When one thinks of composer Christopher Willis, brash “Hangover”-ish rock scoring might not come to mind. More like the spot-on symphonic (and very ironic) lock-step salute to the Russian masters in “The Death of Stalin” or the mock patriotism of HBO’s “Veep,” as done for the foul-mouthed master satirist Armando Iannuci – who also put out the more family-friendly spin on “The Personal History of David Copperfield” that Willis would merrily score. Then there’s the G-rated, Emmy nominated merry melodies of numerous new Mickey Mouse cartoons, “The Lion Guard” and the choose-your-own funny animal comeuppance screwball punishment of “Cat Burglar.” Then there’s the far more adult animation shades of a young refugee’s dangerous progress in “Lamya’s Poem” and the alternately super-sweet and oh-so-dark Broadway showtune satire of the streaming land of “Schmigadoon!” that netted Willis another Emmy nomination.
That the Australian-born and English-educated Willis has also won Grammys for overseeing classical works (and can also tell you a thing or two about the composer Domenico Scarlatti) might not prepare you for music that’s the definition of slugging several brews and blow lines back with the “Old Dads.” But it’s exactly the kind of oh-so-wrong Netflix comedy flick you’d expect from its director, star and co-writer Bill Burr, a comedian whose outraged attacks on woke society have propelled him to stardom. The bald and in-your-face proud Burr leads his marketing business compatriots (played by Bokeem Woodbine and Bobby Cannavale) against the murderously PC slings and arrows of a younger generation that see them all kicked to the curb. As they also deal with the perils of parenting in a strange new world where the wrong word will get you a cancelling F, Willis rocks out a blue-collar score with a heart that fits snuggly into the raucous “Bro” scoring genre, filled with fun funk, guitar licks and middle finger rhythms that’s the definition of rebelling against the system with four-letter word glory and bad behavior. Yet Christopher Willis’ innate old school tunefulness is just as perfect for the characters’ inevitable path to personal redemption, if one that still sticks it to the woke man. It’s a rudeness that we’ve never quite heard in the composer, and all the more fun for it.
Tell us about your musical beginnings, and what drew you to scoring?
I fell in love with classical music around the age of maybe 9 or 10 and just spent tons of time around it from then on. I grew up playing the piano and the violin, and I was a chorister at the local church – it was very English-middle-class. It’s hard to “tinker” with classical music – the way it’s taught doesn’t encourage you to play around with it, very unlike the way jazz or rock music are taught – but I really wanted to experiment with it, and I had a nice rapport with the organist at the church, who showed me a few basic things like a bit of figured bass. When I was 10, I went for a while with no piano teacher, so I just started tinkering all the time, which I now think of as having been a really important moment for me. Later I did the undergrad course in music at Cambridge, then carried on with the piano at the Royal Academy of Music. I was ostensibly on track to become a classical pianist, but then I had a bit of a crisis because I just wasn’t quite ready to commit to the piano. On the other hand, I didn’t feel like a real composer either, because all the classical composers I knew were very much in that late-modernist mould where everything was very dissonant and angular. So I went back to Cambridge again, although without much of a clear plan – I’ve always said that Cambridge kind of fulfilled its original, Medieval function, taking in this confused, wandering scholar from the cold and allowing him to untangle his thoughts. I wrote a PhD and also was really enjoying myself teaching undergrad courses like Analysis and Counterpoint.
It was around this time that it dawned on me that I had always nursed dreams of writing film music, but had never really taken them seriously. Really the account I just gave of my childhood is true, but it’s incomplete: I also spent a huge amount of time consuming and talking about pop culture. I never studied film music, but informally I was already part of the way there. I’d spent a lot of time as a kid fiddling with MIDI. And both my brothers by this point were already working in entertainment, one making video games and the other working as a film editor. I started devoting a lot of time to trying to make it happen: there was a fairly comical period when my students in Cambridge would come to my study to talk about Palestrina or Couperin, and have to step over all these cables and samplers and so on.
