How did the Candyman collaboration come about?
Monkeypaw Productions cold called me. They sent an email asking if I might be interested in potentially doing a score for them for a horror movie that they were working on. I love what Monkeypaw has done. In very short order, they've done a lot of very thoughtful, interesting, well-crafted film and television works. I was all in. And also, I was pretty sure that it was Candyman they were referring to, because I'd remembered several months before that having read an article about how Monkeypaw had optioned the rights from MGM to make a sequel of Candyman. I was definitely excited that they reached out to me. And then, I came to find out that they had been following my work for some years.
I don't know if there is a bigger compliment than to be asked to do the remake of a movie where Philip Glass wrote the original score. How did his score inform what you did?
There was a lot of consideration in making the score, because the film had achieved a cult status. At the time it came out, it was technically a flop. But over time it built up a status as a cult film. A lot of people talk about how strange they thought it seemed that Phillip Glass did a score for a horror film. But if you go back and look, there are a lot of avant-garde composers that had done work for films. Look at Krzysztof Penderecki's music used in The Shining. Bernard Parmegiani did the score for Docteur Jekyll et les femmes, which was a Walerian Borowczyk film from 1981 starring Udo Kier. This had been going on for a while. I enjoy the Philip Glass score. I also enjoyed the fact that it was a very strange fit for the film; how the film ended up in its final cut. These are the things that I had to consider, because obviously there is a history. We're dealing with a lineage. I don't want to gloss over it but, at the same time, it's completely uninteresting to me and reductive to do something that would be derivative. I feel that way for any remakes or sequels that happened many years after the original film. The new film should live within that universe, but it should also stand as its own work. Nia DaCosta, the director, and I were very much in the same place with that – where we wanted to be able to come together and see through a finished work that stood on its own, while also paying homage or reverence to the original.
I read that you wanted to be on set, so the music would be integral and organic. As part of that, I heard you did field recordings on location in Chicago where they were filming. What did you record?
Being physically there was something that I proposed. I said, "Look, this is something that would be very helpful to me." There was the possibility that the sound recordist on set could take some field recordings and send them to me, but I felt that it was necessary for me to be there – not only to be able to select the sounds that I needed specifically, but also to understand what the energy of the set was. I wanted to be able to watch Nia work in real time and see how she directed the actors and see more clearly what her vision was. This concept of the field recordings, it's not something that's new. I thought that it would be an integral part of the structure of the score, due to the fact that I would be displacing the energy of these locations to become textural elements in the score itself. I walked around Cabrini-Green [Chicago Housing Authority's public housing project that existed from 1942-1995, and where the first Candyman film was set] and took a lot of sound from the street. There were these old electrical boxes that were on the outside of some of the row houses that had been emptied out or gutted. It was nice to get the sound of them, with the recorder inside of the box with the wind hitting it, or the door creaking on the outside. Taking footsteps through these abandoned buildings or capturing the air or the insects that were out there. There are a few different scenes that happen inside of a laundromat. When they took a break while they were shooting in the laundromat, I went in and the fellow that owned the laundromat put some coins in a few of the machines. He let them run, and I took some sound of the washers and dryers running. So, you have this mechanical movement as well. I used very little of, but it's in there and it was all about this concept of capturing energy or spirit of the location.
Beautiful. I read that you lived in Chicago in the '90s.
Yeah, I lived about six blocks away from Cabrini-Green in the mid-'90s. I moved there at the end of 1995, so it was only a couple of years after the film had come out. That was still in conversations you would have people, being that was the location that the film took place. I had this relationship to the landscape already, which was interesting and something that the folks at Monkeypaw didn't know. They were very excited about it when they found out that I was a part of that landscape at the time when the buildings were still there.
It seems your collaboration was destined, in a sense. What did you use to record in the field?
