Words by Joe Williams

Whether it’s a heartfelt indie drama or a sweeping Disney saga, Nigerian composer Ré Olunuga has a laser focus on finding the truth.

It’s this commitment to authenticity and shared connections between people that runs deeply through all of his work. Speaking from LA, where he now spends half his time along with London, the Lagos-raised artist recalls how it was the response of people that first sparked his love for storytelling and communication through music. Calm, considered and supremely eloquent at articulating his thoughts on music, art and life in general, Ré reveals how what he does is “more about the people than the music.”

Growing up between Nigeria and Dublin, Ireland, the composer cemented a passion for music making and honed his craft so sharply that — a little over a decade later — his resumé spans shorts, features and documentary series’. His most recent project is Disney+’s culturally groundbreaking Afrofuturistic series, Iwájú — an optimistic vision of a future Lagos, as well as a celebration of Nigerian art. We sat down with Ré to discuss how his compositions are part of a wider conversation with history, why themes of family seem to recur in his art, and how he sees his role as a definitive advocate for the audience.

What was your personal journey into the world of composition?

So, there's a story for how I got into it professionally, how I started to see myself as a working composer. And I think this is a different story for how I got into conceptualising music, conceptualising music of a certain complexity, and seeking to get better at that, you know, as a craft.

I'd love to start with that story; the second one.

I would say that at the core of it is an instinct for storytelling. A compulsion to connect with people and share things that feel meaningful to me. A compulsion for transference; to have something that usually exists in a singular place , or within a group of people, exist in more people — and music as a medium has been something that just lends itself to that. It connects us, it's this language that we are born speaking and understanding.

Were there any particular moments that you remember which illuminated more brightly the path of music being the way to tell stories?

I think there are a few moments in my life that are stacked with each other and pushed me into that space. When I was in Dublin, I won a talent contest. At this point, I hadn't even been officially in any kind of music program, or any music classes, or anything like that — because I hadn't seen myself. Making music and performing music was almost like a party trick for me. I hadn't considered myself as a person who was living and existing as a musician. But after the talent contest, when seeing the reaction of friends and strangers, that was the first little bit of realisation that there was something to this. There's something interesting happening here. It felt good on a very basic level of ego, and working hard at something and succeeding at it. I wanted more and more to inhabit those moments in my life. I think the last little bit of it was getting paid to do it; when somebody offered to pay me to write some music for the campaign they were working on. It crystallised for me that this was a path that I could take. In realising that, I also then realised that I had to work at it even more. I had to invest time in equipping myself with tools and knowledge — not just of music, but of the human experience, and how to traverse that.

As composers, a huge chunk of our work is speaking for the things that might be missing, the emotional energy that might be missing in the creative lead's vision. We're saying, “This is what might be missing. This is how we can fill that up. This is how we can add to this performance, or add to this moment, or even distract a little bit, so that something else later on will be more impactful.” We're advocating for the audience. That should mean that you have an understanding of human beings. You have some sense of the human psyche.

Another thing that you have to do is understand your collaborators. Every collaborator that you're working with, they might have similar compulsions to you. They might be seeking a specific texture. They might be looking for a version of sadness, or love, or angst. There's just one version that means something to them, or that feels true to them in a particular story. You have to be able to hold their hand, and hold that understanding. And then secretly,  — very secretly — you add in what's meaningful to yourself, just so you can get out of bed in the morning and work on it. You have to figure out what version of what you're doing is meaningful to yourself.

Would you say there's an element of balance there?

For sure. Achieving balance is, I think, the core work for composers who are going about the route that I'm going about. I think there are different ways to do anything. There may be infinite ways to pursue any craft, but the way that I'm going about it, and the way a lot of storytellers and composers that I see, it's not just about the medium itself. It's about the people. It's about understanding people. Understanding everyone from a distance and also within really deep, intimate spaces so that you can talk to them, so that you can translate things to them, so that you can connect with them. That's the work.

On that concept of people, and of collaboration: what do you look for in a director or a creative that you’re working on a project with?

I’m always looking for something that feels true. In a lot of ways, I do think of the work that I do as a service. I think of it as helping whoever is reaching out for my talent, or my skill, or my opinion. It's not necessarily that I look for a type of person. I think with any conversation that I'm having, I'm looking for that truth within them. And as soon as I can find the truth of the story, of the vision, then I think I might be able to help with it. I might be able to spread that truth into the auditory medium to a certain extent. That’s what I’m looking for in my collaborators.

Can you think of any specific moment when with a collaborator that you knew that you were getting to the ‘truth’ of it?

