But I always believe that composers come to a project too late. So it was almost like one continuous thought. So as I’m writing a script, I’m almost doing it as a musician, and as I’m writing a score, I’m almost doing it as a filmmaker.
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So which side led the decision-making process?Īs a composer, I worked with the most understanding director! Everything I did was right! But I suppose I always say that I see music and hear cinema.
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With The Harder They Fall, you’re obviously both. In most films, the composer works with the director and tries to meet their vision for the film. Billy the Kid wasn’t listening to Ennio Morricone! When Dean Martin and Ricky Nelson sing “My Rifle, My Pony and Me” to John Wayne in Rio Bravo, that wasn’t cowboy music from the day. I’ve heard people say that this uses modern music for a Western, but Westerns have always done that. By the third time it’s sung, it’s an opera, so I go from folk to opera with the same song in one movie. There’s a song called “Three and Thirty Years,” which appears three times - each time Jonathan Majors’ and Idris Elba’s characters meet each other. I lent on Westerns with regards to the rules and rules of composing, so giving each character their own motif. What sort of inspiration did you have and did you lean on any of the Westerns of old? There’s a lot of different genres running throughout the music, much of which isn’t what you’d automatically expect to hear in a Western. So that was my jumping off point, because the train scene was the first scene that I wrote.
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I actually wrote to Barrington, as he’s still alive, and got him to sing his signature melody from “Here I Come” over the score. So I knew I was going to rebuild that track, and I used it when I wrote the scene where they gallop towards the train. It was this song, “Here I Come” by Barrington Levy, which, since I first heard it as a child, I’ve always thought of horses galloping. Was there a starting off point? Did you have one element of the score that was nailed really early on and knew instantly that it was going to be used? Soundtracks have become glorified compilation albums. Also the score would find the script and the soundtrack, which doesn’t happen in films these days. The whole ethos behind the score was to tell a story sonically, not to complement what was going on in the script, but to converse with it, to help tell that story. There’s three acts in a script and there’s three acts in a song. For me, the music, the songs, or the score or the film itself, they’re all the same thing for me. So when I’m writing the dialogue, talking things out, I’m hearing melodies.
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I was writing the score as I was writing the script. Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter as part of Netflix’s Playlist series, Samuel discusses how the music was part of the development process from the very beginning (and why it should always be this way in films), how his first inspiration for the score has been with him since he was a child and what to expect when he gets a text from Jay-Z while the rapper is on the treadmill.įrom what I understand, the score for The Harder They Fall was one of the very first things that you had planned and written, long before you set foot behind a camera. Netflix's New Releases Coming in January 2022 The Brit also devoted his musical talents to the genre-spanning score, which he says took in the whole African diaspora, “from Cape Verde to Jamaica, from Mali to Brooklyn, from London to South Africa,” reuniting with his long-term collaborator Jay-Z (who also exec produced the film) in the process. Previously best known as singer-songwriter and music producer The Bullitts, Jeymes Samuel burst into the film world this year with dramatic, gun-slinging fashion thanks to his feature debut, Netflix’s The Harder They Fall.īut Samuel didn’t just direct and co-write the all-star, all-black Western, with an A-list cast - which includes the likes of Regina King, Idris Elba, Jonathan Majors, LaKeith Stanfield, Delroy Lindo and Zazie Beetz - that has already received the Gotham ensemble tribute award.