Words by Joe Williams

Films usually get staler as a franchise progresses — but with Furiosa, that tradition is blown completely out of the water.

This is in no small part helped by Tom Holkenborg, aka Junkie XL, who since Fury Road in 2015 has forged a sonic palette that is inextricable from the new era of George Miller’s dystopian saga. The fifth instalment of Mad Max serves as a prequel to its predecessor almost ten years before, which, in turn, marked the first new Mad Max film in 30 years.

Bringing audiences a new ultra-saturated and hyper-kinetic rendition of the Australian apocalypse, along with new boundary-breaking cinematic techniques and indeed a whole new Max, Fury Road proved that not only did Miller and Junkie XL make an excellent creative partnership — they’d made arguably the best Mad Max film full-stop. Furiosa takes this great cinematic collaboration and pushes it further, offering an even richer, deeper and more eclectic soundtrack that scores a high-octane chase scene just as easily as it can accompany a tender moment of love.

Considering the cult legacy that the original trilogy had, and the length of time left before the filmmakers returned to that world, it’s a testament to the creative powers of Junkie XL and Miller that these 21st century Mad Max films will come to define the franchise. Sitting down with the Dutch composer, producer and DJ, we delved into the intricacies of perspective when it comes to scoring, how taking on the role of re-recording engineer aided his return to the Wasteland, and why education is of the utmost importance to him as an artist.

Furiosa hits the screens almost a decade after Fury Road. At what point did you know you’d be returning to that world, and what did those early conversations with director George Miller look like?

I knew it 12 years ago. When I got hired to do Fury Road, it wasn't that big a conversation then — we were more concerned with making a movie that stands by itself. But then, on the other side of it, we questioned: “If we were to do a prequel, how would we set it up to be the perfect handoff into Fury Road?” Of course, the thing that I didn't know back then was that this movie was going to be a first person perspective movie, whereas Fury Road was in the third person perspective.

So in terms of music, that means that the composer is technically sitting next to the people in the theatre as we watch this craziness unfold in 48 hours. There’s lots of different characters, lots of different action, and crazy events like a huge sandstorm. So it really fitted the bill, musically, to do a crazy over-the-top rock opera — except for the middle part of the movie, where Charlize’s Furiosa meets the women, and she finds out that there is no more “Green Place”. And that's where the music became very lyrical and very delicate. That's when we heard the didgeridoo and the duduk, at a certain point where she talks about the Green Place. So we already knew that if Furiosa starts at the Green Place, it's going to be super important that we start the music with those instruments that we already set up in Fury Road.

It’s interesting the way you speak about music related to perspective. How was the perspective different in Furiosa?

So the thing with this movie is, instead of 48 hours, it takes place over 20 years. It's really an odyssey of one person, so you score it from a first-person perspective. For instance, when she experiences that early tragedy, you're not going to write lyrical string music for that, because that’s not what a six-year-old girl would be hearing. What she has is that ultimate fear, her heart racing, and the music is designed to represent that. In a similar vein, people ask how come there's a massive action scene in the middle of the film — without any music for five or six minutes! And then, when the music does come in, it's so minimal. And it’s because, during that scene, we don’t even know that her character is there until later, and then when we join her, she’s purely focused on staying out of the way, and staying alive. The score had to make sense in that context, so with Furiosa, it's a very different approach to music altogether.

How did you approach creating the score for this new Mad Max instalment?

We picked four sonic elements that were super important for this movie. One is what we call the “Darkest of Gods”, which is the very distorted sounds we hear on that main title. And it's made with the Buchla electronic synthesiser system developed in the 1960s, very unknown by most musicians. I just got my hands on it like a year and a half ago, and I knew immediately that I was going to be able to make sounds with this system that I haven't used before that was going to be really great for this movie. That sound represented the darkness of the movie: the introduction to Dementus, coming from the deepest cellar of hell, and then Furiosa’s arc into an instrument of vengeance. The second element, that also came from that sound system, was this heartbeat; this vibrating pulse that you sometimes don't even hear, but you definitely feel it. I was in big discussions with George: “How do you make music that is felt, but not heard?” A very big conceptual thing, which he was very specific about. The third element was the didgeridoo and the duduk — the definition of the Green Place. People living in harmony with nature. And then the fourth element was all those reoccurring sounds we’d established in Fury Road: the panicked string riffs, that over the top percussion, those big brass moments. But it's a way, way more subtle score in this movie than it was back then. That was blaring from beginning to end. This is not.

