “Uganda” given that Nabwana is hoping to uplift his people from a grim, seemingly hopeless past through their love of movies, particularly action escapism, whose cartoonish violence hints at deeper, real horrors these people went through. How did you want to capture that subtext?
It felt like that was coming across on-screen without needing much support from the music. There’s one scene where Isaac is having his kids reenact a memory from his childhood when he was running and trying to hide from helicopter gunfire. That was one place we felt needed score to make it as visceral as possible. That cue has a lot of feedback and overdriven guitar with really low, ominous brass. After composing that cue it was tempting to try to use that approach in some other scenes, but when experimenting with it, it became clear that it wasn’t necessary.
In finding the tone for your score, what do you think makes the Wakaliwood “industry” different from say enthusiastic, but inept amateur homegrown films here like “Birdemic” and “The Room?” And why do you think audiences are attracted to, let’s say, movies where enthusiasm trumps definitions of “good.”
I think Wakaliwood is different because their living conditions make their day-to-day lives so much more challenging, and the history, as well as the current state, of the country gives everyone there a view of the world that’s hard for a lot of us in first-world countries to understand. Regarding your second question, I think audiences are attracted to the enthusiasm in all those films you mentioned because “good” is subjective, but enthusiasm is felt at the very moment you’re watching them. Also, enthusiasm is contagious. I think that’s why a lot of audiences come back to these films again and again.
In that respect, was it important the music to laugh with the Ugandans and not at them?
Yes, very important. We wanted to be sure that the audience felt the joy of the people of Wakaliwood while they were creating these movies. There’s something very pure about watching them work together and create something so amazing out of practically nothing. We always wanted the score to be respectful of the people, even when we were making larger gestures with the music. Also, it was important to feel like you were with them and not just watching them.
On one hand, the documentary is particularly well made with its use of sweeping crane shots, as juxtaposed with the very low-tech Wakaliwood pictures its dealing with. How did you want to bridge those two stylistic worlds?
It felt like the sweeping crane and drone shots had to be melodic and orchestral, so the score really moved with the camera. The low-tech pictures felt like they had to be stripped down, but they had very high energy in a lot of places. That’s where the idea of the 70s cop show direction came into play. Ever since the first rough cut I saw, there was something very 70s that kept coming up for the score, so that’s what ended up being the bridge. I think there’s something about the grit of a lot of 70s films and records that feels connected to the films of Wakaliwood.
You wouldn’t expect an ersatz Spaghetti Western / retro-50’s and surf rock approach for “Uganda.” How did you hit on that sound?
It was a combination of a couple of things they had temped and, as I mentioned earlier, the fact that something about the film just evoked the 70s in spirit, not in any literal way. For the scenes that were a little moodier and one scene that was more celebratory, the 70s direction didn’t feel quite right. That’s where the surf-rock influence came in. Somehow, it all made sense. Of course, we were all pretty delirious by the end of the process, so hopefully it still makes sense.
There’s also some “Shaft”-ian funk in your score. Do you think that captures the wild enthusiasm of Asiimwe’s filmmaking community?
Yes, for sure. Some of the cues you’re referencing are just drums, bass, and clavinet. It felt like since they’re working with so little, I should score those scenes with as few instruments as possible as long as I capture the energy in those moments.
If you got an actual Wakaliwood film to score, what would you approach be?
I’ve thought about that, and to be honest, I have no idea. It’s one of those things where it’s hard to look at those films without being influenced by what they’ve done in the past. I think I would talk to Isaac like I would any director and see if there’s anything he’d love to accomplish musically that he hasn’t had the chance to do yet. It would be interesting to hear his thoughts about that.
What’s up ahead for you?
I’ve got a few things coming up. I’m currently scoring an animated series that will be out later this year. I’ve been working on an ambient project called Dusty Bear with Mike Daly, a great songwriter and producer I’ve worked with for years. He played all the ambient pedal steel on the “Adrienne” score, actually. We got really into some of the Brian Eno/Daniel Lanois records early in the pandemic and that was part of the spark for Dusty Bear. I’m also doing some production on an album by a great artist named Steve Conte. He wrote a bunch of songs with Andy Partridge of XTC, so it’s been a real privilege to be involved with that. The first single, “Fourth of July”, will be out on, you guessed it…
What do you think the film and your score ultimately have to say about the go-for-broke perseverance and enthusiasm of beyond-indie filmmakers, wherever they might be?
My hope is that all of these things show that anything is possible, even if it’s insanely difficult. When anyone is going for broke in any area of their lives, I think there’s an energy created regardless of the outcome. That, in and of itself, is reason to create and go for broke. I also feel that films like these show that there’s no rulebook or roadmap. The road appears as you’re driving, and sometimes the destination may be a bit different from what you envisioned. but that can often be a great thing.
“Once Upon a Time in Uganda” is now at various Alamo Drafthouses and in other theaters. It will be streaming on July 25th. Find out more information and showtimes HERE
Buy the album HERE
Visit Andrew Hollander’s web site HERE