Composer Charlie Clouser — a one-time member of the band Nine Inch Nails, keyboardist, record producer, remixer — has many cool scoring projects under his belt, including the new film Spiral: From the Book of Saw. This film marks the fourth Saw film Clouser has worked on with director Darren Lynn Bousman.
Charlie Clouser
The film follows a police veteran (Samuel L. Jackson), a brash detective (Chris Rock) and his rookie partner (Max Minghella), who take charge of a grisly murder investigation. We recently reached out to Clouser to talk about the film and his process.
For Spiral, you have said that there is less of the murky, underwater gloom that’s in some of the other Saw films and more tension-building rhythms. Why did you decide to go down this path?
Unlike most of the previous installments in the franchise — which had lots of scenes set in rusty, dark dungeons — a lot of the action in Spiral takes place out in the real world, and some of the scenes are in daylight, which rarely happens in a Saw film.
For me, every sound or melody or chord feels inherently as though it belongs indoors or outdoors or in daylight versus darkness. So when choosing the sounds and musical approach to Spiral, I’m reacting to what I’m seeing on the screen, keeping in mind where the story is physically taking us. That meant using a lot less of the dark tones drenched in reverb that have been a staple of the Saw sonic footprint and a lot more sounds that feel brighter and sharper. Musically, I’m still playing dark themes but with a different set of instruments this time around. There are elements of drums and strings that are coming more from an action-movie place than from a horror-movie place, and I think these fit better with the visual scheme of this film.
Since the very first Saw film, the Hello Zepp theme has become the “sound of Saw.” How long did it take you to come up with this theme? What was that process like?
That original theme was a conscious effort to create a piece of music that sounded very different from the rest of the score for the first Saw film. It also had to meet a certain set of criteria that the director and creator James Wan and I came up with. We wanted the audience to feel as though bright lights had just been switched on, so that piece was in a different key and used a completely different set of sounds than the rest of that score.
We also wanted it to be bold, strident and “hooky” but still simple, because there’s so much information coming at the audience — in the form of a voiceover and tons of quick cuts and flashbacks in a visual montage — that we knew that piece of music needed to be fairly simplistic and insistent, with a hypnotic quality, so that the audience wouldn’t be too distracted from all the information they needed to absorb in a hurry. Once we had that game plan established, my job became much easier, and the actual writing of the piece and creating the strings arrangement took about a day. I recorded the live string quartet the next day and spent a third day adding the glitch-percussion and other sound design elements and mixing. All in all, it took much less time that you’d think.
Is the Hello Zepp theme going to appear in Spiral, and did you modify it in any way?
Without spoiling the movie too much, all I can say is it wouldn’t really be a Saw movie without that theme in there somewhere, right? Some of the earlier installments had gigantic, nine-minute, ultra-extended super-versions of the Hello Zepp theme, and it’s always fun to try to flip it one more time and find new ways to interpret the basic material.
But for Spiral, I did steer clear of many of the familiar melodies until a crucial moment in the final reel. Most of the film has completely different instrumentation and musical content than earlier films that better fit the sweaty world of Spiral, but as the plot progresses, bits and pieces of those familiar elements begin to creep in gradually, until at the end, the score is finally dragged back into Saw territory once and for all.
So apparently you are now tied with John Williams for the most sequels (Star Wars) in a franchise ever scored by the same composer. How do you keep things sounding fresh for this franchise?
I never thought I’d be on the same list as John Williams for anything, except maybe most parking tickets or whatever, so if that’s true, it’s a weird feeling for sure.
Other directors have a grittier style, so that leads me to use more raw and dirty electronic sounds. The Spierig brothers, who directed Jigsaw, had a crisper visual style, which led me to use more precise and sharp sounds. So it becomes easier for me to find new flavors while staying in the Saw sonic universe when I can bob and weave with the visual style as it’s evolved over the years. That lets me refer to certain melodic themes but reinterpret them with new instruments, and hopefully that helps keep the sound familiar but fresh.
Spiral is the fourth Saw film you have worked with director Darren Lynn Bousman. Workflow-wise, how has your relationship changed from Saw II to Spiral?
The first film I did with Darren was Saw II, and that was a bit of a challenge because it was the first expansion of the claustrophobic world of the first film, and I was lucky to have collaborators like the amazing guitarist Wes Borland, who added a tense and percussive element to a number of cues.
As we progressed through Saw III and Saw IV, the musical style got a bit more gothic, epic and over-the-top as a response to Darren’s visual elements. Now, more than a decade later, Darren’s visual style for Spiral is a bit of a return to the gritty world of the first film with a layer of sweat poured over the top, so I was encouraged to react to that in my score and try to bring a layer of percussive tension to many of the scenes.
Hopefully that translates to the viewer, and they’ll feel the heat as well. By this point, we’re both so embedded in the Saw world that it’s never a struggle to find a common approach for us. Darren is such an enthusiastic collaborator and always seems to have great reactions to my gut instincts about how to approach a scene. It’s been a real pleasure to get back on this horse with him, and hopefully we’ll be able to take a few more rides down this road.
What did you learn in your days with Nine Inch Nails that you still use in your film scores today?
My years in Nine Inch Nails really expanded my palette of skills in how to delve deeper into dark and heavy tones, manipulating sounds with distortion, pitch-shifting and multi-layered processing to push sounds down into the darkness. Since we didn’t have the variety of task-specific sound-processing tools in that pre-plugin era that are available today, we kind of had to find our sound hiding in plain sight using the same array of ordinary gear that everyone else had, and a lot of those techniques shaped the approaches I still use.