What was your experience of coming to LA to write additional music for any number of Remote Control composers, including both Harry and Rupert Gregson-Williams on scores like “Bee Movie,” “You Don’t Mess with the Zohan” and “Wolverine?”
I was incredibly fortunate to make contact with Rupert. I was totally, utterly unqualified, because I still had no real experience of movies, but I think he took me on as an assistant largely on a hunch that it would be an interesting experiment. To be fair to me, I guess it became clear quickly that I had this slightly weird classical slant that hardly anyone else had. Almost overnight I switched Cambridge for Santa Monica and started working at RCP, and that’s where I really learned the day-to-day nuts and bolts of how movie music gets made. All the endless pieces of software we use, all the jargon, all the shorthand etc. Later I started to move around and work for other composers. It was always very stimulating. Those guys tended to work in ways that were close enough that you could jump around – even to the point of having the same Cubase key commands and things like that – but each person of course was unique.
Later I made a somewhat bigger jump and did some work with Carter Burwell. It was a brief stint, but it made a big impact on me because he wasn’t quite like anyone else I’d worked with (or really, like anyone I’d ever met). He was based in New York rather than LA and he just represented something culturally very distinct. Very ethical, very artistically pure. Even in the hurly-burly of a big blockbuster movie, he had this quiet conviction about him, this sense that we were making art and that we shouldn’t compromise.
Many of your first scores were kid-friendly projects like “Barbie & Her Sisters in the Great Puppy Adventure” and “The Lion King: Return of the Roar.” What did you particularly enjoy about that genre, and what did you learn from scoring those films?
Children’s media does have a tendency to be very colorful, more melodic, and generally overt rather than covert about things. Children don’t know yet what the traditions of the language are, what the tropes are, so you can lean into those traditions and enjoy them rather than feeling you have to subvert them. Still, that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily easy. When you look across the last hundred years of kid-friendly music and you really get stuck into “Sleeping Beauty” or “Tom & Jerry,” you’re talking about unbelievably well-crafted music that sets a really high bar.
What drew you to Mickey Mouse?
As soon as I met Paul Rudish, the show runner of the Mickey cartoons, I began to realize that they weren’t just going to be silly little cartoons, but that the whole history of Disney, and a lot of C20th pop culture generally, were going to be filtered through them. Paul and his collaborators knew their Disney arcana really well, and they wanted to be constantly quoting and gesturing towards parts of Disney history. Not only that, but the foreign-language episodes required me to do these quick dives into all kinds of music around the world. I started doing something that I’ve continued doing ever since, which is to start leaning on my musicology background and taking a lot of notes, looking at books and academic articles etc.
In the middle of all of this, you also pursued being a musical academic, particularly when it came to Domenico Scarlatti. What was it about his work that made you write about it to a PHD degree?
My love of Scarlatti really dates back to a seminar I took with a musicologist at Cambridge called Dean Sutcliffe. Scarlatti is just wonderful – I need to be careful not to go on about him ad nauseam. I’ll just mention two things I learned from Dean about Scarlatti. One is that the way music repeats and progresses doesn’t always have to be “right” – it can be deliberately slightly weird and maddening; repeating too much one moment and not enough the next. Another thing is a kind of orchestration tip. Even though his celebrated music is all for keyboard, Scarlatti’s music feels very colorful and vibrant, and one reason for that is that he’s constantly changing the texture – one moment he’ll be all tinkly up at the top of the keyboard, and the next he’ll have these massive, crashing, dense chords. Personally I think this is probably the single most important thing about good orchestration: we all talk way too much about “color”, when what’s more important is varying the register and the density of the texture, and offsetting different textures against each other to maximize their effect.
Oh, and I should say that I never have quite managed to combine musicology and film music! I wrote my last few articles back in 2007, just before I came out to LA. But I wish I could! I have a couple of ideas that I’d still love to get into print one day if I can.
How did you team with Armando Iannucci for HBO’s “Veep?” And what was the experience of that long-running show?