I scored a film called Drift which is anchored by this really amazing performance by Cynthia Riba. Anthony, the director, and Naima, the producer — for whatever mysterious reason that people are drawn to certain composers, they were drawn to me. Before we had our first conversation, they sent the film, which I like. I personally like when you're able to see the story, and see what's been achieved already. It's rare in this business that the film has already been edited or in late stage editing before they reach out to a composer. I also enjoy when I'm part of the fashioning process, where I'm coming in at the script stage. I'm able to have deep conversations about character… It just sounds like I like everything, but it's the truth. So for Drift, I had this long conversation with Anthony and Naima about their film, and what I felt it was reaching for with its restraint, and its pacing and delicacy. I saw the vision. I saw that, and I communicated that to them; that they were inspiring that in the audience. They were trying to inspire that in the audience as well.

There wasn't a lot of leading. There wasn't a lot of handholding. You really wanted the audience to feel this character's isolation in a really granular way; in the small moments, in the spaces, in the silences, in that quiet desperation that Cynthia was able to convey so beautifully. I just checked with them — was that their intention? It was a very emotional moment for everyone, because making films is not easy most of the time. If you're doing it right, it's fun, but not easy. And they said that I was getting exactly what they were intending, and so I presented a possibility of how we could score it in the exact same way.

What form did that presentation look like? A demo, a moodboard?

We actually went right into scoring. After the conversation, I think they felt that I got the vision, and I understood it. I told them that we should approach the score the same way. We should make sure that it's only there when it needs to be. Because if we do it right, and we're restrained with the score, every moment that it shows up is all the more powerful. It's not the loudest, most in-your-face score. I've written scores like that, that are very forward, and they're gripping you. Because those films need that. But with this film, it was supposed to become the atmosphere in a very subtle way. There are top lines, there are melodies to that score, but everything is gentle, and very cyclical. They're representing certain chapter changes in the characters' journey, as opposed to where you're just trying to lead or bookmark every single emotional moment.

With Girl, you’d previously worked with director Andura Onashile on her short film Expensive Shit. How did that collaboration translate to a feature film?

Girl was a very, very different film from Expensive Shit. The process of making Expensive Shit was a little bit like acting for me. Because the score and its conceptual approach was that it would be the club DJ playing the music. So I was a DJ, essentially, and I was just having the music match the intensity and colour of whatever the emotions are in that moment. But it still had to have a beat. It still had to have a certain rhythm. But with Girl, it was a very personal project for the Andura. She spent a lot of time on it. She had done a lot of work. Not just the filmmaking work, but the physical and mental effort of putting yourself and your experiences and truths onto a page. We had a lot of conversations about the story before the film was even getting made. So I had some sense of the story before I got into it. But it was still a unique experience. Every film is unique, but Girl is particularly unique in different ways, because in finding the truth for it we had to approach the score in a way that we hadn't before.

A lot of the time with scores, you have to send demos or some version of the music beforehand that the director or the studios can approve. But with Girl, in wanting to approach it using specific voices — stylistic, abstract and black women's voices — there was no way that I could make demos of that. That was just not possible. So there had to be a lot of trust. I think that's where our previous relationship and collaboration came into play, where I presented a strategy of rehearsal. I was like, “Look, we're going to make an amazing score, but there's going to have to be rehearsal where I then take the elements and use that to create a framework.”

Like how sometimes a script can be solidified from improvisation with the actors — taking real, immediate and responsive moments, then piecing them together?

That’s exactly what it was, actually. Yes. There were two recording sessions, or two ‘stages’, I should say. There were the stages that had some of the strings and piano, and the theory of voices. I've released one volume that includes those. And there was the second stage that had the more visceral voices. And that stage was where I would prompt the singers with specific lines and tones and things which I wanted them to orbit. We would just collectively circle those themes until I found little moments where I was like “Yes, that's the one, that's it. An even more beautiful thing to witness was how the singers worked with each other. They were responding to each other as well as responding to the director, and it was just this wonderful process of discovery.

With Rise, whilst its based on a true story, the filmmakers are clearly playing in the sandbox of the sports drama. Did you lean into that genre and tradition musically, or was the focus more on aiding the story of the Antetokounmpos brothers?

Yeah, I tried to make something based more on the story. Of course, there's always a sense of the film vocabulary that exists for any genre, but it can be a bit boring to limit yourself to revisiting the tropes. I think that's a hard creative place to be in if you're giving in to the limits of what has happened before. In writing a book, let's say, you're using words that already exist. You're using tropes that already exist, for sure, but you're also trying to place those words in unexpected ways, trying to create a unique character using these very familiar words.