Working with samplers has always been central to what I do, so NIN was the perfect venue for me. We got a lot of use out of early digital techniques, like converting samples to wavetables, using waveshapers for distortion effects and extreme amounts of pitch-shifting and time-stretching. It was a great era in the recording industry, and although the kind of stuff we were doing was a lot more difficult and expensive than it is these days, the success of NIN afforded us the time and budgets to really push the limits.
I still use a lot of what I learned in those years, but now we have so many great tools, like granular synthesis, solid re-issues of vintage synths and, of course, the staggering array of affordable Eurorack modular synth stuff. There’s never been a better time to be interested in wild musical sound design. I still use and rely upon a lot of the techniques and gear that I accumulated during those years.
You have become known in the industry as the “synth guy.” What about synths draws you to them?
At first, I was attracted to synths, sequencers and drum machines because of the ability to create inhumanly precise rhythms with a mechanical feel. That’s what I heard in the music of Kraftwerk and later bands like Devo and New Order. So that’s what I was chasing in the beginning, but as I got deeper into it, I started to discover more hybrid approaches that blended synths and processing with organic instruments, as heard in Brian Eno’s collaborations with David Byrne and Talking Heads.
The albums “Fear of Music,” “Remain in Light,” “My Life in the Bush of Ghosts” and “The Catherine Wheel” from that era were hugely influential to me, and although they’re not strictly synth albums, the atmospheric sonics they contained definitely intrigued me and shaped my approach as time went by. I still listen to those records and wonder how the hell they made them, and my favorite records always seem to be the ones I can’t figure out.
What instrument do you tend to start to write with?
I’m usually not one to sit down behind a piano with a pen and paper except in special cases. I generally start with something simple, like soft, low brass sections. For me it’s all about the sounds I’m going to use, and I don’t mean whether it will be strings or brass or choir, but exactly which sounds will be the final ones.
Since I don’t really write traditionally orchestrated music, it’s usually not as simple as, “Oh, this part will be strings and this part will be harp.” It’s more like, “I want this hypnotic pattern to gradually get more intense, so I need to find exactly the right sound that can get more aggressive without getting louder” or whatever. So there’s a lot of flipping through sounds, rejecting one after another until I find the one that satisfies. However, I often get started writing with a basic set of sounds that includes strings, brass, harp, piano and a few drums. But I try to use the most basic and least characterful versions of those at the start so that I’m not playing to the strengths of the samples I’m using, or “playing into the library,” as some would put it. Then, once I’ve got a wireframe version of the music knocked together, I can begin the search for more unique sounds to replace those generic starting points.
How does your writing process begin? Can you walk us through your writing workflow?
For me, the first phase of a film score is creating new sounds that I can use exclusively on that project and then never use again. So I’ll spend anywhere from a week to a month just watching the film while creating, recording and processing sounds and filing them away to be used once I get down to it. That might be recording individual samples from acoustic instruments, like the bowed metal devices that I love, creating weird droning guitar textures using an e-bow and effects pedals, recording simple patterns by playing a guzheng with a violin bow, things like that.
These days it’s fairly easy to manipulate pitch and tempo of rhythmic material, so even if what I record in that initial phase isn’t exactly at the final tempo or key I’ll need, I can usually finesse those rough recordings without completely starting over. Once I’ve got a drawer full of raw material that feels like a good sonic starting point for the project, I can begin the actual work of writing. But even before I start putting notes and chords together, I spend a long time making love to the click track and tempo map while working against picture. I can generally hear the music in my head fairly easily right from the start, but if I can get the tempo framework to fit against the pace of the images in a way that satisfies me, then the music comes out of my fingers much more easily.
For the movie Death Sentence, I even played a rough version of a six-minute fight scene for director James Wan that consisted of nothing more than an elaborate tempo and time signature map, with me “singing” brass swells and beatboxing drums over the click and trying to describe how the music would fit the rhythm of the action precisely. Fortunately, this worked, and James understood what I was trying to do and was able to comment on and criticize the music without actually hearing any music. That’s not an approach I would recommend, but in that case, I was lucky he had vision, patience and faith in me!
Finally, any tips for those looking to write music for picture?
Right at the start of any project, it’s always been helpful to me to form a game plan, a conceptual framework that can be expressed in nonmusical, plain-language terms when in discussion with directors and producers. In my case, some examples would be, “The chords and melodies should always be moving downwards for the entire film until the final sequence, when everything starts to move upwards.” Or “The rhythms should feel asymmetrical and stop-start through this whole scene, until our hero gets the upper hand, at which point everything falls into line and sounds like it’s finally marching forward.”
Those kinds of semi-abstract descriptions don’t rely on everyone knowing the difference between a major and minor chord. You can discuss the correct approach with all parties and invite them all into the decision-making process without getting into the weeds with musical jargon. Having the filmmakers as collaborators in the shaping of the score is absolutely crucial. And keeping the discussion abstract like that in the beginning lets everyone sign on to your plan before you waste time on an approach they might not fully understand until they hear it.
It can be a bit of a tap dance, but communication is key, so finding a way to describe music to nonmusicians is pretty central to the process.
Aside from that stuff, the old chestnut of “finding your own sound” is pretty well-worn at this point, but it seems to have worked for me. I’ve tried to resist chasing after what others are already doing really well, so if I hear someone who’s absolutely nailing it with a certain sound or approach, then my reaction is usually, “Fantastic! Now I know what not to bother trying.” I never want to be chasing someone else’s taillights down some dark highway; I’d much rather be hacking my way through the bushes, even if I wind up moving much more slowly, because at least there’s a possibility that I’ll find my own path and have the view all to myself if I do finally emerge on some scenic overlook.
