Sweet Tooth is currently streaming on Netflix, which gave us the perfect opportunity to speak with series composer Jeff Grace about his approach to the show and his experience working with Howard Shore on Lord of the Rings.
Based on the beloved DC Comic series by Jeff Lemire, and Executive Produced by Susan Downey & Robert Downey Jr., Sweet Tooth is a post-apocalyptic fairytale about a hybrid deer-boy and a wandering loner who embark on an extraordinary adventure. Jeff Grace’s music can also be heard on Facebook Watch’s drama/fantasy series The Birch, starring Zaria Dotson and Brady Romberg, which is currently in its second season.
Other film and television credits include Tom Dolby’s The Artist’s Wife, Sundance TV drama series Hap and Leonard, Jim Mickle’s In the Shadow of the Moon, Cold In July, Kelly Reichardt’s Meek’s Cutoff, Night Moves, Ti West’s The House of the Devil, and The Innkeepers. Grace earned a “Best Musical Score” award for The Innkeepers at ScreamFest LA in 2009 and for The House of the Devil in 2011.
RELATED: Interview: Neil Sandilands on Playing Sweet Tooth Villain Steven Abbot
Jeff Ames: What drew you to the world of film and TV?
Jeff Grace: Well, TV just sort of happened as an outgrowth of working in film. I went to music school Rutgers University and they actually have a great music program and they have a great theater program, a great visual arts program, and a great dance program. So there were some interdisciplinary activities that have gone on there. So that just got me started thinking about using music with other art forms. And then when I got out of school, the first job I had — I lived in New York — and the first job I had in the city was working at a place called Ruggieri Music that did music for television and a lot of jingles and things like that.
So that was like the day bang. And then the guy who owns that place, Robert Ruggieri, he also wrote ballet for Alvin Ailey — well, not just Alvin Ailey, American Dance Theater, and a number of other places, but he did a lot of ballets with Alvin Ailey. And so that just got me thinking about that stuff more and started thinking about how music be used with other art forms. And then I started putting up flyers at all the different film schools around New York City. So, you know, NYU, Columbia School of Visual Arts, all those places; and then just started scoring student films. And I had a family friend who was a documentary filmmaker and a composer as well; and so, I just kind of started seeing how people did that.
Eventually, I started working for some bigger composers — I worked for Howard Shore for four years when he was doing Lord of the Rings and that kind of stuff. Then I worked for Angelo Badalamenti, and just got to see how people went about scoring big projects.
Then, I hooked up with a company called Glass Eye Pix with a filmmaker friend of mine, Larry Fessenden. He started that company and they do a lot of independent films, and I started scoring films for them and just kept working with them. Larry’s really good about getting the films out there and picking interesting projects. And from there, I just met a whole series of filmmakers that I still work with today.
How did your experience working with Howard Shore prepare you for the rest of your career?
Well, not to compartmentalize it too much, but there are a couple of different areas where it’s really hard to get experience until you just kind of see it or until you’re kind of thrown into it. I was one of his assistants and ended up doing a whole bunch of different things, but a lot of stuff probably would have been categorized as what a music editor does, like handling a lot of spotting — where the filmmaker and the composer decide where music is going to be and what it’s going to do when they have all those kinds of conversations — just keeping track of that stuff, making sure the composer has got the right version of the film, and then keeping up with the versions of a particular piece of music and making sure that everything’s current and then getting that stuff to the stage and recorded … and then it has to be edited.
It’s all the same stuff that you do when you do an independent film — you’re not going to have an army of people. So, you’ve got to go and do all that stuff yourself. On bigger projects, there are certain things that — the composer needs to be focusing on composing first and foremost, so you can bring other people in to do the less creative, more logistical things. But at the same time, for me as the young composer to see how someone else is doing those things was really helpful. And then you see the way that a filmmaker and a composer can communicate — obviously people are different and people are going to do that in different ways, but just having the opportunity to see how people did that and then how people deal with all the different aspects of the stuff in recording sessions and mixing … there’s just a lot of different facets to it.
How do you believe your musical style has evolved since you first started?
Well, you know, one of the reasons why I got into doing music for film was because I like a lot of different styles of music. I grew up playing classical music, playing jazz … and I grew up listening to all different types of music and so it was just pulling from different things. In film and television, and now in video games, you get asked to do different things or even combine different things. My interests have always run kind of wide; and as far as my own projects go it just so happened that when I hooked up with Larry’s company, they were — he’s a great horror director, and while he does plenty of other stuff he’s a very, very knowledgeable and talented filmmaker. He’s definitely got a soft spot for [horror], and he made really, really great, interesting horror films. And one of the things I like about that is you get to use all kinds of extended techniques for the various instruments, and you can use really avant-garde, modern classical music, which, again, those are all things that I really like. And it’s a lot of fun! Those films ask for a certain amount of work to be handled by the music. As a composer, it’s your job to bring the audience into the world of the film, because all I really have is two-dimensional images usually and sound. So, you got to make up for all the other stuff that’s lacking to an extent. You’ve got to draw them in and you’ve got to keep them there without hitting them over the head. It’s almost like sleight of hand.
