When writing the music for his latest film, Knives Out, screenwriter and director Rian Johnson told composer Nathan Johnson to “go gothic. Go darker. More Edgar Allan Poe.”
Benoît Blanc (Daniel Craig) returns to ‘Wake Up Dead Man’ to solve the murder of Monsignor Wicks (Josh Brolin). Josh O’Connor plays Judd Duprentici, a small-town priest, but the group of suspects also includes devout parishioner Martha Delacroix (Glenn Close), gardener Samson Holt (Thomas Haden Church), lawyer Vera Draven (Kerry Washington), aspiring politician Cy Draven (Darryl McCormack), town doctor Nat Sharpe (Jeremy Renner), and concert cellist Simone. Vivan (Cailee Spaeny) and writer Lee Roth (Andrew Scott).
The film will be released in limited release on November 26th as part of a two-week theatrical run, before arriving on Netflix on December 12th. The film’s soundtrack will also be released on December 12th.
Nathan Johnson had scored previous films (Knives Out and The Glass Onion), but he took a different approach to each film and applied the same ideas to Wake Up Dead Man, making it something new.
“There’s an underlying fear,” Johnson says of the film. To reflect that in the score, he begins with the string section “rubbing the bow over the strings and nailing the notes on the chalkboard.”
As the Congregation’s story unfolds, Johnson chooses not to give each character a notable motif. He chose to apply conceptual motifs instead.
“The change from scratch tones to pure tones is like the motif of Eve’s apple jewels that we trace throughout the film,” he says. “For some ‘suspects,’ it’s not so much a melodic motif as it is the idea that this is a violin.”
Taking “Confessions (Violin Concerto in G minor)” as his cue, Johnson wrote this piece as a violin concerto. “It’s a delicate single voice, but it can move between this great drama and intimate tranquility. At the same time, that voice is strong enough to persuade an entire congregation to follow it.”
Johnson recorded the score at Abbey Road in London, but before doing so he located an old stone cathedral in London to make “textural recordings by a quartet”. Johnson explains, “We had six bass clarinets and had them play the key clicks of the instruments, and that became one of the main rhythmic things we heard.”
He also found a half-broken harmonium. “It was making screeching and wheezing noises, so I recorded it and slowed it down,” Johnson said. You play as Brolin’s character. “Ryan was talking about Wicks’ character and the idea that it was similar to Moby Dick. He’s like Captain Ahab, ranting at the waves, but there’s a Leviathan lurking beneath the surface. When we recorded this, it felt like the trees were creaking and the rope was pulling on old wood. It’s not something you would choose, but you feel that creaking fear that something is coming.”
Listen to “Confession (Violin Concerto in G minor)” below.