What was the intention behind that conceptualization of “feeling but not hearing” the music?

George is somebody that is really big on conceptual ideas. Even when it comes to the relationship between George and his composer, whoever it is, what he’s looking for in his composer is a fellow filmmaker. He doesn't want to deal with the guy who just “does the music”. It's not how he works. It’s often the case with directors of that stature, like Christopher Nolan, Peter Jackson and James Cameron. I've been fortunate enough to have met all of them, and worked with them, and they're looking for another filmmaker that helps them understand why they actually want to make that film in the first place. So with George, when we were talking about music, he said, “I don't want to be able to see the orchestra when I hear it, or imagine the session synthesiser playing sitting in the corner.” He wanted to preserve as much immersion as possible. “I want to feel it, but I don't want to hear it.”

What was really interesting about this movie for me was that not only was I responsible for doing the music, but I was actually one of the two final mixers that delivered the final result of the film. In Hollywood they call it a ‘re-recording engineer’. It was me, together with Robert Mackenzie, who were responsible for the end result. And we only finished three and a half weeks ago! Because I was the mixer, I could play with the music exactly how I intended it to play to begin with, in terms of wherever the spacing was in the theatre, how it would ramp up in certain moments, and how much low frequencies and sub-information were in those ‘pulses’, so that the audience is literally shaking.

By the time you got to Furiosa, you and George had worked on two films (Fury Road and Three Thousand Years of Longing). How has your working relationship and creative dynamic changed over the course of these projects?

It actually was the same since the start. He relies on me to come up with what the sound is going to be for the film. He just talks in very elaborate terms about what he wants, emotionally, to get out of the music when he hears it. Right from the first moment when we worked on Fury Road, he would say, “This whole sequence I want to feel like this, and this whole sequence I want to feel like that.” He never said “Make this music, make that music.” I came up with this concept for Fury Road of repurposing instruments for something else other than what they're actually intended for. There's many people that think that there's lots of string riffs in that film, but it's not strings — it's metal. And then I did experimental string recordings that turned into percussion, and people think it's percussion. No — it's actually strings. But George is interested in the story behind these choices. He would ask me, “Why did you make that choice? What is that sound? Where does it come from? How do you get that?” And he expects you to have a solid answer on any of the questions that he might have. He's looking for really meaningful, considered choices.

But with Furiosa, he said, “This is a movie where I do want to hear a beautiful melody that is haunting, and a nice string arrangement.” It's interesting that, when you talk with fans of film music, they think that it's the fault of the composer that there's hardly any recognisable themes now in cinema. But that’s not how it works. Directors have been switching from what they liked 25, 30 years ago to what they like right now. So, for instance, James Cameron may still love big melodies, but George does not. He wants to hear a more modern approach to music. And it really depends per director on what they want to be hearing. When you start analysing movies over the last 40 years, it’s clear how the role of traditional themes and harmonies have been replaced by more ‘sound palette’ type scores. And it's really the director that is steering that process, not the composer.

It's funny you say that, because I speak to a lot of composers and listeners who kind of lament the loss of melody.

I don't agree.

With Furiosa in particular, you kind of cross into that territory of abstract sound design, which is really fascinating. Sometimes people get caught up on this idea that unless the audience can leave the cinema humming a tune, that you've failed in some way.

Exactly, but that’s not how it works at all. You can also leave the theatre thinking about how the music made you feel. With Fury Road, you may not be able to hum a melody, but you hear a track from that score and you’ll know it’s Fury Road. One of my favourite composers in film has been Jóhann Jóhannsson. Now he was capable of writing extremely beautiful melodies. But when he works on Sicario, where there's no room for beautiful melodies. What you need to hear is that roar, which is the theme of the movie — that bending roar.

What compositional tools were most useful for Furiosa?