The score for Rise, it has brass, it has pumping motifs for certain moments, but it also has really lyrical piano lines. I would say it has this other vocabulary of African percussion fused with a certain type of cinematic ‘Disney sound’ for a Disney family movie. It's straddling a lot of things. It's a family movie, it's sports, bio, drama — but it also has Greek elements, and it has this African connection as well, both in the actual story and in the folks that are making the film. So those were always going to be amazing ingredients to work with. It's a little bit different from what you'd expect from the typical sports bio. At the heart of it, we wanted to center family. It really was about the family and the things that their parents sacrificed for their children. That was what informed the score more than the aspirational, energetic, ‘let's-get-it’ feeling. It was the heart. The strongest motivator for Yanis and his brothers was family.

In Drift, Rise and Girl, family is a recurring theme and through-line — although in very different ways. Is this something you look for when choosing your projects?

It's funny that you say that. I'm just realising that family is this huge thing because even with Iwájú, family is a huge thing there. Perhaps family is just a huge thing in our lives. It's a very multifaceted concept, isn't it? I have so much curiosity in me that I want to help tell any story. The limiting factor is usually the people and the number of hours there are in a day. For me, the craft of composing is so much more about people, and less about music and identifying elements of a story, or a genre and things like that. It's often about the person, about reaching for truth and having it connect with more people. I wonder if it feels like a dishonest answer to say that that's what I'm looking for in any project, because maybe every person is striving for that.

Maybe every person who puts a pen to paper, or fingertips to keyboard, is striving for some version of truth. Even though truth is a universal concept, one person's truth might not be yours. Essentially, that's what it is. Sometimes there’s a truth which is very far from any idea of truth that I have. Then those projects are probably best served with another composer. I try my best to be able to accommodate as many versions of truth as possible, as many spectrums of experience as possible, but every person has their limits. Every person has something that's a little too wild for them.

Iwájú presents us with a futuristic vision of Lagos and Nigeria. To what extent was your music channelling Afrofuturism or paying homage to tradition?

Well, the showrunner, the director, and so many members of the team have said this Iwájú really was a love letter to Lagos. There are some elements of the score that people who love Nigerian cinema — who have watched it from the home videos, or who actually live in Lagos — only they will recognise them. The emotional texture is there, the emotional energy is there that anyone can feel, but there are quirks. Essentially, when Nollywood started, it was home videos. We have masters of cinema as well, but the majority of the output for a long time in Nigeria was home videos with very small budgets. As you can imagine, with a small budget, the budget for the score was going to be minimal. Folks who would use very, very cheap keyboards, use the most rudimentary of performances, and even sometimes use the programmed accompaniment in those keyboards as scores. But that started to become its own thing. It started to become a style. It started to become an artistic conversation, in a way. It was a part of my childhood. It was a part of a lot of people's experience of growing up in Lagos.

There's a unique thing about a person using one hand to play a very, very low quality ensemble string patch on a keyboard. There's a specific lack of reality that's there. But for sure, if the metric is realism, it's very low. But if we're talking ambition, if we're talking ingenuity? There are moments in Nigerian cinema that are forever memorable. With Iwájú, I had an actual orchestra. I had all this experience of working with orchestras and writing very intricate work. But I wanted to respond to these ways that previous people who had scored in Nollywood films, back in the day, I'm talking about VHS days, just the language that they built by prioritising rhythm because they were playing it on a keyboard. I took that personal knowledge, but also shared knowledge for folks who watch Nigerian cinema. And I expanded on it a little bit. Again, there are a lot of lyrical moments in the score. But I think music is one of those things where if you talk about it too much… well, the point is the music. All the ideas are in the music.

You think of your Iwájú score as being ‘in conversation’ with that Nollywood tradition?

The process that I'm in right now, working in Hollywood with a lot of projects — it's like having the opportunity to finally play in the game. It's your favourite team. You've been watching from the sidelines all your life, and always felt like you could coach better or you had ideas for how they should play. Then somebody listens to you, and likes your ideas and then says, “Okay, we're going to put you in.” That's where I'm living. That's right now. So there are many genres, many stories, many things where I've had long time questions and thoughts and new ideas about, that I've wanted to explore or contribute to. And with this Iwájú, it was me saying, “What if we took these aesthetics that exist now as a style and an actual language in film scoring — but rather than have them be emotionally flat, we imbue them with these other philosophies and approaches that are personal?”

It’s me taking what is an intrinsic Nigerian sound, for a truly Nigerian story, and seeing what it sounds like with a huge orchestra. Taking choices from before that may have made me and others chuckle, but appreciating them and taking them further. Who knows, maybe right now there's another person who's chuckling as they listen to my score, and they're going to respond with something new later on. I think that's the way it goes: “This is my contribution, and I will continue to contribute to the conversation while inviting other people as well.”