When one thinks of the iconically intense, frequent kill ‘em all collaboration between director and composer, that merciless musical body count award likely goes to Sam Peckinpah and Jerry Fielding. Both were notorious for challenging, often melodically disturbing tones they brought to the vengeful wipeouts of banditos, rapists and gangsters in the uncompromising likes of “The Wild Bunch,” “Straw Dogs” and “Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia.” Flash forward to the bard (s) for a master of grim payback, and that comparison can arguably hang on the vengeance-playing heads of composers Brooke and Will Blair and filmmaker Jeremy Saulnier. From their critical breakthrough teaming on 2013’s “Blue Ruin” a partnership that began with teen short films jolted viewers with an utterly confrontational examination of simmering, feuding vengeance turned into a bloodbath by an unlikely antihero (played by their third brother Macon) . Disturbing in a way that few modern noirs were, the collaborations between Blairs and Saulnier jolted audiences with the backwoods punk vs. skinhead chords of “Green Room” before descending into Alaskan savagery with “Hold the Dark.”
Now that experimental musical tension reaches a surprising peak at “Rebel Ridge,” as pulsing, tonal, heart of darkness anger leads to an explosive confrontation between Terry (Aaron Pierre), a Rambo-worthy master of black ops with a good ole’ boy, asset-armoring sheriff (Don Johnson). Yet for all of the unbearable intensity and reality that makes “Rebel Ridge” a peak effort for the Blairs and Saulnier, the big twist among the broken bones, beaten faces and car-dragged adrenaline is that Saulnier goes to about the last non-lethal place you’d expect while delivering all of the body count satisfaction. And no small factor to the grim, beyond suspenseful build up at hand goes to the grinding tone poem against injustice that the Blairs pile on with overwhelmingly impactful subtlety until things memorably blow. The result is an unexpected hit for Netflix streaming, and one of the best thrillers on any sized screen so far this year. For while the prolific Blairs have handled far lighter pictures in their blood-born years together, no filmmaker can bring out their experimentally twisted scoring anger like the bottled fury of Saulnier, who shakes that Molotov here like never until the big fling that shows just how shockingly powerful it is to let the bad guys live.
Brooke and Will Blair
Tell me about your respective paths to music and composing. Was it a natural conclusion that you’d work together? And does it make it easier or harder being brothers?
Will: We’re only a year apart in age, so we both grew up teaching ourselves the basics of music together, primarily in the world of rock. We both gravitated toward the guitar, but it was clear that Brooke was much more gifted, so I inherited an old set of drums from a cousin. Those became our primary instruments, but we continued to try to learn whatever else we could—piano, bass, etc. Although we played tuba (me) and trombone (Brooke) in the school band as younger kids – it was the ability to write original music with our friends, with fewer rules that really excited us. We each had our own bands with our friends, sometimes playing shows together until college, when we finally felt we would be stronger if we started working together by forming a new band. We’ve worked together ever since, songwriting, touring, recording, and producing other artists. This long-term collaboration, the comfort of creating together, the shared musical experiences, and the honesty in our gloves-off ability to critique each other has led to a strong partnership in film composition. Being brothers, at times, has made this work challenging but honestly, what each of us is really lousy at – the other is really drawn to and often excels at. For better or worse, we certainly have a creative codependency in that sense – but it works.
How did you first meet Jeremy Saulnier? And what do you think it was that he heard in your music that led to a long-lasting collaboration?
Brooke: We met Jeremy as little kids in elementary school. He was a few grades above us both and grew up around the corner from our family so we’ve pretty much know him the majority of our lives. While growing up, we watched Jeremy, and our older brother Macon, run around the neighborhood shooting short films. Even as kids, they took it seriously and tried to constantly get better at what they were doing. I think Jeremy saw us doing the same thing with music. We played in bands, toured, released albums, shot videos and self promoted constantly. He also knew that we always had some sort of recording setup and even released some instrumental music here and there, which lent itself to film music. It was never our stated goal to get into film composing, but we were always fascinated with the process of filmmaking, so it did end up being a natural progression for us to end up here. We scored all of Jeremy’s short films in college and had a lot of “on the job” learning. I think he saw that we took it seriously and were eager to learn and get better at it, so he kept coming back with each project he was working on. We’ve grown and learned a lot through our collaborations with Jeremy.
After doing some shorts, your first teaming with Jeremy was on “Murder Party.” What was that experience like?