Our strategy was, “How much silence can we get away with in this movie? And how can we actually use silence as music?” I truly believe the most powerful thing a composer has is knowing when not to write music. That's the most powerful thing. Secondly is knowing where and when to write the music for? Unfortunately, that is a thing that I think has been lost somewhere in the last 15 years or so — a lot of big movies have a score from right at the beginning to all the way to the very end, and there's no silence. Now, for Fury Road, a film taking place over the course of 48 hours, that worked fine. But for this movie, that would not be the right choice.

You touched earlier on being able to play around with spacing as the re-recording engineer. How important to you is the relationship between space and sound, not just in film scoring, but music in general?

Space and sound are extremely important. When the great concert halls were built hundreds of years ago, they wanted to create a space where the orchestra would completely engulf the audience. The French composer Maurice Duruflé wrote a Requiem which used a choir in the front and a choir in the back, and an orchestra on the left and on the right. People would be sitting in the middle and be completely engulfed in an incredible moving piece. And then there’s all the experiments that Karlheinz Stockhausen did, for instance, like a concerto for four violins and four helicopters — crazy ideas like that. And so, as a sound designer, even when I was making dance tracks back in the day, you had a massive PA system on the left and the front, or a club left and front. It has been like that for the longest time, and so I would play with techniques and mixing to try and put things ‘outside’ of the speaker, as if it didn't come from the speaker, but from somewhere else.

In terms of film scores, yes there's sometimes room to record the orchestra as it is, but often it's really cool to play with space and work with panning.  You can position sounds so that they’re still prominent, but perhaps during a very important dialogue line, the music doesn't get in the way — but you can still maintain sonic weight and space for the sounds to develop. Therefore, especially with the sound systems we have right now available to us, especially Dolby Atmos, where you have up to 128 different objects you can put in a space. It's so incredibly detailed, and usually that space is 100% reserved for the people that do the sound design on a movie, like flying spaceships or ray guns or galloping horses — an incredible creative use of space. But you can do that for the music, too, and you can do it in a way that doesn't get in the way of telling the story. Because everything is to make sure the narrative is correct. So first as a musician I’m writing the musical narrative, and then the last eight weeks, together with another mixer, Rob, we’re telling the narrative again but in the form of mixing: how it's playing, how loud it's playing, and how the handoff is between the two of them in space.

You're very active online, regularly putting out videos delving into your creative process and explaining certain decisions. Why do you think it's important to share this information with people?

When I grew up, my mom was a music teacher, and at night she would teach kids of lesser fortunate families for free. That's how I grew up; having that normalised. Also, I come from the Netherlands, where we have really good universities and really good music schools, and education in the Netherlands is almost practically free. Thirdly, I actually feel that in great societies in the past, everything was being shared with everybody, whether it was science, whether it was philosophy. The Greeks, the Romans — those were the foundations of our culture. So that all combines, and for me, it was just so natural to start teaching at universities and start doing master classes. Then, at certain points, I was like, “Okay, what else would be cool? Why don't we start this YouTube channel and start uploading all these tutorials for free, so everybody can see it!”

And the thing is, it's not like I'm saying to the people that watch me, “This is how you need to do it.” No; I'm just saying this is how I work. You might even, by watching me, know for a fact what you don't want to be doing. It could be a process of elimination, where some people look at my videos and it informs which direction they want to go. In either case, it's a very helpful scenario.

The last thing we did physically was a score academy, which unfortunately stopped because of corona, but we started it in 2018 and invited two super talented young people to study with me at my studio facility. We invited them over, and they were able to see me work and see my assistants work, and they would get constant training for a full year working on my computer system with my samplers, with my templates, and we did that two years in a row. It was so great to see these four students succeed, and in fact all four of them ended up being assistants of mine, and they're now working on their own careers! You know, it's just really great to see that. It's also great to peek in the head of an 18-year-old, because that person will be making music while I’m in some health facility aged 92, and that’s an amazing experience, and an amazing trade-off you know? I'll look at your head as an 18-year-old, and you’ll learn from my experience as a 56-year-old.

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is out in cinemas today.