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Interview: Composer Nicholas Britell on Reimagining Carmen and Finishing Succession

Britell discusses the connection between music and movement in Benjamin Millepied’s film.

Nicholas Britell on Reimagining 'Carmen' and Finishing 'Succession'
Photo: Sony Pictures Classics

If one were to distill the past decade in filmed entertainment into a sound, it would probably vibrate to the frequency of Nicholas Britell’s work. The composer’s peerless sonic landscapes expertly fuse the cerebral and the cultural dimensions of music. Dating back to his study of neuromusicology at Harvard, Britell is a student not only of form but function. As he knits together an eclectic tapestry of influences and inspirations, Britell pulls as comfortably from hip-hop traditions as he does from classical compositions.

Though Britell’s first feature credit as composer came on his friend Adam Leon’s scrappy New York indie Gimme the Loot, the project that really kickstarted his meteoric ascent to music’s firmament was contributing additional music to Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave. From there, Britell quickly became a de facto house composer for Brad Pitt’s production company Plan B, leading to collaborations with Barry Jenkins starting on Moonlight and Adam McKay beginning with The Big Short. The latter brought Britell onto HBO’s Succession, which vaulted him into an entirely different level of cultural prominence thanks to its earworm of a theme.

In addition to recently composing the score for the acclaimed Andor, Britell was instrumental to Benjamin Millepied’s reimagining of Georges Bizet’s opera Carmen. The long-gestating project sees the choreographer behind Black Swan transposing the story of a soldier (Paul Mescal) and his star-crossed dancing lover (Melissa Barrera) to the present-day U.S.-Mexico border. While it’s tempting to see Britell’s work on this experimental cross-disciplinary project as the culmination of an astonishing decade, Carmen is perhaps the purest distillation of his singular ability to keep one foot in music’s past while boldly blazing the trail for what’s to come.

I spoke with Britell earlier this week, shortly before Carmen opened in theaters, and just as he was putting the finishing touches on the penultimate episode of Succession’s final season. Our conversation covered the connection between music and movement, how he’s rounding out the unintended symphonic structure of the series, and more.

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I’d love to start with where your love of music began: Chariots of Fire. Dance is often a bridge between artistry and athleticism, so is Carmen at all a way for you to express that love of how music can accentuate the beauty of a body in motion?

In so many ways, working with Benjamin brought me closer to and deeply enhanced my knowledge and love of dance. I remember I met Benjamin about 14 or 15 years ago, and over the years through our friendship, he was always so kind in inviting me to dance rehearsals to see behind the scenes of how he was putting things together. You’re talking about bodies in motion and music, and there’s something incredibly moving and intangible to talk about.

There’s that clichéd line of “talking about music is like dancing about architecture.” Talking about dance is similarly difficult, I think. I remember seeing a ballet that Benjamin had choreographed that had music by the amazing composer Nico Muhly called Two Hearts, which was probably like 10 years ago at the New York City Ballet. I remember watching, and I found Benjamin’s choreography so moving. That feeling of the way that music and dance can join themselves together, when it works, is a very unique kind of a feeling.

In this project, for sure, that’s at the heart of some of what we were working on. Doing on-camera dances—because on-camera music was the first thing to do, as always—that was a real joy to work on with Benjamin. And one of the really fascinating things for me was that I had imagined that as we got closer to shooting the film, he would maybe want changes because there were certain dramatic needs. And, interestingly, he never did that. He always music in its full form. Basically, in those scenes, he would set the movie to the music, which was really quite special. I think it’s because he really wanted the music to have its own integrity in the film.

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You normally talk with the directors about how your music will layer on top of the images, but here, the music is the necessary pretext to have the images themselves. How does that change the way that you think about your role?

It changes a lot. It changes the way that you think about the music. You imagine, in theory, the music may have a more dominant potential role in the film. I have to add, it was also quite a journey putting it all together. The necessary part of the story here with Benjamin’s Carmen is that it had an incredibly long gestation period. The first email I got from Benjamin that he wanted to do that he wanted his first feature to be Carmen and that he wanted to do a total reimagining of it, that was about 10 years ago. That shows you it was not a recent development. We started working on the on-camera music around 2015 or 2016. From there, we had the wonderful luck of getting to work with Julieta Venegas, Taura Stinson, and the D.O.C. on the on-camera songs, that was probably 2017 through 2020 working on those.

To further your question about the integral nature [of how] the music really finished in the film, we had imagined that the film might have a lot of music. But the way that music actually became a character in the film was something that Benjamin and I really came to quite late in the process. I was scoring the scene in the motel when [Barerra’s] Carmen and [Mescal’s] Aiden were together. I remember turning to Benjamin and I said, “I have a crazy idea. What if there were a choir inside of the score? And what if that choir were almost like an ancient Greek chorus, where it’s commenting on the lives of the characters and is present in the room with them?” And he said he thought that was a great idea. I was relieved because I thought I might have been losing my mind slightly! But then we had these discussions.

