Phoenix on the Challenges of Creating a Score-Less Soundtrack for Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla
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The post Phoenix on the Challenges of Creating a Score-Less Soundtrack for Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla appeared first on Consequence.
The process of finding the right song for the right scene in a movie can involve no shortage of trial and error. And Sofia Coppola’s new film Priscilla, which eschews score in favor of dozens of individual needle drops, required a lot. As Laurent Brancowitz, of the band Phoenix, tells Consequence, “Sometimes you have ideas that work that are perfect on paper, but when you put [the song] on the footage, nothing happens. That’s one great thing about doing this job — it’s very hard to predict, but when the magic happens, it’s very obvious.”
Brancowitz and Thomas Mars (Phoenix lead singer and Coppola’s husband since 2011) worked alongside veteran music supervisor Randall Poster to create the soundtrack for the A24 biographical drama about a young girl named Priscilla (Cailee Spaeny), who at the age of 14 met an up-and-coming rock star named Elvis Presley (Jacob Elordi). Based on Priscilla Presley’s memoir, Coppola’s film takes an intimate look at their complicated romance, drawing on a mix of period-appropriate and not-so-period-appropriate tracks as accompaniment.
“For most films, before your composer really works to the cut footage, editorial puts, say, scores from other movies to show you the tone,” Poster says. “With this film, there really was never a [temp score]. We started to put in the music, and that became the score of the movie.” 51 songs in total were used for the soundtrack, according to Poster.
Poster recently marked working on his 200th movie as a music supervisor (post-200, he’s no longer counting), with recent credits including Killers of the Flower Moon and Asteroid City. While he and Coppola have known each other for “a little while” and he previously collaborated with her brother Roman, this was the first time he was asked to work on one of her films from the beginning.
With no official composer involved, the music of Priscilla became a collaboration between Poster and Phoenix; for the film’s credits, the band is listed alongside Poster with the credit “music supervision by.” Says Mars, “We talked about the credits for such a long time. Nothing seemed to fit. At some point we wanted, I think, ‘music direction by Phoenix,’ but the DGA won’t allow anything that has the word directing. I can tell you that it’s the movie we worked on the most, by far, of all of Sofia’s movies, even though there’s very little score.”
Instead, Phoenix’s contributions included both creating their own songs as well as working with Poster and editor Sarah Flack to incorporate existing tracks as if they were pieces of original score. “I think we were, like, conducting — that was why we chose [music direction by],” Mars adds.
Heavily involved in that process was the band Sons of Raphael, aka Loral and Ronnel Raphael. Brancowitz and Mars say they first learned about the sibling duo via producer Philippe Zdar, with whom they’d worked over the years. “Sons of Rafael was his last project,” says Mars. “One day he called me, and he was like, ‘I know you guys are perfectionists — you are sometimes a nightmare to work with, because you’re so demanding. I found two guys that are just the same as you, and you’re gonna love them.'”
A week after that phone call, just after Zdar finished mixing Sons of Raphael’s first album, he passed away. Phoenix subsequently brought the band on tour with them, “and while we were on tour, we were also thinking about Priscilla,” Mars says. “Their songs are very complex and so layered that the stems to their music, just the separate tracks, have so much going on, and they’re so talented at understanding arrangements. And they loved all the references that they were hearing about the movie, so it was a natural segue to ask them to participate in this.”
Multiple Sons of Raphael tracks, both original music as well as covers, are featured on the soundtrack — in at least one case, the film’s editing was even adjusted to spotlight their work. “One of my favorite scenes was when Priscilla’s looking through the window, and she’s trapped in Graceland for the first time since she married,” Mars says. “This was supposed to be a really quick shot, but [Philippe Le Sourd, the cinematographer] shot a very slow zoom out for a very long time. And because the music was so great, we had enough material to extend that scene for a long time and make a very slow zoom out. This became, instead of a small vignette, a real scene of the movie, because of that Sons of Raphael piece.”
I ask if Mars and Brancowitz would consider themselves mentors to the Sons of Raphael duo. Laughs Brancowitz, “The thing is, they’re really better than us. But we love them very dearly.”
“A Saliari-Mozart kind of mentorship,” adds Mars.
