Words by Ann Lee

As a teenager, Nathan Johnson once photoshopped himself into The Beatles’ iconic Abbey Road album cover along with his cousin. “We were just sitting on a broken-down car in the background,” he says. Many years later, he’s still amazed that he recorded the score for Knives Out at the famous music studio. “It’s the place where so many of your favourite records were made, so it feels kind of magical.” 

Nathan has composed scores for Brick, Looper and The Brothers Bloom with director Rian Johnson, the very same cousin that appeared with him on his digitally altered photo with the Fab Five. He’s created the music for all of his films bar Star Wars: The Last Jedi. The pair are currently busy working on the first of two Knives Out sequels, which wrapped filming in Greece last summer.

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Photograph: Nathan Johnson at Abbey Road Studios, Rian Johnson

It was during the shoot of Knives Out 2 that Johnson got a call from Guillermo del Toro. He wanted to know if he could step in at the last minute after French composer Alexandre Desplat was forced to pull out of his latest project, Nightmare Alley, due to scheduling conflicts. The Oscar-winning director, who made Pan's Labyrinth and The Shape Of Water, sent over a copy of the film so he could take a look.

“I watched it completely dry with no music,” says the 45-year-old musician. “I was just blown away by what he had created. He’d made a masterpiece.” Johnson had six weeks to complete the score. “This was a very quick turnaround for me. But the movie was almost done, it felt really assured. Guillermo would come over to my studio every week. It felt like a brain melt, we just clicked. It felt really smooth, which is not what I was expecting.”

 

Guillermo would come over to my studio every week. It felt like a brain melt, we just clicked.

Nightmare Alley is a lavish noir set in the murky world of carnivals, adapted from William Lindsay Gresham’s novel. Bradley Cooper stars as Stanton Carlisle, a mysterious drifter who latches on to a gang of carnival workers and tricks his way into high society by posing as a psychic with the help of his girlfriend Molly Cahill (Rooney Mara). He sets his sights on an even more elaborate con when he crosses paths with Lilith Ritter (Cate Blanchett), a coolly seductive psychiatrist, who turns out to be even more ruthless than he is. 

Del Toro gave Johnson free reign to do what he wanted with the score. “He basically said: ‘I don't want to tell you too much. I trust your instincts. I love what you do. I want you to do your thing.” So he didn't really give me a whole lot of references. It was really fun in that way because I got to immerse myself. I just started sending him music and he was responding really positively to that. Then we would refine things together.”

While the film is firmly planted within the noir genre, Johnson didn’t want that to be his entry point into the music. Instead, he found inspiration from the enigmatic lead characters. He was especially struck by how little Carlisle evolved throughout the film. There’s no dramatic emotional arc for this anti-hero. “Usually [films are] about a character starting in one place, going through a journey and becoming a totally different person by the end. It was really clear to me that essentially he doesn't change, he keeps hitting that same note throughout the whole movie.”

Johnson wanted to mirror this in the music. “My idea for him was a single piano note that we introduce at the very beginning. As it repeats, we introduce dissonance that we develop into a motif. Then as he moves through the movie and begins putting on these masks, we begin filling out the score. It becomes lush and orchestral when he goes to the big city but really that same note is there underneath it. When we strip everything away, that same piano note is the last thing we hear. So Stan's theme is a simple motif that’s anchored in a single note that's there through the whole movie.” 

 

One of the things that I often think about is sounds as opposed to instruments. In Looper that was literal.

Del Toro told him he wanted to make the film because of Lilith. Like the best on-screen Femme Fatales, she is as conniving and crafty as she is elegant and bewitching. “Lilith’s theme is a very simple, beautiful oboe motif on top of very dissonant, unsettling strings,” says Johnson. “I love her character. It's like this calm, placid surface and then underneath, she has a hurricane. Stan doesn’t realise that. He doesn't clock her power.” 

The composer wanted to combine a sense of beauty with an element of danger. “Even with the rhythmic element in Lilith’s theme, there's a piano lurch in there that is not quite straight, it's kind of doing this push and pull that normally is more at home in hip hop. All of that works together as an unsettling agent. It was really important that we never allowed the score to tell you she's all good or she's all bad.”

