Music Composer Michael Abels Talks Working with Jordan Peele for Third Time, Mixing Genres with ‘Nope’ Score

Awards Daily talks to music composer Michael Abels about how his score for Nope supports Jordan Peele’s most ambitious film to date.

If you ever want to know about spoilers for Jordan Peele’s next film, music composer Michael Abels might hold all the secrets. Having worked on each of Peele’s films, Abels says one part of the process that never changes is that he gets sent the script in preproduction.

“Each time we’ve started with the script before the film is even shot,” says Abels, “and that’s really great to be in the process essentially from the ground up, helping him design the music world in the film even while they’re picking out locations and designing the production itself. Jordan really regards music as being an important part of the feel of the film.”

Because of their frequent collaboration, Abels knows what kind of music Peele finds appealing and how to write with his ear in mind, even if the director genuinely seeks collaboration.

“He wants to have great ideas that challenge him. He’ll even sometimes say when he listens to music that I’ve done for him, ‘I’m challenged by this.’ In the hands of another filmmaker it might mean, ‘I don’t like it,’ but that’s not really what he means. What he means is that the music is causing him to look at his own ideas in a different way.”

While the process of composing music for a Jordan Peele film might be similar each time, the score is definitely not.

“[Nope] is certainly his most ambitious film, and it touches on even more genres than any of his other films. It was really important to make sure it was both terrifying, where it needed to be, and heartwarming, much more so than some of his previous work. But then it’s also a western, so that needs to feel authentic, and at the same time it’s a full-out sci-fi action adventure. We talked about how to ground each of those parts of the score so that each of those genres landed while giving the score an integrated voice.”

Abels not only tackles genres, but genres within genres. For example, “Jupiter’s Claim” is a big-budget, old-fashioned western from the ’90s, whereas the piece “Nope” has more spaghetti western vibes.

“You can hear the difference in the western vibes in the music. I’m writing in the genre—period. It’s 1967 or 1991, whatever year we need it to be, for something coming out in that year. That’s part of my formula for making music that I hope feels authentic to the genre.”

Since Nope builds into a huge action-adventure film, Abels needed to make the score bigger and bigger and even incorporated a new instrument he hadn’t previously used for a Peele film.

“There’s a lot of brass, something that maybe people don’t think about. The brass really gives it that big summer blockbuster feeling.”

Plus, in the main theme, someone pointed out to him that a recurring musical phrase mimics some of the equine characters on screen.

“Someone said to me, ‘Those two falling notes feels like a horse whinny.’ It was not conscious on my part, but when someone said that, I thought, of course it is,” he says with a laugh. “One thing you do when you’re a composer is watch the actors over and over again. Music is my canvas in which I pour out my emotions, and I try to make my emotions through music completely match what I’m seeing on screen and what I see from them.”

While Abels might be the man with all of Jordan Peele’s movie secrets, like all of us, he, too, can’t wait to see what’s coming down the road.

“I have no idea where he’s going next,” he laughs. “People ask me for previews, and I say, ‘I got nothing!’ I’m right there with everybody else watching him do what he does. He’s fearless and challenging his own creativity and writing original stories.”

Nope is now available on DVD and to stream.