‘She Said’ Composer Nicholas Britell On the Collaborative Process That Produced the Deeply Emotional Score

In a relatively short period of time, celebrated Emmy-winning composer Nicholas Britell (HBO’s Succession) has become one of the most sought-after composers working in film and television today. In just under five years, received three Academy Award nominations for his brilliant film scores for Barry Jenkins’ Oscar-winning Best Picture Moonlight, for Jenkins’ follow-up If Beale Street Could Talk, and for Adam McKay’s satire Don’t Look Up. This year alone, his compositions are featured in such varied projects as HBO’s Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty, Disney+’s Andor, and the recent critically acclaimed film She Said.

It’s his work on She Said that brings him into a close collaboration with his wife, renown cellist Caitlin Sullivan. The resulting deeply emotional and often very dark score perfectly suits director Maria Schrader’s compelling story of The New York Times’ investigation of the Harvey Weinstein sexual abuse scandals that shook Hollywood in the mid-2010s. The film focuses on the two Times reporters who broke the story, Jodi Kantor (Zoe Kazan) and Megan Twohey (Carey Mulligan), as well as a handful of Weinstein’s victims that helped break the story. It’s a challenging, engrossing, and fascinating film that needed an accomplished composer to underscore its emotional tension.

Here, in an interview with Awards Daily, Nicholas Britell talks about his process in exploring the sound of She Said. He also reveals the benefits of his close collaborations with Schrader and Sullivan. He explains the intents of various character themes and the way the score mirrors the structure of the film. Finally, he talks about how the film reaffirmed a long-held belief about the composition process.

Awards Daily: As I look back at your body of work, there are pieces like Beale Street that have a very specific sound and place and language that you as the composer, while still being original, need to adhere to. She Said is set in a very specific time in our recent history, but there’s no inherent cultural influence to dictate the nature of the score. How then does a score come to you in situations like that?

Nicholas Britell: It’s a great question. I have definitely a philosophy that every project deserves its own sound, its own sound identity. One of the most exciting questions you asked is ‘What is the sound of a film?’ Every composer brings their own feelings and thoughts, and every composer/director collaboration brings their own interest and intricacies to answering that question. When it came to She Said, early on, interestingly, I remember reading the script and having an immediate reaction to it. I found it to be very powerful, of course, but there was also a sense to me that the score would have a multiplicity of potential feelings. I needed to figure out a sound world that had this multiplicity of feelings. For me, there are many dualities in this film, and one of the reasons I was drawn to the cello early on was I felt that there was a possibility with the sonic palette of a cello that it could, on the one hand, speak to one’s emotional inner world but, at the same time, it could also speak to a variety of experimental sounds that might actually at times veer into very harsh sounds, sounds of darkness.

I always feel that the early stages of one coming into contact with a new project are very important because you have to be very sensitive to your early feelings and thoughts. Your first blush with something only happens once. When you read the script and you have those initial feelings, or when you see the first rough cut and you have those feelings, you really should remark for yourself, ‘What are those thoughts?’ Everything later is sort of in relation to those first thoughts. My first thoughts regarding She Said were these feelings of both an emotional inner world but also the ability to explore the darkness to a great extent. My first instinct was the cello. Each project has its own journey of discovery to that.

Awards Daily: So, for She Said, you had an initial conversation with director Maria Schrader. What kind of insight did she bring into the material that helped you work on write that score?

Nicholas Britell: Early on, I had come up with many sketches where I was showing certain potential theme ideas. I remember there was one particular scheme concept that, initially, I was calling “The Search.” Not just in the sense of the search in the world, but also more of the internal search for truth, the internal search for what really happened, what is really going on emotionally. I remember playing that for Maria, and she was really into that idea. That music really resonated for her, and I think one of the most powerful moments of our collaboration was this bigger question, not just what a theme might be but about the overall role of music in the film and the way that the music might actually be a partner in telling the story. It really was this wonderful conversation we had about the very opening of the film, actually, where we figured a lot out together.