I was actually a huge, HUGE fan of Armando’s earlier comedy from the UK, so I had a few bits of insider information when it came to auditioning. I knew, for instance, that he was very well-versed in classical music. Rupert and I worked on this basic sound for the show that was almost like a little missing chapter in American music, somewhere between Aaron Copland and John Adams. I think that immediately clicked with Armando.
A movie that got you a lot of attention was recreating the grand Russian composers for Iannucci’s great political satire “The Death of Stalin.”
Thank you! I was very lucky to get the opportunity to do that film. People often remark on how “legit” the music is, and what I tell them is that I was lucky in that Armando was very clear from the beginning about what the remit was musically, and also there was not a huge amount of rewriting or dealing with endless picture changes. So that meant I was pretty free to focus all my attention on musical problems. I wasn’t doing massive rewrites and trying to placate different factions of producers or anything like that. I was just completely immersed in Soviet music for those months that I was working on it – quite literally surrounded by full scores by all these obscure Soviets, Weinberg and Myaskovsky and Ustvolskaya and so on. It’s rare that we as composers can actually focus all our efforts on the music in that way, rather than spending most of our time on other problems.
What was it like doing Armando’s more straightforward take on David Copperfield?
The challenge for me on this one was to see if I could begin to liberate myself from the world of pastiche I’d found myself in thanks to “Stalin” and to some extent “Mickey Mouse”. Armando and I were still throwing around a lot of references, but what I wanted, above all, was that it would start to sound like, this is Chris Willis expressing himself in something approaching a “natural” idiom.
A quite different, and far more “adult” animated project of yours was “Lamya’s Poem,” which has just recently gotten a score release.
It’s a beautiful film and I strongly commend it to all your readers, if they haven’t seen it. Its release was rather negatively affected by the pandemic. Also, the movie is about the refugee crisis of 2015 or so, which was a huge topic in the news at the time, but the trouble with our media cycle is that by 2021, the world had moved on and become occupied with other topics. Nonetheless, the film does keep finding new viewers. The release of the soundtrack this year has actually given the movie an extra burst of visibility, and there are a few other developments. We might be doing some live performances of a concert suite from the soundtrack, which would be played against a montage of footage from the film. The score is mostly written for a small chamber string group, plus harp and a semi-improvisatory part for Persian ney, so it’s quite well-suited to live performance.
Not only did you work with Charlie Booker on “Black Mirror,” but I particularly loved your score for his interactive Netflix salute to Tex Avery with “Cat Burglar.” Did you take a crash course in that style of classic Scott Bradley screwball toon music for it? And how was it scoring the show, especially given any number of directions the music could go in?
Thank you! I did indeed go on a bit of a Scott Bradley odyssey in preparation for that show. I actually hadn’t previously looked super closely at Bradley or Carl Stalling, despite all my work on Mickey Mouse, because there was always a feeling on Mickey that we didn’t want it to turn into “classic cartoon” music a la Looney Tunes, we didn’t want that straight-ahead zany orchestral sound, because somehow that feels so connected with the classic Warner Bros characters, and for Mickey Mouse to have exactly that sound felt wrong. But with “Cat Burglar,” the whole point was that it was this love letter to classic cartoons – although to be specific, it was more about MGM than Warners, which means Bradley, not Stalling, and it means these quite small chamber ensembles rather than big orchestra. I was lucky enough to get hold of some conductor scores from the classic run of Tom & Jerry that was scored by Bradley, which went from about 1932 until the late 50s. Man, it was an education. Bradley is quite, quite brilliant. Even more than Stalling, Bradley pioneered the idea that some of the music could be essentially atonal, or at least extremely chromatic and tonally ambiguous. It’s still weird to me how dissonant you can go, and the audience totally gets it. The stroke of genius on Bradley’s part, I think, is that the atonal stuff is generally transitional, it’s always bookended by these very tonal bursts of melody. So, in a way you hear the entire atonal passage as being a kind of dissonance that’s ultimately resolved.