Will: Well, we had literally no idea what we were doing. Both technically and creatively. We were still playing in bands so we were thinking very much like songwriters and not composers. So we would get stuck on structure and that’s often not helpful when trying to compose something that can be as amorphous as a horror film cue. We had no professional recording equipment and Jeremy had virtually no music budget for MP – but he managed to buy us our first refurbished Mac laptop and an entry level version of ProTools to get started. We still work exclusively in ProTools today because of that gift. We loaded up an old ASR-10 sampler with “spooky” sounds percussive noises and stings and stabs and we found a cheap orchestral sample library and some big, cheesy synth sounds. That was the palette we had to work with. The main thing that helped us get through it was Jeremy’s leadership. He came to town and sat with us in a small bedroom studio and guided us through the process. And in lieu of real compositional chops – we did have a strong, or more accurately, afearless sense of improvisation. We would try anything since we didn’t really know where to start. We faked our way through that first crucial idea of each cue, and then wrestled with it until it started to sound and function like a score.
Years later, you’d really hit it with the mainstream with Jeremy on “Blue Ruin,” which was one of the great, gritty modern noir thunderbolts that also happened to star your brother Macon. Tell us about that scoring experience for a movie that was about the price of revenge and violence?
Will: Jeremy sent us some references of synth-driven film music or other instrumental pieces he thought could work. He described them as “liquid noir.” He wanted us to think about the beach setting in the movie: waves, wind, big washes of atmosphere. And he wanted us to think about the protagonist Dwight’s sloppy and improvised approach to revenge. As far as instruments go, we didn’t find much in the way of synth libraries or patches that we already had that seemed to fit. Everything felt too BIG. So we started learning how to work in Iris; a small sampler Engine from Izotope that allowed us to drag in our own sounds, some field recordings we had and other random tones, layer them up and quickly figure out how to tweak them in a way that would sink into the picture. Jeremy suggested a no percussion rule, as he didn’t want anything that resembles modern thriller scores. And although he didn’t want anything melodic enough to draw attention to itself, we did rely on a slightly detuned piano patch from an old Mellotron library for a few cues. In some ways we were much further along as engineers and bedroom-studio composers, but in other ways it resembled our “Murder Party” scoring experience.
Macon Blair in “Blue Ruin”
We had just been accepted into the Cannes film festival (which is insane to think about) and we only had two weeks to figure out how to score this entire movie. Jeremy came to town, slept on Brooke’s couch and we woke up at 7am every morning and he would guide us through each and every frame offering real time feedback. He was literally over our shoulder every time we hit record so we had no choice but to begin most of the cues by improvising. The three of us would talk about that first take – try another take, or in many cases we really embraced the messy, chaotic and unfocused approach to these early ideas. They seemed to match Dwight’s mission. We couldn’t stop until we recorded however many minutes we needed to make our day. It truly was the most intense on-the-job-training we ever had. The approach to the score was less-is-more – don’t step on sound design and find ways for the score to sink away and disappear without allowing the tension to subside. We give Jeremy a lot of credit for essentially “conducting” that score and the way it functions in the movie.
If anything, your next collaboration on the rockers vs. skinheads “Green Room” was even more intense. How did you want to capture that particular energy?
Brooke: We knew there was going to be a lot of punk/hardcore music in the film, both in the source music and licensed tracks, so we needed to find a way for the score to coexist with all of that music. We kept a lot the energy of the score in the lower end of the sonic spectrum: low bass pulses, bass synths, darker atmospheric pads and swelling distorted synths. In order to inject a little rawness and grit, we made several virtual instruments based around the sounds of instruments and mics feeding back. We recorded hours of feedback sounds, then edited, sampled, treated and stretched the sounds into chromatic, playable soft synths, again using Iris. This gave the score a texture that complimented all the distorted guitars, without getting in the way. Jeremy always leans towards synth sounds, and we knew it would be too on the nose to base the score around the use of electric guitars, bass and drums, so we created a synth-based pallet that would sit in nicely with all the chaotic sound design and loud rock music.
With Macon in the Middle
Conversely, “I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore” took on a more absurdist feeling for the war against crime. Was that a welcome “break” as it were?
Will: Very much so. This was our first opportunity to work with our oldest brother Macon on his first feature film as a director. We grew up listening to Macon’s mix tapes which were always such a collage of different genres and eras and artists. There’d be moody new wave, gospel, hip hop, country western, sludgy rock, big band sort of stuff – they’d be all over the place, but he always managed to make them cohesive and dynamic and very fun. This was the vision he had for the score and for the needle drop songs in this movie. He had such a clear idea for what he wanted but he really let us loose to figure out how to get it done. Mom and Dad even came to the studio for an afternoon to see how a score is recorded. It was a stressful (“Leave us alone, mom and dad!”) but very fun and rewarding experience. We later got to travel to Sundance together as a family and Macon and the film won the Audience Award for Best Feature.
