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Interview: Composer Terence Blanchard on Upping the Ante with Da 5 Bloods

The jazz trumpeter and composer discusses the evolving nature of his collaborations with Spike Lee.

Terence Blanchard
Photo: Henry Adebonojo

“It was totally by accident.” That’s how Terence Blanchard describes how his first collaboration as a composer with director Spike Lee came about. Blanchard was working as a session player on the orchestrations for Mo’ Better Blues when Lee, after hearing some music that he was working on, used it in the final film. Not long after, the filmmaker called Blanchard out of the blue and asked him to compose the full score for Jungle Fever. “We’ve been working together ever since,” says Blanchard.

Their latest collaboration is Da 5 Bloods, about four African-American veterans who return to Vietnam to look for the remains of their platoon leader, as well as a load of buried gold. The film is an at once hilarious and moving study of the complicated nature of patriotism, and it benefits Slant’s as Chuck Bowen put it in his review of the film, “from the wrenchingly serendipitous timing of being released in the midst the largest civil unrest in America since the protests of 1968.” While politicians remain busy trying to make America great again, the soldiers of the film dare to ask: “When was America ever so great to begin with?”

On the eve of Da 5 Bloods’s streaming release, I spoke with Blanchard about matching his score to the tonal complexity of the film, the evolving nature of his collaborations with Lee, and why he considers the film to be the director’s very best.

Having created film scores for numerous filmmakers over the past three decades, how does working with Spike differ? Having worked together so frequently, have you developed a shorthand for how to communicate what it is he’s looking for?

Working with Spike is totally different. When we first started working together, he told me what he liked and what he didn’t. He doesn’t like underscoring scenes, but he likes strong melodic content. We have a common, shared sense in music, so I know what he’s looking for. Nowadays, before beginning a new project, we have a conversation about what we’ve done in the past and how we can move forward and try something different. Spike will send me the script before they begin shooting, and then after production is finished and I’ve seen the film, I’ll start compiling thematic ideas. Once I do that, Spike goes through them and assigns them to different characters or situations related to the film. After that, we meet up in the studio.

When you first get the script, are you making some notes for yourself about where orchestral music might be needed?

I did that earlier in my career and it wound up being a catastrophe. When I did that, I soon realized that what I was scoring in my head was my movie, not Spike’s. While the script is helpful in giving me a general idea of the story, I now try to wait until I can actually see some of the finished film before beginning my process. When I’m reading the script, it’s to my pacing, my cinematic vision, the colors I see in my mind. There was a scene in the Summer of Sam script where John Leguizamo and Mira Sorvino’s characters are arguing in a car. I read the scene and got a sense of the dialogue and knew that they were having a fight upon returning home from Studio 54. But when Spike shot the scene, we see Mira get out of the car and then, all of a sudden, Spike keeps the camera on the empty seat. That’s not in the script! It’s its own moment. That’s a drastic example, but those things can and will happen to varying degrees, so I try to wait until I can actually see something before starting my work.

Da 5 Bloods is both a film about the Vietnam War and a film about movies about the war, both an action movie and a contemplation of the long-lasting aspects of mass carnage and destruction. Were you looking toward other Vietnam War films to provide you with a roadmap? And in your score for Red Tails, a film about the Tuskegee Airmen of World War II, did the period of that particular war influence what you brought to it?

That’s a good question, because I don’t know if it’s due to the specific period or if it’s due to war in general, you know? Red Tails was a different thing, Miracle at St. Anna was a different thing, and Da 5 Bloods is a different thing. There’s certainly a sound that I associate with these films, and that consists of a lot of brass and percussion. What I try to bring to it is a different viewpoint, as each of the war films that I’ve done have been told from the viewpoint of African-American soldiers. As a result, I’ve always tried to incorporate a certain type of self. Spike does a great job, in the source material, of giving you a sense of the flavor of the period, and in the case of Da 5 Bloods, that’s Marvin Gaye. When you hear those Marvin Gaye songs, it sends you right back to that time period. I don’t necessarily think that the score needs to do that, but we tried to make sure that those timeless songs could speak to everyone.

