Director Tony Gilroy’s upcoming film Behemoth! puts the art of film scoring front and center. Pedro Pascal stars as Alex Serian, a classically trained cellist whose return to the film scoring scene stirs up memories from his past. While most scores have a single credited composer, Tony asked nine artists to contribute to BEHEMOTH!’s soundtrack.
Ahead of the movie’s release on December 4, Pedro and Tony sat down with Edith Bowman, host of Soundtracking, at Spotify’s Listening Lounge in London to explore the film’s unconventional score and the creative collaboration behind it. Read highlights from their conversation below.
Edith: This is a beautiful film that takes us into the world of film composing and musicians, whose work we often take for granted in terms of what they do and how much they affect how we feel when we watch films. Tony, first of all, why did you want to tell this story?
Tony: I’ve always really been into music. But I got really excited about the scoring process when I was working on Michael Clayton with composer James Newton Howard, who was kind of my guide into this world. When I went to do the score for Rogue One: A Star Wars Story with Michael Giacchino, there was a huge orchestra, tight deadlines, and lots of people moving around. We left every day thinking, “There has to be a movie here. Why hasn’t somebody told this story?” So that’s what started it for me.
This time you put together The Behemoth! Collective, a group of nine composers. Some you’ve worked with before, while others are new collaborators. Why?
Tony: In the film, when Alex, Pedro’s character, cuts music cues into the movie he’s working on, they trigger flashbacks. So I had to create a bunch of fictitious films for these cues to come from. Rather than have one person change hats for each of these fake films, I decided to get nine composers and put it together that way. I also cast these composers like I would actors, picking people that were interested in the specific slots.
Pedro, how do you describe Alex? What’s your interpretation of who he is?
Pedro: He has such an honest lens to his own life. He’s very true to himself, but his primary language, or perhaps his only language, is music. Alex’s mother was scoring movies when he was in the womb, so it’s literally the first thing he hears. But it gets him into trouble. It’s this very conflicted existence of being incredibly present and somehow still absent to some of the people in his life.
Henry Jackman did a song for Behemoth! called “Spies Don’t Run.” It’s a piece of music for a fictitious film that becomes a memory moment for Alex, so it’s doing a lot of different things. Tony, with so many of the songs being layered like this, what was the conversation you had with your composers about what you were looking for?
Tony: I told Henry that this was Alex’s first cue in the movie. It’s his first session back in L.A., and he’s working on the final shot of an in-film movie called Spies Don’t Run. There’s a snowstorm, a chase, and an escape sequence. I told Henry to blow it out, go for it. But the cue that he’s scoring is also scoring Alex’s flashback, and it’s the first time we tell the audience what we’re doing in the real film they’re watching, and it’s how we orient them. So it’s an important cue on many levels, and Henry really went for it.
You obviously have Alex’s story in the world of the orchestra, but there are some side stories, as well. The sequence with Olivia Wilde’s character is one of those, and it’s just so joyful and funny. What was it like working with her?
Pedro: I had a blast. Her character was one of my favorite roles in the movie when I read the script. I was like, “Who’s going to play this? Who am I going to get to do this with?” And when we got Olivia, I was like, “Are you kidding me?” Her story is there because, as serious as some of the human experiences are in the movie, there’s always a sense of humor in it.
There’s this amazing song in the film called “Your God Is Sleeping” that I could easily lose myself in a club dancing to. What’s the story behind it?
Tony: James Newton Howard and I wrote an initial version of the song, and we thought it was good. We wanted to get Lukas Frank, another composer, and his band, Storefront Church, to play it. I gave it to Lukas, and he goes, “It’s good, but it sounds old.” So I told him to take the title “Your God Is Sleeping” and write a new song. A couple of days later, he sent it back to me, and it just blew my mind. I couldn’t be happier with it.
Pedro: On the day we shot that scene, Lukas’s band was playing live in this warehouse. So we got to shoot the band and my part, watching the band play. And this just isn’t ever the case where you get to have a scene partner like that, an entire band. It was one of my favorite days of shooting in my entire life.
Stream the soundtrack for Behemoth! before the film hits theaters December 4.