“Schmigadoon!” was a real delight. What was it like doing the underscore of a show that had its way with song and dance numbers that went from satirizing 50’s and 60’s musicals like Carousel to the way darker 70’s likes of Chicago and Sweeney Todd?
“Schmigadoon!” has just been a total delight. I think Cinco Paul is a genius, and the biggest mystery to me is that he doesn’t give me harsher notes or just want to write the underscore himself, because I have little doubt he could do that if he turned his hand to it! The biggest challenge with each season is actually getting all his songs under my fingers to the point where I can work with them with the freedom that I might with my own melodies. I really loved getting to know the old movie musicals and learning how the underscore composers back then were so adept at constructing orchestral textures out of the songs. My firm belief now is that film composers can learn a lot from that tradition, even when we’re doing non-musicals.
Given so many symphonically elegant scores, “Old Dads” is a raucous rock and roll change of pace for you. How did a seemingly unlikely composer like yourself get the gig?
I’m still surprised I got the gig myself! I think Bill wasn’t certain about what the music should be like, and my lovely agent Bradley Rainey said something like, “You should get Chris Willis, he can do anything!” Which was a lie, but a nice thing to say. Once I got to know Bill, it turned out that he had a very strong sense of what the film wanted, which was a very classic, warm, vintage rock color, but he’d been struggling a lot with the temp, which is understandable because comedies are just really hard. So maybe there was a feeling of, “Instead of a proper rock guy, let’s bring in someone who’s done quite a lot of comedy and see where that takes us.”
With you researching the kind of genres you score, did you do a dive into these kind of rock n’ roll attitude soundtracks before starting “Old Dads?”
I did! In many ways it wasn’t so different from something like “The Death of Stalin!” I just put on my nerd hat and got to work researching. The advantage in this case, though, was that a lot of other people know classic rock better than I do, including Bill himself, so I had to be very open to discussion and criticism. Bill was throwing out a lot of references, a lot of deep, deep cuts. It’s so fascinating – the timbre of everything is so important. I got to know a lot more about guitars and amps and so on. My guitar skills are essentially zero, but I bought a bunch of pedals and other gear and got a lot more comfortable in that world. You turn the knob to 8 and it’s Aerosmith, but turn it up to 9 and suddenly it’s a totally different thing, it’s Metallica! If it’s wrong, it’s wrong. It doesn’t feel like the character, and the emotion isn’t right, or the joke just feels false.
What was it like collaborating with Bill Burr, who wore several hats here?
I like Bill enormously and I have so much respect for him. The film was behind schedule so the poor guy had to resume his touring schedule with the film still going. We were literally having music meetings where Bill was zooming in from the green room at a huge comedy venue, and eventually he’d say, “Ok guys, I have to go on stage now,” and off he’d go and do his show. The thing is, the film is quite zeitgeisty and I think he has such a connection with his audience and was anxious for the film to be done so he could get it in front of his fans.
Between Armando and Bill, you’ve scored extremely potty-mouthed characters. Is there an art to musically playing with swears and profane put-downs?
Haha, I hadn’t thought about it that way before! I guess what I’d say is that in both Bill’s case and Armando’s, very often the music avoids the funny areas altogether, or else it sits under the scene ignoring the comedy, as though the scene were serious. If the swear word is a punchline, chances are I’ll be doing almost nothing under it, so as not to interfere with the actor’s timing.
Tell me about your band for Old Dads. Did you do any improv’ing at all?
I was very lucky to be able to put together a band using amazing session musicians. Some of them I’ve actually known for years, although we’ve just never done a gig together quite like this before. Generally, you’ll hear a lot of the same musicians on my stuff even in very different styles. I think there’s a lot to be said for working with people you know and trust, and if you’re all smart people and like doing your homework, you can figure almost anything out. But interestingly, there’s almost no improvisation in the final score at all, actually. There are cues that are intended to sound very casual and spontaneous, but actually they rarely were truly spontaneous, especially when we were anywhere near a joke, because the tiniest ride cymbal or fret noise could change the way a moment played.