What was it like playing with the heart of darkness in an Alaskan environment for Jeremy’s “Hold the Dark?”
Will: HTD was another very welcome invitation to try something new, by building on what worked well for Jeremy’s first few movies. The vast landscape of the movie and the multiple, the overlapping lead roles and the epic journey sort of aspect to the story allowed for a much bigger sound. Jeremy still wanted to hear atmospheric, washy synths but there was space for plenty of orchestral layers and big naturalistic percussion. We worked with Carlos Carty – a brilliant Native flutist based in Brazil who added such breathy mysticism to certain cues. And we are so fortunate to connect with Kathy and Karen Kettler, also two siblings who are supremely talented and gracious artists practicing traditional Inuit throat singing in Canada. Their very guttural, rhythmic and ancient approach to folkloric singing became the foundation and often the tempo of many cues in the HTD score. Working with those artists to add more breathing, more mouths, more wind and therefore more life to this score was certainly a career highlight.
“Rebel Ridge” is unusual in that it’s relentlessly intense, yet no one ends up dying on camera due to a hero who’s conscious of not killing anyone, even as everyone is trying to kill him. Were you struck by that change of pace from Jeremy that subverts his fans’ expectations?
Brooke: Yes! We were just as surprised by that choice as anyone. I think he wanted to make a movie that his daughters could actually see for once! But what was the most fun for us was being able to score Terry’s arc, who for the first time in a JS film is actually competent, highly trained and effective in carrying out his plans. Of course, things don’t always go well for Terry, and things do escalate…but this is the closest thing to having a “superhero” in one of Jeremy’s films.
What do you think is the trick to doing a slow burn score like this? And were you influenced by any other scores, or films in particular here?
Will: I think reminding ourselves to zoom out and watch long runs of the film as we work and try to listen as a whole rather than scene to scene is important to finding the right balance. We needed to listen for any moments that feel like the tension subsides or slows too much – and we also need to be aware of score fatigue, are we doing too much, are we too present? I think finding that balance is essential in a movie like this in order to build that slow burn effect. I don’t remember us, or Jeremy, being too heavily influenced by any one score in particular. We were constantly inspired by Aaron’s performance of Terry Richmond. His physicality, his restraint, his sensitivity and at times, his brutal energy really was the guiding star in figuring out the scope and direction and even the quantity of the RR score.
Tell us about the instrumentation of “Rebel Ridge.”
Blaire: We knew we wanted to keep the score super sharp and focused to match the intensity of Aaron’s performance. The score had to be an extension of Terry’s skill set and determination to constantly push forward, all while the stakes are increasing with each confrontation. We wanted an earthy, gritty and raw sound. We relied heavily on low strings (cello and bass), some treated low brass, as well as contrabass flute, and of course synths. Jeremy loves low pulsing sounds, so there’s a lot of that as well. The other aspect of the score that keeps the tension moving along are drums and percussion. The drums were treated in a way to feel like low pulses as well. They were also designed to give punctuation to Terry’s actions. You’ll notice that the drums and percussion start out relatively small and contained, and then grow in intensity as the story unfolds.
You could have taken a much more emotionally visceral approach to the film. Yet the music is the definition of “less is more.” Was it a challenge to play that kind of extensive simmer?
Brooke: Jeremy is a fan of less-is-more when it comes to score. I think this approach is a subtle way to draw the audience in to feeling like this is all really happening. Jeremy’s films always have a heavy sense of realism. The minute we try anything that sounds too much like “film music”, it has the potential to break that spell. Our marching orders were to always stay with Terry, and score from his perspective. We were never going to give him a huge hero theme or go for over the top action music. That wouldn’t have fit with this film. The score is a texture, it’s the sound of blood and adrenaline pumping, it’s part of the world that Jeremy’s creating. We needed to find creative ways to keep the constant sense of dread and the walls closing in without becoming sonic wallpaper. It’s in the subtle details, where one sound hands off to another, one pulse morphs into another, the string lines have a lot of unison, then drift away from one another, and then come back into focus. The drums and percussion are always sneaking in-between pulses and bass lines, and then at times taking over from the synths and becoming pulses with a tonal center. It’s all designed in a way to keep people’s heart rate up while not drawing too much attention to itself. This has been one of the biggest approaches we’ve learned from working on five films with Jeremy, and we know that’s how he’s going to want his scores to operate.