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Did you and Spike discuss Marvin Gaye before the shoot?

We did. Spike wanted to take the music from What’s Going On and make it a character in the film. Spike is really great at nailing down his source material, his script, before he hands it over to me. Those ins and outs can be kind of tricky, musically, and we tried to make those moments as seamless as possible. I’m not sure there was ever a moment in the film where I had to really think about what Gaye song was either coming before or after what I was scoring.

Did Spike note in the script that Wagner’s Flight of the Valkyries must be included? That theme is, of course, most famously used in Apocalypse Now, a film that Da 5 Bloods acknowledges several times…

Yeah, that’s part of Spike’s reverence for film history. He’s a film historian, man. He loves the war genre quite a bit and he’s always trying to pay homage to certain aspects of them.

The film often toggles between scenes in the ’60s during the war and the present day, with soldiers returning to Vietnam. Did that provide you with opportunities to experiment a bit with thematic and time-based shifts that might match the story?

Yeah, and I’ve grown so accustomed to that when working on Spike’s films. For example, Miracle at St. Anna is similar to Da 5 Bloods in that it’s a serious drama that happens to feature some very comedic moments. The comedy isn’t based on something silly but rather on real-life situations, and so I’ve grown accustomed, musically, to going back and forth between the drama and the comedy. Generally, what I try to do, honestly, is stay out of the way. Spike always has great performances in his films. The only thing I need to do is enhance them. I don’t need to help them tell a joke. I don’t need to help them be more dramatic. The only thing I need to do is be their support. That’s the beautiful thing about working with Spike.

Are there certain instruments that jumped out as most appropriate for this story? There are a few moments in the film where we hear the soft pattering of drums and it feels inherently patriotic, like we’re attending a solemn military funeral.

You hit on it right there: the drums and the brass. In Da 5 Bloods, the soldiers are battling the Viet Cong. In Miracle at St. Anna, they’re battling the Germans. As a result, I illustrated the distinction between the soldiers and their enemies by incorporating contrasting snares. For the Americans, we used nice, fat-sounding snares, and with the Germans in Miracle at St. Anna, we used lightweight, tight-sounding snares. We didn’t have that same contrast on Da 5 Bloods. For the Viet Cong, I decided to incorporate a duduk, and for the Americans I used full-sounding snares, percussion, and brass. The thing that stuck out for me on Da 5 Bloods was that our main characters were going back to Vietnam and, as a result, you might sometimes forget that these guys were ever real soldiers. I didn’t want people to forget! These are military guys who come back to Vietnam after many years removed from the war’s conclusion.

And given that the film is about a specific war and its long-lasting effects in the country in which that war was waged, were there influences specific to the culture of Vietnam that found their way into the tone of the music?

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Yeah, and I tried to pick up on the little things, as that music has a certain type of melodic and harmonic structure to it that’s a bit more pentatonic. I’m pretty sensitive and careful, as I never want it to sound like I’m trying to appropriate something from a specific culture. I want it to sound like I’m paying homage. That’s why we brought in a really great duduk player for Da 5 Bloods. Sometimes we would give him things to play that were already written and other times we would let him improvise. It worked to great effect.

One melodic theme in the score that really jumps out comes when the men turn on the radio and learn of Martin Luther King’s assassination. The music takes on an innocent quality, or an “innocence lost” quality, that illustrates the soldiers’ internal pain.

Exactly, and it has a denizen quality too. For that composition, the thing I kept thinking about was, given everything we’ve gone through in this country, what does it feel like to put your life on the line for a country that doesn’t give a shit about your life? What does it mean to be a professional, to do your job, and then find out that the one person who’s fighting for your rights back home, gets killed? And not only does he get killed, but the Viet Cong starts to take advantage of his murder by trying to get inside your head. That is, why would you even fight for a country that doesn’t care about you? And those are legitimate points!