What gave you the idea of bringing voices into the score?
There’s just one moment when we wanted to signal very quickly that we’re entering this more youthful world, when Bill and the guys go back to work at the company they just sold and everything is suddenly very different. This is so old-man-ish of me, but I literally downloaded TikTok and just spent a while roaming around, trying to get a feel for the types of songs that show up on dance challenges and so on. The feeling was, this doesn’t need to be subtle! Everyone should immediately get that Gen Z vibe from the first bar of this, because the whole point of that beat in the story is that everything changes instantaneously for the characters.
Were you surprised at how far some of Old Dads’ humor went?
Actually no – I thought Bill did a great job of bringing the ambience of his stand-up as the silver screen. I do think it’s very striking how dark the film gets, although upon reflection, I think that too is very much in the spirit of his stand up. I think Bill’s audience expects him to be honest with them, to be authentic.
For all of its foul-mouthed laughs, “Old Dads” also has heart that comes to fore in its second half. Is it tricky bringing genuine emotion into a comedy score like this that are more up your orchestral and piano alley – and doing so without getting too sappy, especially given these characters?
Yes, it took quite a lot of thought. One thing that helped me is that in the key moments where the music was really down, Bill gave me room to breathe. So instead of laying on the emotion with a lot of intensity, I could play the sadness by taking time and having a lot of air around each phrase.
You have a fun U2 vibe going for the epiphany big race at the end that’s a comedy stalwart.
Yes, that scene was tricky! And would make a textbook case for something to show film music students. My earlier versions of that cue were more driving and tried to sculpt the scene with a lot more – excitement. Then suddenly quiet when the characters hit a problem, then up again, and so on. The final cue plays the scene completely differently – it treats the entire sequence as one sort of transcendent experience for Bill’s character.
What’s up ahead for you?
I’m in the midst of a wonderful dramedy called “Goodrich”, with Michael Keaton and Mila Kunis. I’m playing a lot of piano on the score. I generally play my own piano parts, but I don’t think I’ve ever done anything before where the piano is so featured and intimate. I feel very close to the characters and the story. I’m also working on a follow up to the Eva Cassidy album I did with the LSO, released earlier this year. This one is going to be more upbeat – Eva is most famous for her quiet, soulful songs, but she did a huge variety of music and was a great interpreter of jazz standards too.
Have you ever been as fed up with PC moments as Bill’s character has here? And if so, how did that play into your score?
I’ve got lots of stories from behind the scenes at studios that I’m not sure I can share! What I will say is that, as a former academic, I saw some of the current buzzwords before they went mainstream, when I was a postgrad student in the early 2000s. The truth is that every piece of woke silliness can be traced back to some philosophical idea from academia that’s actually pretty interesting in its original form. But unfortunately, those specific ideas have evolved into something much dumber and more associative. You now have this vague, all-pervasive climate of fear where people are worried about what they say and do without even quite knowing why. What really saddens me in Hollywood is that I’ve seen studios take a great storyline for a film or TV show and just get so jumpy about it that they start removing things, things that no sane person would ever have objected to, until the thing is completely ruined.
Whom do you think is worse when it comes to PC? England or America?
I think the two cultures are certainly different. America is more of a zealous culture, and that’s reflected in the way they do political correctness. The British are more worried about being impolite, killing themselves rather than risk offending you. But on both sides of the Atlantic, I think it may have peaked. Something’s changed in the last year or so. The last few times the mob on Twitter has tried to cancel someone, it hasn’t really happened. But then again, maybe Bill will cancel himself with “Old Dads!” Let’s wait and see.
Do you hope that “Old Dads” opens up a way ruder musical world to you?
Well as you said, “Veep” was pretty rude! But I really hope Bill makes more movies, and I’d love to join him if he does. But who knows, maybe he’s done with being rude?? Maybe his next movie will be a sweeping Jane Austen adaptation. If so, I’m in.
Watch “Old Dads” on Netflix HERE, with Chris Willis’ score on HERE
Visit Christopher Willis’ website HERE