Marco Beltrami & Miles Hankins on Scoring Nine Perfect Strangers

Nine Perfect Strangers is currently streaming on Hulu. As such, we decided to speak with composers Marco Beltrami and Miles Hankins about their work on the Jonathan Levine-directed David E. Kelley production.

Jeff Ames: What drew each of you to this project?

Miles Hankins: Marco has collaborated with Jonathan [Levine] on four projects. This is my third with both of them, but yeah, he is a draw. He’s an incredible director, he’s very versatile and he tells interesting stories through an interesting lens. As composers, that gives us lot to play with and its always an exciting prospect to see what he is doing next; and journey down that road creatively with him.

Marco Beltrami: The first film I did with Jonathan was Warm Bodies. Honestly, I would jump on any project he did without even known what it was because I have that much faith in him. All of his movies examine the human condition from different angles, and they feature a combination of a lot of different elements. Especially Nine Perfect Strangers, which is very comedic, but also dramatic with a lot of poignant elements. There’s a lot of intimacy to his work.

There are so many different styles in the score, as you can hear on the CD, which is really fun creatively.

What concepts or musical references does Jonathan bring to the table and how does that inform your approach to the score?

Marco: Sometimes he comes in with source pieces and things that inspired him as he was working on the script or shooting, but he’s also very open to suggestion. In that sense it’s very collaborative and that’s one of the things I like about him. There’s no prescribed way to do things. If he does temp, it’s not something we have to adhere to strictly. It’s always a fluid situation.

What was your initial approach to the material, especially considering all the different elements in the series?

Miles: This is one of the most eclectic stories that we’ve done together. It’s ripe with different characters and lots of different twists and turns. You’re never sure what’s going to happen next. That’s one of the great pleasures of the series is that we got to stretch out creatively and try different things as the show progressed.

But there is some thematic continuity. The Nicole Kidman character, Masha, has her own motif and the spa itself has its own theme to it; and there’s a lot of instrumentational and sonic continuity throughout the score, but even within that construct we were branching out all the time. If you listen to the CD, you’ll hear that cornucopia of different sounds.

When we watched the show the first time, we all thought we had a pretty good idea of where it was going. As it turns out, we were all wrong. The show evolved and progressed. We were just as surprised as the audience will be. As composers, that kept us on our toes and allowed us to move things into different directions. This was really exciting and a really refreshing project to work on because of it.

You utilize a lot of various instruments – what were some of the more unique elements you used for the score?

Marco: In terms of instruments we didn’t use anything that strange, but we did do quite a bit of sound processing even though we had a weekly string quartet. We would play around with the pitching of the string quartet. There was some flute stuff we used for Masha’s character that was pretty heavily processed.

Miles: I think the idea was to take sounds that were familiar – piano, string quartet, for example – but then process it in a way that allowed the audience to hear it for what is but just slightly off-kilter, so something is slightly changed. We would record the strings at twice the tempo and one octave higher and pitch them back down to the original written pitch. The result is they’re playing all the material we wrote, but something sounds just slightly off. Little tricks like that that we could manipulate to varying degrees of intensity depending on the direction of the show. As the series goes on it becomes this trippy otherworldly experience and we were able to push these processing effects to varying degrees of intensity and reflect that. It’s a combination of traditional acoustic instrumentation and this kind of sinister manipulative processing in the analog domain to give it what we hope is a very special character.

Was there a specific moment, episode or character that you patterned the music around?

Miles: Well, it’s a really well written ensemble piece and I think the cast is very strong so it’s difficult to say we were inspired by any one character. Although, Nicole is extraordinary, and her character is such a powerful presence in the show. It would be incorrect to say we weren’t immediately influenced by her. But there’s also an air of mystery surrounding her throughout the show – is she good, is she bad? What’s she doing? In the midst of this you have all these different characters with different backgrounds, and they all have these different issues and it all revolves around this Masha character. But what grounds it is the concept of this spa or retreat that all these characters are rushing to try to save their lives. The idea that that can completely twist and turn – and Masha is the head of all that, but we developed a theme for the spa itself that we called the Tranquillum Chord, which can play a major tonality and be beautiful and meditative or be dark and Bernard Herman-ish. A lot of time we felt we were representing the voice of the spa itself.

Marco: One of the other interesting things about the show is oftentimes on a series like this, you sort of nail the sound of the show. With this one, the show was constantly evolving. So, we had these ideas, but we couldn’t just use them one way. We were always writing new music. It was a great challenge.

How does your partnership work?

Marco: We definitely work in conjunction, but it was a COVID show so there was more separation than usual. We did a lot of Zoom time and a lot of Zoom sessions with the director. We would write separately in our own studios, but we would share ideas. The thing was to keep it harmonious throughout so it wasn’t like things were from left field and vice versa – there were things I would do or Miles we would do that we would incorporate. But the way we work, and the way things have evolved, you don’t have to spend much time in the same room together.

Is there a musical cue you’d like to explore if given the opportunity to do so in the future?

Marco: Miles wrote this amazing cue for this one scene that never got use [laughs]. We tried to use it on several episodes but could never figure it out. So, if there was a Season 2, we would definitely try to shoehorn that cue in.

Miles: [laughs] They should commit to a second season just for that reason alone. I would say, otherwise, there’s some really incredible stuff. A cue that Marco wrote, called “Test Pilot,” that rears its head in the background of the season and serves as sort of kinetic motif as the action and the pacing picks up. It’s really an interesting piece of music harmonically and showcases Buck Sanders’ production really well. I think that’s one definitely worth checking out. There’s plenty of interesting things on the score CD for fans to listen to.

Marco: I still think there’s lots of room for development on the Tranquillum Chord. I don’t know, we’ll see. But I’m sure if we were to do a second season Jonathan would take it from a completely different angle.