Words by Amon Warmann

“That’s fascinating.” It’s my default response at the end of another typically illuminating answer from Justin Hurwitz, and it’s true every time.

With Babylon – a film that follows the rise and fall of multiple characters in 1920s Hollywood – the Oscar-winning composer is back for his fifth collaboration with Damien Chazelle. The score matches the ambition of the movie that it’s soundtracking, demanding that Hurwitz adapt his usual process to find the right instruments and the right musicians, whether they be from YouTube or Britain’s Got Talent.   

It’s that attention to detail that has led to tracks like ‘Voodoo Mama’, a catchy, toe-tapping banger that’s been on repeat ever since my ears were first serenaded by it. I could easily have spent my entire conversation with Hurwitz talking about that track alone, but we also covered his themes for the film’s main characters, his decision to incorporate La La Land motifs into the score, why he loves working with Chazelle, and much more. If I do say so myself… it’s fascinating.  

Babylon is about debauchery, old Hollywood and dreams that don’t quite pan out. What sort of questions are you asking yourself when approaching your music?

You mentioned debauchery. That was the key. The main words we were talking about from the top were ‘wild’, and ‘unhinged’. Like a band going off the rails a lot of the time. We wanted to find the feel of that and there are a lot of different moods and moments in this movie. But we wanted to start with the wildest moments and try to find a sound for that, trying to find a way to have one foot in the 20s, but also one foot out of the 20s. This is because we didn't want that quaint, swing jazz that we're used to hearing. We wanted something that was a lot more aggressive, a lot more rock and roll.

Did your process on this score differ in any way from that of your previous scores?

We started with the script and identified where the music would be. We recorded about an hour of music before the shoot, then I was on set. Then I did about another hour of music as score. So all of that process was very much the same but what was different about this was I became very interested in finding special musicians. People with very unique voices and unique styles, I've never done that before. 

The trumpet was obviously super critical on this It was a long search to find the right trumpeters, and it actually took several trumpeters to cover the range of styles we needed in this movie, both for Sidney and the score. About three or four years ago, a little before I was getting started, I went on YouTube searching for trumpeters. I found this guy, Sean Jones, who was playing with the University of Texas band and I just knew immediately that that was the sound of Sidney. But when we started recording the music a couple of years ago, we reached out to Sean and for whatever reason, we couldn't get him to LA. So I recorded other trumpeters in the meantime, who ended up being just perfect for certain kinds of music in the movie. But this last spring, after waiting for a couple of years, we finally got Sean Jones to come to LA and he laid down those really fiery, technically almost impossible solos at the big party that opens the movie, and on a track called ‘Damascus Thump’.

There are a couple of sax players were also really, really important. Jacob Scesney was a total discovery. The contractor here didn't really know him too well, but I asked the contractor to really look outside the normal pool and to go jazz clubs and find some interesting players. He sent us Jacob, who just completely unlocked part of the sound of these tracks. Jacob played the Alto solo in ‘Voodoo Mama’, and all of the wild, screaming improvisations in the finale track. Jacob just instinctively knew where this line was that we were trying to describe in the studio. We were having a very hard time finding it. Which is between tonal like the songs are, and atonal avant-garde, going off on these sort of wild runs and screams and extended techniques. Jacob just knew exactly how to thread that needle.

I’ve been describing Babylon as chaos with clarity…

That's great, I might steal that for some interviews! The finale is actually kind of the epitome of that, because that is total chaos. But it's also very crafted and it sounds like a total cacophony. But I know you can tell there are fragments of all the tunes coming and the way they're staggered and stacked and put together... It took a lot of thought and a lot of care to do that. 

What’s the balance between careful crafting and improvisation on ‘Voodoo Mama’? 

There's a little improvisation. I would say the key elements are first of all the percussion that starts off the track. There are layers and layers and layers of stuff. I don't know how to describe it other than… stuff. They are sticks, I got wooden boards and I was slamming them on the floor right here at my home studio. There’s a group of people clapping. One of our percussionists, Alex Acuña had the idea in the studio to pull out shoe trees, and he was slamming them on his boxes. And so that is, first of all, a very chaotic idea to begin with, to create that rhythm.