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Photograph: Kerry Hayes. © 2021 20th Century Studios

When it came to Mara’s character Molly, Carlisle’s devoted and far too trusting girlfriend and on-stage assistant, del Toro asked Johnson for a theme that would “break” his heart. “It was about innocence, really. Molly has this hopefulness and part of that comes from these promises that Stan keeps repeating. He promises her the world and everything in it. Towards the end of the movie, she realises all of his promises are lies. With Molly's theme, it was just a very beautiful, simple motif. But it was something that we allowed Stan's character to be able to steal from Molly and apply to Lilith.”

One scene shows Carlise effectively switching his affection from Molly to Lilith. “He's stolen so much from Molly and in that moment, he also steals Molly's theme. We hear Lilith’s theme transition and take on Molly's for a moment. That’s one of the fun things that I love about scoring a movie based on character themes. It allows you to just be underneath the surface. We've given these different characters identities and we can twist those in ways that hopefully support what the story is telling.”

Knives Out Poster
Looper Poster
Nightmare Alley Poster

Carlisle is a hardened trickster who lies, cheats and steals. Like an emotional vampire, he sucks away the energy of those around him. Monsters have always fascinated del Toro and here he tackles the demons that lurk within us. Nightmare Alley is consumed by cynical despair as the director paints a dark vision of the worst of humanity. “We didn't want to purely rest in that bleakness,” says Johnson. “We're kind of chipping back and forth between beauty and ugliness, between hope and bleakness. We keep that unsettling feeling until the end.”

Johnson, who was born in Washington, fell into composing by accident. His family was “very conservative” so he grew up in Colorado listening mainly to “obscure” Christian bands although luckily a few more mainstream acts like The Beatles managed to filter through. He learned the bass, guitar and piano, instruments that would “work in rock bands”, eventually forming his own group The Cinematic Underground. He’s still part of the indie collective although it’s largely been put on the back burner due to his composing jobs.

The musician has always been close to his cousin Rian. As kids, they loved to round up their younger cousins during family holidays to make home movies on a camcorder. “We sort of forced them to be the actors in our movies,” he laughs. “For the music, we were just using whatever film score we had, usually the Hook score from John Williams. I grew up with Rian making movies and music together with our whole childhood but weirdly, I never really thought of combining them together. They were always separate things.”

That all changed when Rian asked him to score his first film Brick, a dark noir starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt, which has since become a cult classic. Johnson created the music for the low-budget project while living in Bournemouth. As there was hardly any money for the soundtrack, it was recorded using one microphone on his laptop with the composer using household items as instruments including wine glasses, kitchen utensils and filing cabinets. 

“It was very different from how we do it now,” says Johnson. “But at that point, I didn't know another way to do it. I come from an indie band background. I wasn’t using samples then. It just felt like we didn't know what we were doing but we had to get it done. We see this throughout the history of art, often when you're working inside of restrictions, they can produce really surprising results. So that was a great first experience to realise that you don't have to wait until you’ve got an orchestra at Abbey Road, although that is nice. That’s the important thing in any art form - if you want to make something, make it now.”

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Photograph: Kerry Hayes. © 2021 20th Century Studios

Johnson may not have trained to be a composer but he feels like this has given him a different outlook on his profession. “One of the things that I often think about is sounds as opposed to instruments. In Looper that was literal - we were on set doing field recordings, I was gathering found sounds and then turning those into playable instruments. My background is more from a broader storytelling perspective.”

Now that filming on Knives Out 2 has finished, Johnson has started work on the score for the highly-anticipated sequel although there’s not much he can reveal right now about what direction it will take. “It's probably a little too early to say but I'm very excited.” Daniel Craig is returning to the role of enterprising private detective Benoit Blanc in what promises to be another fun and entertaining take on the mystery whodunnit. “It's not a sequel. It's Blanc’s next case, it’s the next instalment in his life so it’s a whole new story, which feels really fun.”

While he has scored across various genres, there are still unexplored soundscapes that Johnson is keen to conquer. He would love to make a musical. Working on last year’s TV show Mr Corman, created by Gordon-Levitt, he penned several songs including a musical number with the actor. “I would love to combine songwriting with scoring. I think that would be an amazing sandbox to play in, where I would get to use a lot of the elements and tools that I love.”

Having more than surpassed his teenage dreams, Johnson is busy setting himself new goals. He still has that photoshopped Abbey Road cover of him and Rian, which has been blown up into epic proportions, just like his career. It’s a visual reminder of how far he’s come. “We each have a very large poster version of it that is much too large to hang up in our houses!”