At the same time, I really hate it when I watch a film and I feel like I’m being manipulated. That just irks me. So, I try not to do that, but at the same time try to make the whole experience feel like one engaging thing. I don’t know how things have evolved for me. I mean, part of that is just a product of the projects that have come my way, because for me it’s definitely a collaborative process. There are very few filmmakers that I’ve worked with who weren’t involved — they all have ideas about what they want the music to do in their films. Some can articulate it better than others. The good ones will tell you what they’re looking for in terms of the drama, story, and the character and try not to micromanage. I find that those are the scores that — of my own work — that I think is the most effective, you know?
It’s a little hard to separate my music from the evolution of the filmmakers that I’ve worked with. Again, I’ve been fortunate enough to work with the same filmmakers multiple times, and they’re growing as filmmakers and I’m growing as a composer as a result of the process. So, it’s all kind of jumbled together, but I definitely think that my range has expanded and you just get more experience doing different things. The first couple of films I did with Jim Mickle, where, at least on the label, they were horror films; and what’s great about his filmmaking is it’s never just one thing. He’s very good about story and making sure all the stories have some kind of emotional impact. The reason why they’re effective is because you actually care about the characters. Horror films where everyone is dying and you don’t get to know or relate to the character, it’s like, who cares when the people die? So, I think he’s really good with that. Then, as the project started branching out more and more, I think every time he just nails it. I feel like I have to be the same; I gotta be as effective as he is. At the same time, not wanting to repeat things that we’ve done in the past. But Jim and I have a lot of the same sensibilities about different things. So, we’ve always been on the same page.
To me, creating the right mood is really important, and finding interesting ways to do that is the tricky part of the job, but it’s also the fun part of the job. Now I’ve done 20 something films and a number of TV shows, I feel like the scope of the stuff has branched out.
RELATED: Neil Sandilands Was ‘Absolutely Blown Away’ By Netflix’s Sweet Tooth
That brings us to Sweet Tooth. How did you approach this particular show with your musical style?
The good thing about having a good relationship with the filmmakers is we will talk between projects. All of a sudden, I get a phone call and it’s like, “Yeah, we shot this movie. Can you go?” I’m usually working on stuff when he starts shooting. So, I’ll just write a few things or something, but we’ve already had conversations about what things might be musically and those things might change, but at least the ball started rolling, and then you just have to make an adjustment and try something else.
So, you know, he gave me the logline and how he was going to approach it. We were actually working on our previous movie when those conversations started and we’d done adaptations before. And on this one, I decided to — because with adaptations things are going to change. The project has gone from one medium to another; images someone has in their own head when they read a graphic novel or a book or something like that, and when they put it on the screen … it’s never going to match up a hundred percent with somebody else’s vision. I got the sense they probably wanted to go for a wider audience than maybe the graphic novels would allow. So, what I decided to do is actually get the script first and then I knew I’d have a little bit of time after reading the script before I was getting footage back from them.
I decided to wait and actually not read the comic until I had read the script first. That way my first impression was kind of like what they wanted me to do with it. And that approach made me go a bit less dark from the get-go and really lean into this kid who’s isolated. So, it’s not as dark as I probably would’ve gone with having just read the comic. We knew that it had to be an organic sound, but there are parts of it that needed to be intimate. Jim wanted my score to be different. The way that he communicated it was, he just wanted it to have personality, you know? And so we talked about different ways that we could do that, that kind of reflected the story and the characters and all that.
One of the things I thought about was, to me, it was like there’s this virus, and then society kind of collapses as a result of it. And then the hybrids emerge and there’s some mystery around all of these different things that happen, but it’s kind of futuristic and organic and exotic all at the same time. And the thing that Jim kept coming back to was, he is gonna go out into this pretty dark world, but through the eyes of a kid; and he’s full of wonder, but at the same time, there’s a lot of threat around. So, how do you put the wonder and the threat together? So, that was the really big, tricky part.
Have you given any thought as to how your music will continue in a second season, should it get the green light?
Well, there’s plenty of material to keep moving forward if they keep wanting to keep moving forward. What’s interesting to me is that, aside from the first episode in the first season, it’s basically like a road journey. And then that shifts right at the end. So, that will be the big difference in the second season. Also, the character’s thing, he can’t really hem and haw anymore. He’s really in a position where he’s got to do deliver the goods. There’re some really ethically questionable things that he has to do to make that happen. So, those are big shifts that I think would be really interesting to explore. That’s what I’m looking forward to.
The post Interview: Composer Jeff Grace Discusses Netflix’s Sweet Tooth appeared first on ComingSoon.net.