When it comes to the solos, the trumpet solo is written, and then the sax solo is half-written and half-improvised. So I wrote the solo, I demoed the solo and then I charted the solo. Jacob laid down the written solo and once we had good takes of the ink, we opened it up and said, “Okay, Jacob, now just do whatever you want.” And he gave us 35 solid takes of just going nuts and just having fun. This is another part of the process I've never done in the past. In the past, I would basically just say to the mixer, just pick the best solo, or pick the best couple of parts and put it together. But on this one, I came home with all 35 solos, picked through them and found all the great moments.

There was so much gold that Jacob had given us that it was very hard to whittle it down. But I would go and select the parts that I thought were really special and figure out how they could fit together with the written solo. So it'd be like, I'll use my line here then we'll use Jacob’s line there. And then we'll use my line and then Jacob did this wild bit here that was really cool, so I'll use that there. We kind of checkerboarded it, my material and his material. So that's how that alto sax solo on ‘Voodoo Mama’ was created. It's exactly why you're correct that it's somewhere in between crafted and improvised.

The other single from the movie is ‘Call Me Manny’. There are a lot of renditions of it throughout the movie. Which variation did you start with before switching it up?

The very first iteration we came up with for that tune is the track where Manny's racing to get the camera, which on the soundtrack is called ‘Herman's Hustle’. If that sounds like a familiar name, it's because there was a track on La La Land called ‘Herman's Habit’. I've been naming tracks after Herman, my grandfather. I never knew him – he died when I was one – but he was a great saxophone player, and I've heard a lot about him. I think that's where my musical spirit comes from. So ‘Herman's Hustle’ was the first version of that tune. It was a sequence of the movie that needed music on the set when Nellie starts dancing. But then, working with Damien, we talked about where else that music needed to fit. At the script stage, I was creating that music and then Damien was creating the animatics for that whole sequence. ‘Herman's Hustle’ is the dance version of the track, and it’s a little more straightforward. It's got Leo Pellegrino on the baritone sax. It's got Peter Erskine doing this awesome stuff on a snare drum, going all around the kit and having fun with it. And it's guitar. Just three instruments, but it's still got that really fun dance feel to it.

Then we started spinning it off into other versions. ‘Call Me Manny’ is a track where we really started pushing it. It's a very manic sequence. Manny's running around on coke, everybody's on amphetamines, and everybody's life is taking off. We wanted to give it that sweaty, everybody's at an 11 sort of feel. There’s a kick drum with a little 808 under it to support it, and it's got a dance high hat which you definitely didn't have in the 20s. But you could have! Maybe somebody tried it. 

The other actually important use of that tune is for all the Manny and Nellie themes. And there, we really adapt it and treat it very differently. It goes from being this fun sort of dance thing to being much slower and much more melancholy, and it’s harmonized differently. Because in those dance tracks, there isn't even a baseline most of the time. But we turned it into this bittersweet theme for Manny and Nellie. The instrumentation is completely different for those cues. It's three pianos that have been blended together; one of them is a very warm, mellow Steinway. The second piano is a slightly out-of-tune Spinet that has been treated with tacks to get that twangy sound. Then the third piano is an extremely out-of-tune and broken Upright when you mix those three together, you have some sweet and you have some sour, and it has this very fragile and broken quality that felt to us like Manny and Nellie's relationship.

There’s a marked shift in the music when Tobey Maguire’s character enters the film. It’s almost like the score belongs to a different film entirely. 

[NB: This answer contains spoilers] That sequence of the movie is unlike anything else in the movie and we go on this really interesting and dark and strange detour. Once we meet the Toby character, James McKay, the music needed to reflect that. The track is called ‘Toad’ and it’s led by a Theremin. And because it was invented in 1929, we thought alright, let's throw it into this movie for fun. I put a lot of distortion on it to be very scary. There’s a bass sax that was played by Jacob Scesney, and he played it in such a way where the notes were kind of breaking so there are these really interesting overtones going on. That track is meant to be scary and creepy and pull us into this new world of the blockhouse which is this underground club in LA. Then the next track is also super creepy, with some pitch-shifted vocals. There was this guy from Eastern Europe who I had seen on Britain's Got Talent, and he was doing alien voices. So I did a remote session with him, got all these weird creepy alien voices, and added those to the track.

