‘Still’ Composer John Powell on Avoiding Sentimentality and Honoring Michael J. Fox’s Story Through Music

John Powell is a legend in the world of music composers, with over 70 movies to his name. The majority of his work has been in animated films, earning an Oscar nomination for 2010’s How to Train Your Dragon. Powell’s attraction to animated films comes, in part, from the joy that’s intrinsic to their film scores.

His task for Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie was also about finding joy— in the life and triumph of Michael J. Fox’s personal story. The challenge? Powell was new to the world of documentary filmmaking. And Fox was very clear—no sad violins.

Working closely with director Davis Guggenheim, Powell created an energetic and dynamic score that perfectly mirrors Fox’s natural magnetism and his strength in the face of an unexpected Parkinson’s diagnosis.

In an interview with Awards Daily, Powell reflects on his foray into documentaries, the unexpected difficulties, and using the violin in subversive ways.

John Powell: Very surprising. I thought I was doing a film. With the world of streaming and things, I didn’t quite know where we were going with it. I just knew it was a film, and I loved the subject matter. I loved the director. 

AD: There are so many individual songs that I want to ask you about, but I first want to start with the overarching themes and ideas that you were looking at. I know Davis was very specific with what he wanted to achieve. What did that mean in terms of your work? 

JP: Well, the first thing was he wanted to hire somebody who didn’t do documentaries. And that was me. I’d never done one before. He didn’t want somebody to wallow because Michael does not wallow in his situation; he fights tooth and nail to enjoy his life.

So I think it came from Davis’s daughter during a conversation in a car ride, ‘Who out there writes joyful music?’ And I think his daughter said, ‘John Powell, because of all that dragon stuff.’ [This film] was not exactly a close match with what you would think of me.

When I spoke to Davis, it was all about finding the joy in the music that would support the joy in the man. That’s always one of the things I’ve loved about doing animated films. Finding joy is harder to do in live-action movies. They’re often more about drama, but there seem to be lots of moments in animation where I get to represent, in sound and music, the joy that characters can have from the situations. 

I think that’s why Davis was thinking of me, and I realized that Michael was a man who danced his way through life. I just needed to make sure I stayed with the ballet of his life. 

AD: I just found the score so surprising. I felt like I never knew where it was going to go. It covers a lot of ground— there are very joyful songs, songs that are a little bit haunting. Some songs are a little bit more emotional; some are fast-paced. Tell me about all of those different arcs.

JP: It’s a complicated one because it was a film where I couldn’t sit down at the beginning and analyze it in the way that I would do with a story with a film where a screenwriter has written the story, and it’s all set up in advance. This is a film where Davis had to find the story. And even after he’d found the story, I found it hard to know the threads. One of the threads I wanted to do was, and we found this quite late, was how to turn something from pain into grace. It took a while, but eventually, that had to do with this very, very high violin. When Michael signed onto the film, he told Davis, ‘I’ll do the film, but as long as there’s no violins.’ In other words, he didn’t want any sentimentality.

So I kept thinking, ‘Well, how could I use the violin?’ Not to spite Michael, but I thought this is a really good point— we associate violins with sentimentality, but what does that have to sound like? So, we did this thing where you play an incredibly high note. It’s almost above the hearing range. It’s kind of grunge. I used to play the violin, and it’s this note right by your ear. And all you can hear is this grunge, rubbing sound, but somewhere out there is this incredibly high tone. That was where I suggested we started. It’s a sound that, just in isolation, if you don’t know it’s a violin, you just think it’s a painful, unpleasant vibe to the whole situation. I used that and kept using the violin up very, very high to gradually let it say more and more.

And by the very end, when you last see Michael, [the music] is doing this filigree through the air and eventually gets back up to that high note again. What Michael says is the pain of Parkinson’s is what gave him grace. And gave him a realization of the value of his life and the pleasures of his life, not with any sentiment, but with truth. That’s what we try to find in the music.

It’s very hard to talk about music. Music is the way it is because it expresses things that we cannot talk about. That’s why I liked music from a very early age. It said things that I couldn’t find the words for. And certainly, I couldn’t see anybody else finding the words for them. It expressed ideas that were beyond my imagination or my ability to image. Music made very complex emotions just there for me to enjoy, to understand and communicate, and to hear the communication from the composer and the players. I’ve spent 50 years trying to speak that language, having understood it almost immediately. 

When you start [making music for] film, it becomes complicated because the film is saying something, and the idea is to try and write music that supports that idea. But in itself, music should be able to express a lot of other things. The idea is you write the subtext, and whatever the subtext is, it just needs to be there in everybody’s understanding of the story. 

I’d like to say I knew exactly what I was doing, and I could explain it all to you, but it ends up that you have hope for what you can do and have conversations about how you hopefully get there. And then you work, and you work. And we worked for a long time with it. Davis and I explored many different avenues guided by him and perhaps my own sense of trying to express what I felt about Michael —the music found its way through and into the movie. And when it was right, it attached itself and built this thing. I’d like to say that it’s all very technical, but it’s not; sometimes, it’s pretty chaotic.

AD: Well, it sounds like you let your emotions do a lot of the talking; that’s why people connect to it, right?

JP: I mean, they’re connecting to the man, connecting to a pre-understanding of him because of the joy he’s brought in his films and our knowledge of his heroism, as it were, in the face of something none of us want to go through. I was feeling that about him. Everybody watching is feeling that about him. How you tell that story is difficult because it can be told in one sentence. How do you keep people interested for 90 minutes? That’s where I had to rely on Davis. He is such an extraordinary filmmaker in a way that for the first time in years, I felt out of my depth; that was the strange thing. I think this was film number 65 for me. Having done 64 other films ranging from the beginning where I really didn’t know what I was doing to where I felt I had gained an understanding of what I was doing— I was then thrown into this with absolutely no ability to find my feet sometimes. And if it wasn’t for Davis being such a nice man, I think I would have had a really difficult time. I had to have faith in him as much as I did in myself. It was quite interesting.

AD: I love every track. I wish I could ask you about all of them. With “First Casting” and “Hollywood Struggle,” where it’s this fast-paced run through his career, it’s almost jazzy. How did you land on that?

JP: I think I probably ended up right there because it feels like a heist. He’s making this attack on Hollywood without them knowing. And the joy of what was unfolding despite the difficulties. I think that’s a great thing about some of the storytelling in the movie; it unfolds in a way that you’re enjoying it from two levels. You’re enjoying it because of this man, his career, and where he will get to —you have the pleasure of knowing that he will succeed, even though we’re telling you it was hard.

We’ve all had that feeling ourselves. It resonates with me knowing that there were times when I didn’t know I would get to do any films, nevertheless, good ones.

The joy of everybody’s life is you work hard, and still, things don’t happen, but then there’s just one little crack in the door that lets you put a little bit of your foot in, and you keep going. That’s what I was trying to capture, and it was definitely representative of my own life.

AD: “Tracy” is the most traditionally emotional song on the soundtrack; it represents Tracy and Michael’s love story.

JP: It’s who we end up with in our lives. It’s a really intriguing question as to why it works. They couldn’t be two more different people. Sometimes, what you need from that other person also represents what you have a problem with. She doesn’t take any shit from him. And that was right from the beginning. And she still doesn’t. That’s what Michael loved about her. He didn’t want somebody who just thought he was a star. And now he doesn’t want somebody who thinks he’s an invalid. It’s about finding the person that keeps you real. I was trying to be as real about it as possible. And trying to be romantic. Sometimes [the music] pops out, and it just seems to work. And I can almost not tell you why.