Words by Amon Warmann

Steven Spielberg and John Williams. Tim Burton and Danny Elfman. Christopher Nolan and Hans Zimmer. No list of the best director-composer tandems would be complete without these names. Over the last half-decade, it’s become clear that another duo is worthy of the same stature – Barry Jenkins and Nicholas Britell. With both Moonlight and If Beale Street Could Talk, Jenkins’ powerful visuals were beautifully augmented by Britell’s hypnotic, tender scores.

The two are teaming up for the third time on The Underground Railroad, an ambitious adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel that chronicles the story of two slaves from a Georgia plantation – Cora (Thusa Mbedu) and Caesar (Aaron Pierre) – who escape and embark on a desperate bid for freedom. When we caught up with Britell for a chat over Zoom, he mused about his creative partnership with Jenkins and how he went about merging key themes. He also teased a three-volume soundtrack release for the series which we can’t wait to listen to.

You’ve said that “the first time you see a piece of footage, or a cut of something, it’s really important to be very aware of what you’re actually experiencing or what you’re actually thinking because that first experience only happens once.” If that’s the case, what do you remember about that first experience watching The Underground Railroad, and what emotions were you thinking about when you started working on this score?

My first thoughts were really from when I read the book. Whilst reading the book, there were certain things that I thought to myself, almost as questions, about how things might sound. I remember reading about South Carolina in the book, and how there's that moment where he talks about the skyscraper in South Carolina in the mid-1800s. I remember thinking to myself that I didn't know there was a skyscraper in South Carolina, and of course, there wasn't. That strangeness, that magical realism, those historical anachronisms, are really a central part of The Underground Railroad. So I remember thinking to myself if I were to see that in my mind's eye, what does that sound like? That was one of the first musical thoughts I had, and I put it in the back of my mind.

I really cherish being able to work with Barry for so many reasons. He's a truly brilliant artist, but he also has this really amazing ability to express these instincts that he's having musically. He has such strong, early ideas, and yet at the exact same time he's totally open to trying things out and experimenting. So those early ideas that we had on The Underground Railroad is actually a very interesting story. Early on, he was shooting in Savannah and I received an audio text message from Barry. I listened to it, and it sounded like a piece of construction equipment. There were no comments or anything on it. It was just the sound of drilling. I was a little confused. Later in the day, Barry texted me and he said, “did you get what I said?” So immediately, I noticed what he was talking about, and that the idea was we're drilling, we're digging into the earth. What can we do with that sound? I took that sound of the drilling and I started manipulating the audio. If you stretch it a bit there's this cool rhythm to the drill, and there was this tonal shift that was happening.

It just spurred both of us to have these conversations. At first, it was about drilling into the earth. And then we were thinking about insects in the air, and we went and listened to Cicadas. We were sent all of these amazing sounds of Cicadas, so I was then listening to that and bending that. What's fascinating when you do that is you can't hear any melody with the Cicadas sound, but when you slow it down these cool weird melodies emerge and you can hear them. Barry and I were listening to this and were like “these are amazing”, you know. So then we said well, that's air… what's fire? Taking the sound of fire and experimenting with that and weaving it into a piece of music…those were kind of our starting experiments. All of these elements wound up in the score in some form. I've worked on this score for over 18 months, and actually, I'm in the 20 something months now because I'm still working on the soundtrack. We're actually going to release it as three volumes of music. Also, just like we did with If Beale Street Could Talk, we’ll be including some of the foundation tracks and early sketches as well.

Exciting! I love it when composers are brought into the filmmaking process early like you have been here because it makes it easier for those ambient sounds to bleed in and augment the score in really unique ways.

When you get started early, not only does it provide you with more time but it gives you a chance to try things out knowing that those things may not wind up in the project. For Barry and for me, there's always so much more music that is written than gets into the projects. It's an interesting thing because I think one of the greatest lessons that I've learned is that it's always about the project. Adam McKay actually said that to me five years ago. He always says the movie is gonna win, and what that means is that we are aspiring to create the best possible version of the movie. It's not about any one of us, you know, and Barry and I have a similar ethos. The project speaks to you, and you listen, and until you find exactly what’s right you keep pushing and pushing. So along the way, there are lots of things that you do early on where you're like… this is not the right idea anymore. Not only is that OK, but it's actually good and important because it allows for growth.

The Underground Railroad is so massive in its scope and there is so much that we wanted to explore. We also worked on the episodes out of order, interestingly, so there were things that I did in the last episode that once I had done them made me want to relook at the first episode and make changes. Barry and I have talked about that kind of learning process before. In the editing process on Beale Street, we realized there was this whole idea that needed to be incorporated in.

As a composer, you have to train yourself a little bit. I never send anything out unless I love it. That way you always know that you believe in what you're doing. But, you know, there are lots of times I'll play something for Barry, and he'll say “this is really beautiful. It's not going in this.” You have to be willing to throw it aside. That being said, the creation and the work is a joy on its own. And there are pieces that are not in Beale Street that Barry still listens to I think, but they just weren't right for the film.

Sounds like you’re just as much of a perfectionist as I am! How did you go about choosing the musical palette for this one? What was the starting point?