We love to draw on and twist all the themes from earlier in the movie. Almost every cue is something from early on that's been manipulated and turned into something else. So in that blockhouse cue, these pitched gongs come in. They're called nipple gongs, and they're pitched percussion. And they're actually doing a version of the ‘Voodoo Mama’ riff. I'm always trying to think about what the connections are between the music and the story. ‘Voodoo Mama’ belongs to Nellie. And this cue occurs in a very tense moment of the movie, where Nellie’s life is on the line, in a way. So I thought it would be nice to bring in just a little hint of ‘Voodoo Mama’ in that track.

If I’m not mistaken, the ‘Gold Coast’ theme you use for Brad Pitt’s character, Jack Conrad, features some riffs from La La Land… 

We definitely tried to evoke similar feelings that we did at times on La La Land. There's a melancholy and there's a sweetness and a romanticism and a wistfulness in that track. And I guess, if I'm trying to evoke the same feelings for any given track, I'm the same composer, so I'm going to rely on similar musical grammar if you will. There has to be a sweetness to that track. But it is very sad. It had to have some pain in it. One thing that I think about a lot as a composer is we have to walk a line between sounding like ourselves and not repeating ourselves. I always appreciate when I see it in other composers that you can hear a few measures of their music and know exactly who it is. That's John Williams. That's Thomas Newman. That's Trent Reznor. When composers have a very identifiable sound, I think that's usually a good thing. But at the same time, we also never want to just straight up repeat ourselves. So I think that's a line we have to walk. And that's a line that I was walking on with that track and a couple of other tracks here. But these are new tunes. And I hope that people feel that they are new.

Most of the time I ask composers how they like a director to speak to them, the response I get is that it’s more about feelings and storytelling over any technical terms. However, Chazelle is a drummer, so he’s also musically well versed. Do you like to talk about music on that level with him? 

What other people are saying is totally true and most of the time, that is the case between me and Damien. We're talking about emotion, we're talking about what we want to feel from a scene or from a cue. That being said, Damien is more musical than just about any director. We can talk on a technical level more than probably most director and composer pairs can. He can talk about the bassoon he likes or doesn't like, and he can talk about whether he wants a tremolo or not a tremolo. He's got a pretty good vocabulary and he also just has great musical instincts. And being a drummer, he can certainly talk about rhythm. We discuss where to add polyrhythms or where to syncopate it more, and where to swing it less. We're always swinging it less in this movie. That was a constant thing. Damien and I are always talking about rhythm and conferring on those issues. There is a lot of good technical musical language that goes along with the normal director speak.

Do you think that’s partly the reason why you make such a great duo?

That definitely helps. I just love how he thinks about music and his movies, and how he values music. Damien wants to start working on the music, creating the music and making music part of his process from the very beginning. I love being a part of it it keeps me occupied for a long time, which I want. Another sort of secret to why we work well is we just trust each other and respect each other so much. And neither one ever wants to push the other into something that the other isn't happy with. So he'll never make me do a piece of music that I'm not happy with. And I'll never try to force a piece of music on him because we really respect others’ opinions.

We disagree constantly. But when there is a disagreement, when he wants version A of something that I want version B of, we will always keep searching for version C. And every single time version C is creatively a better choice than version A or B. If he was bumping on something for one of the options and I was bumping on something, there's some truth there. There's some reason why. So we will continue looking for a solution. The thing that works for both of us always ends up being creatively the best choice.

Would you ever compose a score with any other filmmaker?

I would, in theory. I haven't found the right person or filmmaker. First of all, I've been really pigeonholed as a jazz person, which I wish wasn't true. But it has been. So there aren't a lot of movies that need jazz. I don't want to keep doing jazz. I was very excited to do it in this movie, because Damien wanted to push it out of jazz and into some other things, and do this old meets new hybrid stuff. So I was excited by where we ended up on this movie. But generally, I don't want to keep doing jazz. But beyond that, I think it's hard to find a similar kind of rapport I have with Damien with someone else. To find filmmakers that want to think about music through as much of the process as Damien does, who want me on early, who want me there at the dub. I've been very spoilt to have a director who cares about music that much. So it'd be very hard for me to adapt to another process. I guess that's my answer there. I'm open to it. I just haven't found the right situation.

Babylon will be releasing in UK theatres on 20th January. The full soundtrack can be heard here.