I kept thinking to myself that those guys had to be questioning quite a lot at that moment. It had to be a very sensitive and volatile time for them, filled with anger and filled with pain. As a result, I wanted to write something that was inherently innocent, as that’s how I understood the mindset to be. I’ve had uncles that were in the Navy and in the Army during that time and I’ve listened to their stories and it’s both riveting and heartbreaking.

The first flashback sequence, where the soldiers get their chopper shot down and are thrust into combat, serves as the first big moment of action in the film, and the score swells accordingly. The stakes go from zero to one hundred in a matter of seconds. Does that affect the music you write to accompany it? Where things have to get amped up very quickly and match the dangerous predicament the characters find themselves in?

Dude, you have no idea. I think that sequence is a film class onto itself. I think it’s going to go down in history as being one of the great scenes of these types of movies. I even told Spike that. It took me five days to write the score for that sequence. I took my time with that scene because there’s so much detail in it, so many shifts in emotion. Once the action starts, it doesn’t let you out of its grip for damn near five minutes. I had to make sure that the music never bogged down. It took me five days to fully plot it out, two or three of which I just sat at the piano and plotted out the orchestrations before structurally enhancing them. I’ve thought a lot about that sequence, and the analogy I’ve been using is that it’s like being on a basketball court with Michael Jordan and he passes you the ball, because you’re wide open, and you drop the ball. You cannot drop the ball when you’re given filmmaking like this.

When does silence matter? The extended sequence where the men unwillingly discover active landmines is a great example of “less is more.” We hear the sounds of nearby cicadas, but that’s within the scene itself. Do you discuss with Spike when your score should pull back and let the tense, diegetic sounds speak for themselves?

Yes, and that’s a part of our process before we even go into production. We have discussions about that. Sometimes Spike chooses to have music where I probably wouldn’t have music or, on other occasions, I want to place music in a scene where Spike doesn’t think there should be any. Over the years, I’ve learned that the beautiful thing about our collaboration is that Spike may have something else stored away in his mind that he’s not telling me.

When Spike told me he was going to make Da 5 Bloods, I was like, “Okay, but you just made a great film, BlacKkKlansman, and maybe you should take a small break. I don’t know how you’re going to step up.” And then, when I saw the finished film, I was blown away. That’s been our working relationship. He ups the ante with every film, and it makes me have to up the ante for myself on every subsequent project. I honestly think this is the best film he’s ever made and I’m proud to have been a part of it.

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It goes without saying that every Spike Lee joint feels prescient and topical regardless of the era in which it’s released, but perhaps there’s no greater example of a film for this moment than Da 5 Bloods. It’s being released at a period in time that may bring about sustained social change for African-Americans long wronged by their country.

I want to tell you what I think is most important about the film, in the context of its relevance to current events. When we talk about these social movements in time, these pivotal moments in our history, we usually hear about them from the viewpoint of a person who has somewhat aged, who has a few years on themselves. What I love about Da 5 Bloods is the fact that you have Delroy Lindo, Clarke Peters, Isiah Whitlock Jr., and Norm Lewis as part of a collective unit with Chadwick Boseman and, for whatever reason, when I first saw Chadwick, it made me realize how extremely young all soldiers are when they’re first thrown into action. They have to be very responsible and very thoughtful at such a young age. This is something I reiterate to my students all the time. Given the pandemic, I’m teaching my students online for the time being, but I let them know that this is their time, their moment. This is their time to make their mark. Don’t think that it’s going to come around, that there will be another moment down the line that you can speak on. Don’t be afraid to step out and make your statement now.

Erik Luers

Erik Luers is a film journalist, programmer, and digital marketer. He is a contributing editor for Filmmaker Magazine.

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