There’s no Bizet in the movie at all, and that was something I felt very strongly about from the start because there have been so many incredible Carmen adaptations and arrangements of the Bizet. Especially because Benjamin was doing something so different, I felt it was so important that the music be different as well. But we had this idea late in the stages where what if the words that the choir was singing were actually the original French lyrics from the opera, totally rearranged and adapted into my music? And that’s what we did. So there’s this kind of ghostly counterpoint in the score of Carmen that is aligning with what’s happening actually in the film.

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In his director’s statement, Millepied talked about how none of the elements should conflict with each other in dance—and he approached this film similarly. But since you mention there being counterpoints within the film and the music, is that a way of paradoxically achieving this unity?

So much is up to the audience and how people respond to it. It’s a complex tapestry, and it’s definitely an experimental tapestry as well. There are a lot of things in the way that we utilized music in the film and in the way that a movie’s score works that are things that I’ve never done before. It was a challenge, it was exciting, but it was definitely an experiment. Part of the approach was to say “what if we did these things?” and then see how they felt to us.

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How did working with a property like Carmen, which already has a strong cultural footprint, affect the way you approached writing these songs and the score? By wanting to move away from the Bizet, did that process resemble your desire not to riff on the classic John Williams Star Wars music for Andor?

For me, the answer for all these is always and has to be: What is the direction or instinct from the filmmaker or creator? What I’m receiving from them is their instinct. Speaking of Andor, because it’s an interesting comparison, the first thing that [creator] Tony Gilroy and [producer] Kathleen Kennedy said to me was, “We really want a unique soundscape to this story.” I was given the blessing or the permission to say, “Okay, well, let me just treat this as it is, or as I see it, or as Tony feels it, and see where that takes us.” Obviously, I adore the John Williams music, and it’s part of all our childhoods and cultural heritage. But I think that for Carmen, too, it was important at that early stage to set what our approach was going to be.

If you aren’t very clear at those early stages, it could become very difficult, and you say yourself, “What are we doing? Is there Bizet? Is there John Williams?” Early on with Benjamin, it was clear when I said that I didn’t think we should rearrange the Bizet. He said he didn’t want that either. From a musical perspective, I wasn’t forced to question whether I was going to have this song or that song. We just said that we’re not having them, and I’m going to treat it as if it’s a new concept that Benjamin is bringing to me. As far as his approach with the story and the film itself, I let him, you know, go on that journey, and then I basically would respond to his feelings on it. I think without setting those ground rules in place, I think it could become very difficult.

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You’ve described your philosophy behind scoring a film as not necessarily wanting to “put a hat on a hat.” How do you handle that challenge when some of the music precedes the images?

There are certain feelings that Benjamin and I were trying to explore through the story, dance, and movement. A lot of the film is told through movement, in a way. Through the music, there were certain kinds of feelings I think we were trying to evoke in this film. There’s a sense of time. I think there’s a sense the music has an ancient quality to it. Because we have the choir that literally interacts with the characters in some of the scenes, there’s a sense of fate and destiny to that. These are very abstract feelings, but I think most films are really about finding a set of feelings, inhabiting those, and trying to explore those using the techniques of film to have an experience. That’s the closest I can come to what we were trying to say through those feelings.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t ask about the music for season four of Succession, especially the striking way you play out episode three with an elegiac tune for Logan’s death. The four seasons of the show have corresponded nicely to the movements of a symphony. Are you approaching this one like a sonata?

The coincidence, let’s say, of the fact that there being four movements to a classical symphony and we have four seasons…if there had been a fifth season, I would have to throw that framework out the window a little bit! But fourth movements of classical symphonies could have been many different things. A fourth movement sometimes was a presto, or sometimes a rondo where you’d introduce an idea and go away from it and come back to it. Because of the theoretically flexible nature, potentially, of fourth movements, there are many things I think that I’m trying to do musically in season four. And like you said, episode three has a very specific tone to the events of that episode. I wrote a huge amount of new music for season four.

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Every season I write a lot of new music, but season four I really wrote a lot. There was a different sensibility at times with it. I’ve said on the record that I didn’t know for sure that the fourth season of Succession was the last one until later in the stages, but I had a sense that it might be. Some of my music that I was writing was imagining some of that in a way. Imagining a finality. What’s an ending? What’s a new beginning? What is the future?

I knew some of the outline of the season before I was writing things, so I was aware of what was going to happen in these episodes, I’ll say that. Even before we started formally editing the episodes, I was already writing a lot of music with those events in mind. I’m not giving anything else away beyond that, but there’s much more to come! It’s been a joy to get to have these musical concepts and keep getting the ability to reimagine them, go off on new tangents, and find things. I think there may be nothing I love more than going on a new road with a piece of music, then getting to turn back and wink back at where we’ve been. The music sometimes knows itself in a way and looks back on where it’s been. It’s very fun to write music that has a self-knowledge to it, and hopefully the audience feels that too.

Marshall Shaffer

Marshall Shaffer is a New York-based film journalist. His interviews, reviews, and other commentary on film also appear regularly in Slashfilm, Decider, and Little White Lies.

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