For the closing credits, Sons of Raphael cover Phoenix’s own track “My Elixir,” which the younger band fussed over: “They kept wanting to add certain things — like, ‘We need a harp, we need a lap steel,'” says Mars. “They had the vision more than we did, for what they wanted to achieve, so we were receiving it and we were like, ‘This is perfect to us, but if you think you can do more…’ Every time they would add something, and it wouldn’t subtract anything to the quality of the song.”
Behind the scenes of Priscilla, courtesy of A24
The most memorable needle drop may be Dolly Parton’s singular version of “I Will Always Love You” — as Coppola said in the press notes, “it was so important to me to have a woman’s voice at the end of the film.” The song’s importance came directly from real life; according to Parton, Presley was a big fan of “I Will Always Love You,” and sang it to Priscilla just after the two of them were officially divorced. Fortunately, Poster says it wasn’t tough to get the rights, because “Dolly and Priscilla are very friendly. So Dolly made it a very pleasant experience.”
However, things weren’t as easy when it came to the King himself. Priscilla doesn’t offer up a glowing portrait of Elvis Presley as a man, and one of the biggest challenges, to Mars, was not being able to use the legendary performer’s most famous tracks: “The estate was not sure what the movie would be about. So they didn’t want to allow us to use songs from Elvis,” he says.
“They weren’t very comfortable with the movie being from the perspective of Priscilla,” adds Brancowitz. “Which is exactly what the movie is about.”
Instead, the team instead found workarounds that would give the impression that Elvis’s music was more present than it was. A sequence of the film tracking the taping of Elvis’s famous TV special uses the song “Guitar Man,” performed by an Elvis impersonator. “Randall Poster had to reach out to a few Elvis impersonators, and it was really fun, because he had access to this one guy who could sing like Elvis, but from ’66 to ’69, and then there was a different guy from like ’70 on. So it was a world that was really fun to get into,” Mars says.
In addition, Phoenix performed a cover of “Aura Lee” for the soundtrack, as the public-domain Civil War tune (see below for an example) was the basis for “Love Me Tender.”
Phoenix’s version, Brancowitz says with a laugh, utilized “vibraphones and glockenspiel. It was really fun to do. And it brings back to your mind the feeling of Elvis — it’s a very powerful song that encapsulates this period and the magic of Elvis Presley.”
If you think there’s more Elvis on the soundtrack than there is, Mars adds, “it means we did our job well.”
“Aura Lee” is one of two songs to play a significant role in the film’s aural landscape; the other is Frankie Avalon’s “Venus,” which was historically the song that was playing when a young Priscilla Ann Wagner met the friend who would eventually bring her into Elvis’s world.
“It happens to be a really great song pop song that we love,” says Brancowitz. “When we were kids, there was a French version of it, so it’s part of our DNA as well. And it’s a song that’s really well constructed around different motifs. We used that throughout the movie — those two songs [‘Venus’ and ‘Aura Lee’] were the backbone in terms of melodic elements.”
That didn’t prevent the team from playing with the juxtaposition of both classic and more modern songs. “That’s something Sofia really loves,” says Brancowitz, “You can create a very strong aesthetic emotion just with the contact of two songs that have nothing to do with each other, with, with each other. For instance, the very beginning of the movie is is the Alice Coltrane song, which is really beautiful with harps and orchestra. And then suddenly it morphs into the Ramones. When we heard this, we knew that we had found the feeling that we needed. It was a key moment for this movie.”
Brancowitz notes that the specific Ramones track, a cover of a Ronettes song called “Baby, I Love You,” fits well because it’s from End of the Century, the 1980 Ramones album produced by Phil Spector. “It’s the wave of music that came just after Elvis, and it was kind of, for [Elvis], the beginning of the end. They used the music of his era to build something new, and so [‘Baby, I Love You’], The Ramones reinventing music from the fifties with the help of Phil Spector — it all made sense, and it works very well.”
It might not be the most intuitive approach, but as Poster says, the results are “splendid. The joy of working on this movie is the joy of getting to watch Sofia put her vision on something that I think is, in its way, emotionally epic.”
Priscilla arrives in theaters nationwide on Friday, November 3rd.
Phoenix on the Challenges of Creating a Score-Less Soundtrack for Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla
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