Maria had a really, really insightful comment, which was that she would love it if there was a way to have the music at the beginning of the film signal to the audience that the movie knows more than we do. I thought that was a really interesting way of putting it. She actually wanted, I think, the music to have a broader perspective, a zoomed-out perspective, where the music was actually talking about the whole movie. It was actually speaking to what will happen, not telling you things, but perhaps posing a question right from the beginning of the movie. What you hear at the beginning of the movie is what I call the overture. It’s an overture to the film. It’s not a cue in the sense that it’s speaking to that particular moment. It’s actually speaking to the whole story.

Awards Daily: So what was it like collaborating with your wife on this? 

Nicholas Britell: It was wonderful. I think it was, in some ways, a wonderful culmination of many, many, many years of working together in various ways. I really treasure Caitlin’s opinions and her thoughts. She has incredible musical instincts. There was almost a group collaboration where I would work with Maria, Dede Gardner (producer), and separately with Caitlin. Caitlin’s a cello expert, certainly, so that was wonderful. She had very strong instincts, for example, of the types of harshness in the sound. There’s a type of plucking of the strings that she was doing with her nail where it created a really harsh sound. There was this wonderful dialogue that we had as we went through. She was very moved by the early rough cut of the film. I actually hope we get to do this again because it really was quite a wonderful process.

Awards Daily: You talked about the emotion of the film, which is certainly very present. Is it using the cello that is key to bringing up that emotional context within the score?

Nicholas Britell: There’s a darker landscape, and one of the things that we did with that was explore many different harsh possibilities with the cello. What I would do is I would actually take some of these sounds, and I would bend them. I would experiment sonically with them, and there were a variety of different techniques that we utilized. There’s a sense of the memory of trauma that exists throughout the film, and musically, one of the ways that we did that was we created these sort of swirling motifs with the cellist that speaks to the way that a memory of trauma may just come out of the blue and affect you. Then, it may go away just as quickly, but there’s a heightened anxiety because you don’t know when that type of a feeling is going to return. There was also another sound that we created, which was an aleatoric cello where it’s almost like a chaotic kind of playing where you play by chance and see where your hands take you. It creates a sense of unease and uncertainty, especially if you do it in certain registers on the cello. We did it sometimes very, very high up in the cello, and it actually can almost sound like distant voices in a sense.

Awards Daily: Looking at the tracks of the soundtrack, you’re singling out two Weinstein survivors with themes: Laura and Rowena. Why those specific characters?

Nicholas Britell: Some of that had to do, to some extent, structurally with the film itself or where we were musically at that moment. Themes are always about relationships and dynamic relationships. For me, musical themes might be a person in relation to another person or in relation to the story. A theme you hear around Laura might actually be related to the overall search theme, for example. For me, it really is about the music. It’s always about the place in the story that we are having this kind of an idea. I would almost call it the rhythm of the architecture of the music. Where do we have certain musical ideas? It’s the type of thing that, as you’re scoring a project moment to moment, you’re maybe writing a piece of music, but there’s always that kind of stepping back feeling and asking how does it actually feel in the flow of the movie?

Awards Daily: Obviously, you’ve talked about wanting to continue your collaboration with Caitlin. What else did you learn from scoring She Said that perhaps you will take to another project?

Nicholas Britell: That’s a really, really good question. It wasn’t maybe something new that I learned, but perhaps it was a reaffirmation of something that I have thought about a lot which to reaffirm the importance of continually experimenting and continually trying things out live. Often, we as composers find ourselves alone in the room writing, or we find ourselves trying certain things out perhaps with the computer or with one instrument. But getting musicians in a room, trying things out, and spending that time with Caitlin in the room here where we were just recording things was incredibly productive and incredibly insightful. It opens up your eyes and ears to all these other possibilities. It continually adds to your understanding the more that you’re in the room experimenting. That’s something that I always knew was the case, but the experience on She Said reaffirmed it to a huge extent the importance of just taking that time and really sitting in the room and just trying things out.

She Said is now available on VOD.