What’s the importance of percussion in this score?
Will: We made sure never to over-do Terry’s restrained approach to his mission and to violence, but percussion starts small and contained, minimal pulses like Brooke mentioned and then grows and swells with the story. By the final showdown – (spoiler!) – we tried to get the percussion to explode. We never wanted massive thriller toms that you hear in many action thrillers. We tried to think more like punches or gunshots and we always considered the heavy metal / hardcore music (Iron Maiden, Bad Brains) that Terry listens to while riding his bike. We had a modest setup of a few snare drums and toms – some of them we piled old metal junk on top of – and we tried to find patterns that might even mimic the tightness and consistency of a heavy metal drummer: fast, very precise bursts of consistent energy – before shifting to something entirely different. We would distort and morph these sounds until they read less like familiar drums and more like getting punched or pistol-whipped in the face by Aaron Pierre.
Terry is the epitome of the strong, silent hero. Talk about your approach to the character.
Will: Again – we initially started a little too big, with a medium-sized orchestral ensemble: primarily low brass and low strings. But it was apparent this sound was too obvious – too familiar and too big. Terry’s mission was singular and personal and restrained. These initial riffs and ideas got minimized until we realized we just needed to work with soloists one at a time: bass, cello and contrabass flute, (Brent Edmondson, Justin Yoder and Becky Simon, respectively.) The singular nature of these instruments seemed to follow Terry around effortlessly and further support and imply his one-man mission. A lot of those string / flute ideas were then glued together with Jeremy’s preferred palette of atmospheric and slowly evolving synth patches and accented with percussion.
I particularly liked the sequence where Terry races with his bicycle to the prison bus. Tell me about scoring that.
Will: Jeremy said “this is our Indiana Jones moment! Well, not literally – don’t go John Williams – but let’s go HEROIC, but keep it in our world!” This cue went through MANY iterations to find that balance of restrained heroism. It signifies the first moment we as an audience are meant to feel Terry’s raw power and determination.
Jeremy’s feeling for the underdog is no more present than in Summer’s character, an ex-addict mom whose weakness is turned against her. How did you want to give her a sympathetic presence without making her the kind of typical victim you’d see in a genre piece like this?
Will: Once again – less is more – we wanted to let Annasophia Robb’s understated performance do the work. We overdid some early ideas for Summer’s scenes, and we then carved away textures and layers leaving only raw, emotional elements behind. Mid-range strings, minimal layering’s of cellos and violas seemed to support Summer, while again relying on lower strings, bass and cello for Terry’s moments.
Conversely, Don Johnson is great at the “evil sheriff” archetype, though he masks it with civility as such. Tell us about playing him, and his escalating “meetings” with Terry.
Will: Again, once we dialed in on recording soloists one at time we had an idea to tackle some of Chief’s moments. We actually had bass and cello perform the same piece together, at the same time, since now we have two guys staring each other down, one on one, trying to out-wit each other. As we watched the picture, and as their conversation evolved – we encouraged these two wonderful players (Brent Edmondson, bass and Justin Yoder, cello) to push against each other: play with time, push back and forth, surprise each other or rub against each other tonally or rhythmically. These guys are incredible improvisers who have worked with us on almost every thing we’ve done – and they’ve become so natural at watching the scene and responding in real time as the drama builds. The audience’s ears are often used to hearing very trained musicians playing in perfect sync – or in mostly harmonious ways, but by getting them to de-sync in a sense, we aimed to build more and more very miniscule moments of dissonance and tension.
Tell me about scoring the big confrontation between Terry and the cops that’s a set piece in the use of non-lethal force.
Blaire: This scene was a beast to score, but one of my personal favorites in the film. The action is constantly shifting and there on tons of peaks and valleys. Of course there’s a ton of sound design and dialogue in the scene, so the score had to coexist with all of that. Once again, we didn’t ever feel like full-on traditional “action music” was gonna work for this. If it ever felt like, “I’m watching a big action scene with a bunch of ass kicking and cool ass music” then the audience would be taken out of the moment. We just focused on Aaron’s performance and let that guide the score. It definitely rides the line between music and sound design. We’re relying more on momentum, textures, bursts of energy, tension and release to keep us in this moment and have it feel believable. This is a great example of when we turn the drums up to eleven!
