Composer Christophe Beck Returns to His TV Roots for ‘WandaVision’

Christophe Beck, one of the busiest composers in Hollywood, has become a favorite of Disney and Marvel in recent years. Beck’s latest collaboration with the biggest franchise in movie history, WandaVision, marks the MCU’s first foray into the world of streaming. And a return to television for Beck after a 20+ year absence. The Montreal-born composer won an Emmy for his work on Buffy the Vampire Slayer; it was on that series where Beck ‘cut his teeth and learned to transport his audience to fantastical worlds.

WandaVision takes those same elements of magic, mystery, sci-fi, and character-driven emotion, and elevates them to a much larger scale. The genre-bending limited series has allowed Beck to showcase his mastery of sweeping compositions and subtle tonal switches and musical nuances within his score. A work worthy of a return trip back to the Emmys.

Read more from Christophe Beck below.

 Awards Daily: Take me back to the beginning. What was your initial reaction to the conceit of WandaVision, and what was the scope of your research?

Christophe Beck: I grew up as a child of the 70s, 80s, and 90s. There really wasn’t research necessary to tap into those parts of my past. But it was a little bit more of an effort for the first two episodes, which were designed to evoke the 50s and 60s. I ended up bringing on a young composer, Alex Kovacs, who studied jazz and really understood that style. I brought him in as my vintage sitcom expert. He handled those early episodes sitcom queues and many of the later ones as well.

The concept of the show was so bonkers to me when I first heard about it. Matt Shakman, the director of all the episodes, pitched this idea to me that they would pay homage to a different era of sitcoms in every episode. It almost seemed a bit like an insurmountable challenge, but I kind of like those. And I’m incredibly proud of the job we did on the show. And also really proud of how the show became such a huge hit, and such a part of the culture when it first came out. I consider myself very fortunate that because of how the pandemic messed with the release schedules, WandaVision was one of the first Marvel series out of the gate, and as a result, it got a lot of attention. People were really ready for some new Marvel content. And I’m really, really proud that it was as successful as it ended up being.

AD: I’ve been fortunate to speak to many of the craftspeople from WandaVision, and something that comes up is the challenge of creating something new that still fits into the overall Marvel palette. How was that experience for you?

CB: The show’s structure made it pretty clear exactly how I would negotiate the integration of the new and old. Half the show takes place in the ‘real world,’ which, in terms of the Marvel universe, takes place about five years after the events of Avengers Endgame. It was pretty clear that in that environment, we would mainly be in a contemporary Marvel musical sound. 

Whenever we were inside the show, we would stick to a very loving and authentic homage to those musical sitcom styles depending on which era we were trying to evoke. However, what became interesting is when we started to deviate from that formula anytime something happened within a sitcom that was a little bit off. Because as I’m sure many of your readers know, this is a story about Wanda, whose grip on these massive spells and these illusions that she’s creating starts to slip away from her as the show moves on, and this comes up in various ways that are sometimes surreal and sometimes creepy.

That’s when we would start to mix in some of those more contemporary styles. Sometimes it was just as simple as a single note held on a synthesizer. Other times, it got a little bit more involved. By being really intentional about where we deviate from the traditional sitcom style, we were able to create a very trippy and cool effect that was very closely tied to what was happening in the picture.

AD: Yes, that would be my next question for you; there are many tonal shifts and even shifts in genre within the episodes. How did you handle those musically?

CB: It’s really a strategy of experimentation and a back and forth with the director. There were times when we just decided it was appropriate to just do a hard shift and not spend too much effort doing a smooth transition or a hybrid effect and just tell the audience something isn’t right here. Then there were other times when it felt better to change the tone of the music. In other words, instead of playing comedy or a light-hearted short piece of music to bring attention to an establishing shot we actually played the drama of what we were seeing on the screen. 

There is a particular scene I’m thinking of where Wanda discovers a drone that has been flown in from the outside world into her sitcom bubble. It piques her interest and lets her know that all is not well and that her bubble is being noticed and analyzed. When she picks up the drone and looks at it, the music stays in the old style of the era, it becomes a more Twilight Zone-y, Bernard Herrmann type of a feel— with still emphasis on the woodwinds and strings and still using our smaller group of instruments as they did in those days. It’s decidedly mysterious, but we stay in that old style. In those moments, we could straddle the fence a little bit and not only play the actual moment dramatically but do it in a way that was a little bit more linked to all the other music in the sitcom world. As to when we decided to do a transition vs. a hard switch out of something, that was more of an instinct and intuition. It was a back and forth discussion between Matt and me.

AD: You’ve done several Marvel and Disney projects. I’m curious to know what that is like in terms of marrying your own creativity with notes from executives. What role do those discussions have in the music you create and what we hear on the show?

CB: Composing, like all aspects of movie-making, is a very collaborative art. And if I just went ahead and did my own thing without paying attention to any of my collaborators, I don’t think my career would be as long as it has been. I actually relish that part of my job. I love being part of a team. I love practicing my art in service of a story, and Marvel movies are no different. The person I work the closest with is the director, and that is the same whether it’s a tv series like WandaVision or the Ant-Man movies. 

The Marvel executives are also very involved, particularly Kevin Feige, a huge fan of film music. And to be honest, sometimes he comes in and throws a bit of a creative monkey wrench into the works, but his notes are always really insightful and always end up showing me a better way of something that hadn’t occurred to me before.

I remember on the first Ant-Man movie, Payton Reed the director, and I are both fans of experimental electronic music. I love putting a lab coat on and making strange-sounding music with my synthesizers. We went down this rabbit hole of coming up with some dramatic material that was very evocative of insects, but also very harsh, glitchy, and electronic. We were so proud of ourselves. We brought this music to Kevin, and I’ll never forget it; he said, ‘You know this music sounds amazing, it’s super interesting, but I think I prefer music that doesn’t make me think my speakers are broken.’ [Laughs].

Peyton and I took a step back and realized maybe we had gone a little too far down this rabbit hole. We ended up shifting the focus to a more acoustic sound that was a little bit more traditional and maybe a little bit of a retro heist vibe. In the end, it made so much more sense with the story that we were telling, especially in that first movie which is a heist movie.

AD: I’m curious, when you’ve had a long career, where does WandaVision fit in with everything that you’ve done, and the point where you are now?

CB: That’s a great question. You know the first 5, 10 years of my career were spent doing TV series. That’s where I cut my teeth. Particularly Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which I did 3 or 4 seasons on. It was an amazing training ground for the work I do today. Every one of those episodes was like a mini-feature film. The palette was very symphonic. Of course, I didn’t have the resources to hire a live orchestra back then, but it was still an incredible way to learn and hone my craft— working with orchestral music, working with themes. You have an opportunity on a TV series you don’t have in a film, to work and develop things over a very long period of time. In Buffy the Vampire Slayer, I had themes that were introduced at the beginning of season 2 that I was still playing with in season 4. That’s two years, over the course of many, many hours of film.

In a feature film, you only get a couple of hours to do that type of development, so after many years of working in movies, maybe even close to 20, WandaVision was my first return to series television. It was a no-brainer for me. My relationship with Marvel is great. I love working for those guys and would do anything with them, so when they approached me with this, it was an easy yes. It was an amazing opportunity to engage again in that kind of long-term thematic development. And unlike the TV series I was doing at the beginning of my career, I knew where the story was going over the 9 episodes. In a more micro-architectural way, I was able to plan how the themes for the different characters were going to develop; how I’d be able to plant the seeds for those themes of the early sitcom episodes, even if they were in the old sitcom style.