When it came to finding a composer for Charli XCX’s mockumentary The Moment, no one made more sense than her longtime producer and friend, AG Cook. Although he’s never composed a feature song before, Charlie’s seminal 2024 album Brat, which became a lime-green party-girl phenomenon and served as the backdrop for Aidan Zamiri’s film, has his fingerprints all over it.
In “The Moment,” which premiered at Sundance ahead of its release in select theaters on Friday, an alternate-reality Charlie is forced to choose between keeping his art alive or selling it when an evil director (played by Alexander Skarsgård) is hired to make his concert film. But for the most part, “The Moment” eschews “Brat” songs, relying instead on Cooke’s moving score that evokes, if not directly draws on, the album’s sonic landscape.
“I’ve worked with Charlie for a long time, so when you read the script and see the dynamic situations with venues, managers, and tours, it feels so funny and so real and vivid,” Cooke told Variety over Zoom hours before leaving for Sundance. “‘Brat’ is used to haunt Charlie as a character, so it’s also a really good opportunity for me to not only think about the palette of this album, but also to twist it in a way.”
Below, Cooke talks more about scoring The Moment, how David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive influenced him, and the film’s blockbuster hit Bitter Sweet Symphony.
When did you first hear about “The Moment” and how did you come up with the idea to score it?
I think it’s been exactly a year since I read the script and actually started creating some of the sounds. It was sent to me in January, and it was right during the Los Angeles fires, so I was supposed to be in Los Angeles, but I wasn’t, and I used that extra week or two to start writing some of the music. I did a lot of that before they shot, and of course worked on it again to take subsequent photos. There were a lot of reasons for that, but it also meant that it was part of the Coachella and Glastonbury set and was actually in the ears and minds of Aidan and the cast and crew[during filming]so it was great.
“Dread,” which samples Charlie and Icona Pop’s “I Love It,” was also used at Coachella and Glastonbury, right?
“Dread” was used as the first trailer of its kind at the end of Coachella, followed by a longer version blazing in the background of “Brat” zoomed in at Glastonbury. They are all different parts of a long track. Also, there were more subtle things like me playing bits and pieces in DJ sets back then. However, “Dread’s” was something of a main theme, although it was used a little differently in the film’s editing.
This is your first time scoring a feature film. What was your approach?
Anyway, it’s a really weird, once-in-a-lifetime brief, just being involved with “Brat.” I was reluctant to create a full-length musical score. I’ve done some short songs and I have some really close friends who compose film scores all the time, so I know how much work it is. Basically, you set all these rules yourself. I was like, “OK, I don’t want any of Charlie’s vocals in the score, just like I don’t want to use her voice unless it’s on screen, when she’s rehearsing the song or listening to it in the car.” And the only thing that breaks it is the “I Love It” (sample) from “Dread” at the end, which is also very strangely used. It doesn’t seem to have anything to do with “Brat”.
Actually within a week of reading the script, we had a pretty much perfect palette before shooting. But obviously there were certain scenes that I really wanted to portray perfectly. Towards the end of the film, this different, more emotional music takes over and should work with precise dialogue and monologues.
Please tell us more about the score that subverts the sonic palette of “Brat.”
It has some “Brat” parts, but doesn’t use any actual melodic content. There are some similarly harsh synth textures, but they’re actually used quite sparingly, and they start to fall apart towards the end of the film. There are some bass references that you can hear on “365,” so we wanted to incorporate a little bit of that DNA. But “Brat” itself was more fun. It was a lot more controlled in terms of the drums and the way we recorded it. This one doesn’t have a lot of drums, but when they do, it’s very noticeable.
I’m also a big fan of scores with a lot of silence, so this was quite a challenge. There’s something very awkward about the way this whole movie was shot. It has this fly-on-the-wall nature, and every once in a while you get a glimpse of Charlie as this superstar. So I wanted to have the feeling that there’s a really extreme musical moment and then things completely disappear.
Did you draw any inspiration from other film scores when creating this piece?
The week I was writing this was also the week that David Lynch died. And I’m a big fan of Lynch and Angelo Badamenti’s soundtracks like “Twin Peaks” and “Mulholland Drive.” I was rewatching Lynch’s work, especially “Mulholland Drive,” and it felt thematically related to “The Moment.” There’s an opening shot of driving through a canyon that’s reminiscent of a “Twin Peaks” style suspended classic chord, but the chord progression moves so slowly that your brain doesn’t necessarily know if it’s typically positive or negative, happy or sad. Emotions are quite ambiguous. “Dread” has a big panic element, which you can hear in my other songs, but I’d say a lot of the chords actually move like this. There’s Charlie’s monologue towards the end, and there’s some music that keeps changing, but it never stays in one emotion. It was a very conscious influence.
charlie xcx from “the moment.”
Besides the occasional Brat song, the only standout on The Moment is Verve’s Bitter Sweet Symphony. How did that come about and how did it affect your score?
It was written in the script and it was like, “We’re going to blow our entire budget on one big sync.” It felt very on-brand, like, “Okay, we’re only going to drop the needle once, and it’s going to be really good and really important.” And the score itself doesn’t have to do all the work of handling these big songs all the time. That set the direction and created a crescendo of sorts. Therefore, there is no string in the score. For example, “Bitter Sweet” would be the first string you hear. Perhaps the most complex part of this score is the transition to “Bitter Sweet,” but it was done very carefully. They managed to find some original stems and I was able to very cleverly adjust and introduce it at the right time. I haven’t really heard many scores like that, where one big needle drop kind of deforms and oozes out from the previous score.
Could you also be in charge of music for movies?
What was interesting was that my tracks as AG Cook were getting longer and longer. From “7G” onwards, we have these 10 minute tracks. And some of those long ones had already been used in little movies here and there, and I’d done some things in fashion soundtracks as well. There are parts of my music that really relate to that. So as long as the project feels fresh, I definitely think so. I’m almost certain it will.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
