Justin Hurwitz is a rising star in the world of film composing. His collaboration with Damien Chazelle on La La Land earned the composer two Academy Awards as well as two Golden Globes. Hurwitz again graced the stage at the Golden Globes this year to accept the award for his score to his latest collaboration with Damien Chazelle, the Neil Armstrong biopic First Man. Now available on DVD, Blu-ray, and Digital HD from Universal Pictures Home Entertainment, First Man is a bold, unconventional biopic that focuses on the sacrifice of those in NASA as they prepared to make one small step for a man a giant leap for mankind. I had an opportunity to talk with Hurwitz about his award-winning score for First Man.
The starting point for Hurwitz with the score for First Man begins with conversations with his frequent collaborator, director Damien Chazelle. “For me it always starts with the script and then conversations with Damien. I can’t remember of any specific music that was an inspiration as much as it was just talking to Damien about what he wanted to feel from it and what he was imagining in his head,” the composer said. “It always starts with words that he throws at me, like in the main theme he wanted to feel loss and grief and loneliness, and that sort of cosmic pain. He talked about coming up with sounds that would sort of be this mixture of otherworldly as well as classically emotional as well. He basically described what he was looking for and then it was a lot of experimentation to figure out what that would sound like.”
To find the sounds that would become his score, Hurwitz undergoes a process of discovery and experimentation. “There are multiple phases. The first phase is always at the piano. That’s not really an experimentation phase. That’s kind of the composing phase of what are the themes, what are the melodies,” he explained.
“Damien loves really thematic scores,” Hurwitz continued. “For this movie, he wanted a really lyrical, melodic main theme and then he wanted couple of subordinate themes. Those are all really found at the piano, so there was a couple of months of just working at the piano trying to come up with those melodies. After that was done, that’s when the real experimentation started because in the past we’d only done music that was either orchestral or jazz band. You know, we write music for an ensemble of musicians. We put it in front of them. They play it and it’s recorded and that’s it.”
The score for First Man wouldn’t be a simple as putting some sheet music in front of professional musicians. “But for this movie Damien mentioned from the beginning that he wanted to get into electronic music. We talked about possibly manipulating the sound of an orchestra to make an orchestra sound weird or different or otherworldly. We talked about designing some sounds just for this score, creating some instruments and some sounds just for the score. We talked about Theremin. We talked about vintage modular synths. We talked about all sorts of things I’ve never used before so that’s where the experimentation began,” Hurwitz said of the creative process.
He continued, “As soon as we had our main melodies and material at the piano, I got into many months – during pre-production and while Damien was off in Atlanta shooting – I got into many months of just playing around with things. I got a Theremin and started messing around with it and learning to play it. I got a couple modular synths and started learning how modular synthesis works. I started recording a bunch of substances and environments to create some of our own sounds and some of our own ambiences. I started playing around with other production techniques, figuring out how to take a recorded orchestra and bend it and make it weird, make it fit what this movie need. That was a really fun exploratory phase. It was all before pre-production and during shooting before we got into the editing room because we thought once we got into the editing room we needed to hit the ground running and score the actual themes.”
Damien Chazelle has become Hollywood’s wunderkind, with two features getting Best Picture nominations and himself being the youngest director to ever win the Best Director at the Academy Awards. It’s safe to say that Chazelle is a filmmaker who knows exactly what he wants. However, Chazelle’s commitment to his own vision doesn’t hamper the creative process for Justin Hurwitz who finds working with Chazelle as a fruitful collaboration.
“That’s what so incredible about Damien – he knows exactly what he wants and he’s so incredibly specific with me and all of his collaborators. He really pushes and pushes and pushes until he gets what he was envisioning that he wants,” the composer said of his director. “But he also is incredibly collaborative and there’s always a conversation to be had. He always wants to know how you feel about this and I’m not shy either talking about how I feel something is working. If there’s any kind of disagreements, we just talking it out and work through all the possibilities. We make sure nobody’s unhappy at the end of it. I never feel like I’ve been pushed into making a choice I didn’t think was right and, of course, he never feels like he was pushed into doing something that he thought was wrong. We really believe that if somebody wants Version A and somebody wants Version B there’s always a Version C that’s better than both of those options. You just have keep searching for it.”
What does the future hold for Justin Hurwitz? Another collaboration with Damien Chazelle, of course. “I don’t have another score I’m working on right now,” Hurwitz said. “Damien caught me up on what he’s working on, so he’s about halfway through writing his next movie. He just caught me up on what that is and what kind of music it’ll need. So I’m putting thought into that and I’m sort of spending a little bit of time at the piano and a little bit time trying take things in, listening to a lot of music.”
He concluded, “It’s gonna be a while because he’s still writing and he’s not going to shoot it for quite some time. It’ll probably be half a year before I’m really working with him actively on it.”