While race relations are definitely heard here, “Rebel Ridge” takes much more of its note from the very real arming of local police departments into their own mini-armies as such, where civil rights and presumed innocence take a back seat to seizing assets. Were you aware of this before scoring the film, and how did you put your own thoughts about that into the score?
Will: I think we were only so aware of this practice, and rightfully so, very angered by it but also perhaps in disbelief of it in some ways. But – having a history with Jeremy he shared with us the very early idea of this movie and helped shed some light on this level of corruption as he continued to research and write. Our driving force behind the millions of little decisions in scoring a movie was always Terry. His personal mission was our guide – especially when we got lost along the way. So his restrained and quietly calculated way of righting this wrong inspired us just as much as his winner-takes-all and full steam ahead approach to winning this fight.
Taken out of context, one could assume this was a horror score. In that respect, do you think it captures someone who’s instantly attacked by a system that’s supposed to serve and protect? And do you think there’s an emotional feeling of betrayal that comes with that?
Will: Like most of Jeremy’s scores, this score is from a very internal, physical perspective. Meaning; rather than scoring the external sounds of the police chasing you as you speed away for your life – let’s score what the inside of your body might feel like: pure adrenaline, flooded cardio system, non-stop increased heart rate. To us, that’s scarier than any “action music” and it’s more grounded in reality. So I can see how it could function like a horror score in that sense, but again, we aimed to build a realistic and restrained slow build that would accompany Terry on his long-term mission – rather than ever feel the need to immediately react to any one given scare. I would imagine if faced with the threat of a corrupt practice, and as you begin to understand how it might affect your life and livelihood – that the fear response would slowly, gradually evolve as it all continues to sink in, rather than say jump scare you.
With Jeremy’s films mainly super dark, how do you psychologically handle scoring them while so effectively getting into their headspace?
Will: My brother and I both have a kid – so we often watch a LOT of animated shows, Pixar stuff, The Wheels on the Bus, Miss Rachel, Sesame Street, etc. Shout out to current kids’ favorites on Netflix: Puffin Rock and Trash Truck because they are so calmly paced and easy on your (and your kid’s) senses. In other words, we LOVE horrors and thrillers as a genre – but if we’re working on one, we don’t go home in the evening ready to watch another. We need the most non-threatening palette cleanser we can get. Naturally, our kids help us find that. But! When it’s time to get in that headspace at work, we just dig up whatever shared emotional trauma we can find from our own childhoods. Piece of cake! 🙂
BROOKE: Given the great reviews and ratings that “Rebel Ridge” has gotten, could you imagine a sequel for it? And where do you think the story, and your scoring for Terry might go?
Blaire: It does seem like a lot of people online are asking the same thing, like “does the ending set things up for a sequel?”. I feel like we’ve reached the end of Terry’s arc. (Spoiler!) By no means are things wrapped up nicely, however. Summer is in the ER fighting through a second overdose, Marston has a bullet in his leg, Terry has been battered, bruised and shot, and Mike is dead. Terry does have all the evidence he needs in the hard disc recorder, so what happens next might be the legal fallout which could be really fun to follow along with, so who knows! It could all turn into a court drama, which could be fun to score. I do think Aaron Pierre did such a fabulous job with all the physicality the film required, but he also really shined in the emotional moments. It would be a huge treat to dig further into scoring more of those performances. Much of what we had to do in “Rebel Ridge” was to maintain the swelling sense of tension, so shifting into more of a dramatic score with Aaron at the center would be pretty amazing for sure.
I’m certainly looking forward to seeing and hearing Macon’s take on Troma’s cult classic “The Toxic Avenger.” Tell us about what we can expect? And what’s ahead for you both?
Will: We’re just hoping to hear some news about a distribution date soon! It was the most insane thing we ever did. Again, Macon challenged us to think about it like a multi-genre mixtape – we included over 100 musicians when it was all said and done. It’s fully orchestral, there might be a “superhero” theme or two – but we also did some very surfy and messy rock stuff, wacky 70’s crime “jazz” – and we worked on a lot of songs for the movies as well: 50’s Motown doo-wop vibes, some opera and some very questionable 90’s gothy rap-rock. Most fun we’ve ever had on a feature score and it nearly killed us. Hope it gets released soon enough!
Watch “Rebel Ridge” on Netflix HERE and buy Will and Blaire’s soundtrack HERE on Netflix Music. Visit Will and Blaire’s website HERE
Special thanks to Emma Rose Rowell and Cory Stillman at Impact24 PR