Over the last few days it dawned on me, that despite Blade Runner being initially ruled out as an influence for Immort, it is actually, at least musically, quite representative of what the director actually wanted for the early segments of the score. The film didn’t end up being reference material, with, as mentioned before the score for the Mass Effect series of games being an inspiration.
This had led me to thinking about the process for scoring the film. Originally I wasn’t attached as the composer, though I was in line to produce the music, with a band of the directors choosing in line to score the film in a jazz style. Around this time we had a conversation about how I would score the film (it was fairly different script wise at this point) and I was pointing to a modern feeling synth based score, possibly including a few natural instruments to add some emotional content to the score at points. At this point the director still wanted the band, but wasn’t sure.
After Christmas I was told that he wasn’t able to get the band anymore, so the job was mine if I wanted it, which of course I gladly accepted. The first reference tracks came that very night, consisting of tracks such as:
This is obviously quite different from how things turned out.
Further to this point diegetic music was originally more important than it is now, with two pieces of diegetic music in the film when Sici first enters the apartment. One of these, the cheesy pop track made it in, an old track I made three or four years ago called Monster (https://soundcloud.com/jonesm94/monster). The other was intended to be a rap rock style piece, which I was going to write specifically for the film with the idea that it would help explain her motivations through lyrics relating to invasion of privacy of technology. However, as this track progressed, I realised that I was getting no clear direction on how far either way to lean, with the half written product being an amalgamation of my style of electronic music, my style of rock and a bass line inspired by hip hop. After filming and then seeing a first draft of the film, I spoke to the director suggesting that this be scrapped, with the reasoning that this section of film doesn’t feel like it took place all within three minutes and that actually, non-diegetic music could portray the events much better without intruding on the isolated feeling of the character or painting her as a bit of a ‘rebel’ for lack of better phrasing. He agreed to this.
I’ve written on here about the chase scene music before, but I’ll cover that briefly again now. For the animatic I did a test piece of music, which was a piece of music heavy on threat and trying to evoke the feeling of action, while also referencing the odd jazz/electronic sound of the reference music, however, the director wasn’t keen on this style of music and asked for it to be toned down, with the start synth pad being the only surviving part. I asked for further direction, with the answer being, less real, more synth. To this end I wrote the music for the rest of the film, still keeping in mind his original jazzy wish for the music and incorporating a double bass line, inspired by The Hateful Eight’s score and while the line itself isn’t jazzy, it was a reference to his original wish, also incorporating her character into the score as mentioned in a previous post. The chase scene still proved problematic after this, though he was happy with everything after that, the issue with the chase scene boiling down to it being too threatening, which is how we ended up with the final version of the score for that scene in the film. This direction also influenced the title credit music, which now needed to seed both the more upbeat style seen in the chase scene and the style seen thereafter, something which proved quite difficult to achieve without coming across very melodramatic and cheesy.