The first piece that went into the show for me was actually some diegetic music. There's a social dance that happened in South Carolina, and Barry asked me to write original music for that. I remember asking him “what do you want it to sound like? Do you want it to sound like a period waltz?” He actually said he wanted it to sound almost Central European in a certain way, and so I started playing with that idea and carving that. So that was kind of the starting point, along with the sonic experiments we were talking about – the drilling, and the Cicadas. In a way, that's a testament to all the different musical worlds that are in this show.

One of the first pieces of music that I wrote was inspired by the drilling that we talked about. After experimenting with the sonics of that I started thinking what going downward would seem like, musically. So I just started experimenting with a descending chromatic scale. Just four notes descending chromatically, just by half steps, and living with that sort of hypnotic repetition. I remember I was with Barry in Los Angeles in a studio I had set up, and I started playing this and I started playing these sort of chords and each one would have just one element that was descending with it. I know when things are working for Barry because he'll say “keep going with that, don't stop!” So I remember I was playing these chords, and that piece became ‘Pillars’ because it felt like these sort of pillars in the ground. I set that theme to strings with very raw, harsh tremolo, and then I recorded it with an amazing orchestra in London, led by our concertmaster Everton Nelson. After I had that, I put all that together and kept working on it and that piece is actually the first piece you hear in the series.

There are so many different types of music in the series, so there isn't one sound. For the on-camera music, we actually hired Professor Eric Crawford from Coastal Carolina University who did research on the music of the South in the mid-19th century. There's instrumental music, there's very lush orchestral music that I wrote for at certain points. There's the sonic experimentation, there's atmospheric type music. We incorporate voices at times – we worked with two amazing singers in Julia Bullock and David Huey. There are so many different types of music, and I think it's really because this show is about Cora's journey. It is about her going to literal different states, but also different states of mind and different worlds. Each world required its own musical landscape, and so Barry and I worked very hard to create all those. So I think in a way, the answer to the question of not just where we started but where we wound up is that there are many sounds.

If each episode is its own musical landscape, which ones are you especially excited for people to watch from a musical perspective?

I'm really excited for people to hear all of them to be honest with you. They're all so different. On the orchestral side, the music in South Carolina, in particular, stands out to me. There's also some orchestral music throughout the series. The music was actually recorded in London at AIR studios and it was the largest orchestra that Barry and I had ever done together. Pre-pandemic, I had recorded a 100-piece orchestra on the movie Vice, but Barry and I have never actually had that large of a sound. In Moonlight, it was really a Chamber Symphony sound. It was like 17-25 players. For The Underground Railroad, we had 50 strings at Lyndhurst Hall. At the peak of it, it’s a very lush sound. We also had a range of different instruments: harps, there are smaller instrumentations, brass, flutes, voices, there are different types of pianos, there are metallic sounds and percussion. So I'm very excited for people to hear all of it.

You mentioned that there are so many different types of music and so many different types of sounds. You’re already merging themes in episode 1. How conscious are you of having everything work together as you’re constructing each individual motif?

There are certain themes that when I write them or when I'm thinking of them, I’ll present them to Barry and he’ll immediately say “North Carolina”, or “Tennessee”. He has the most remarkable mental map of the works that he's creating. I benefit from that because then I'm like, okay, it works here but it's also gonna go here.

There are times where he knew we needed new things. I remember when we were working on episode 8, and there was a point where I was actually writing something new and then Barry said we have to connect this back to episode 2. It’s a constant conversation guided by Barry's just incredible instincts. In hindsight, a lot of this becomes clearer and clearer to us. We're so immersed in it as we're doing it. There are of course times where we'll say okay, this is how we're ending the show. How are we starting the show? And how do we want to do this? But I rely so much on Barry's amazing instincts. The themes that resonate for him become themes that are in the show most often.

Lots of the imagery in this show is so powerful. How do you and Barry decide on what scenes should be augmented by music and what scenes are best left to the visuals and the sounds?

I love talking about this, because it's something that I think about all the time, and I talk to Barry about it all the time. On the one hand, Barry knew right away which episodes he wanted to be less fully scored. He knew which episodes he wanted to be quieter and have less music and more sound. That being said, we would talk about those things and I would always want to propose ideas to him with the full knowledge that it's okay if they're wrong. I’ll always say “what do you think of this?” and he’ll always say “show me!” So there are definitely places where I experimented with music that wound up staying in, and there are also many places where we put music in, Barry would go to the dub stage, and as he's watching the finished product he says “I don't want any music here.” That's been something that we've always done together.

I remember in Moonlight there was music that we had initially had in the film, but when Barry and I were at the mix stage there was just a moment where we realised that we wanted certain scenes to just be quiet and have sound. When you don't have music, that's as important as when you do have music. You need the natural balance of that. When you have music, then you really know why you're having music. And then when you have sound, you are there with the characters and the sound is its own score to a sequence. There's a potentially more intimate thing that can happen when you have just sound. So we always talk to ourselves about why are we having music in a place, and it's a constant conversation. I like to think about this because there's no obvious answer. It's just what feels right.