Here’s Why the Furiosa Soundtrack May Leave You Feeling Unsettled
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The post Here’s Why the Furiosa Soundtrack May Leave You Feeling Unsettled appeared first on Consequence.
Like director George Miller’s other collaborators, composer Tom Holkenborg knew all about Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga prior to the making of Fury Road, all those years ago. Everything except “if Warner Bros. would greenlight this movie,” he tells Consequence. “That’s a business decision. But I knew what was in [Miller’s] head. So I knew when we were working on Mad Max: Fury Road that if there were a prequel coming after that, everything needed to be set up in such a way that it would be the perfect handoff.”
The result is one of the year’s most acclaimed films so far, an epic adventure that reveals how its titular heroine (played as an adult by Anya Taylor-Joy) survived the Wasteland as a child, and found herself in the position to change the balance of power there for good.
Holkenborg, also known as Junkie XL, knows he writes a very specific style of music, “a specific choice for types of melodies I like and harmonies that I like when it comes to an orchestral-type score, like a Black Mass for instance, or even, for that matter, Sonic the Hedgehog. To me, they’re all different movies, but they’re all the same. Sonic is an alien on Earth, and he wants recognition for who he is. He wants a family, he wants people who love him and respect him. It’s the same with Furiosa.”
It’s a pattern Holkenborg sees extending throughout Miller’s work in particular. “If you go to Happy Feet, the little penguins — exactly the same thing. Babe: Pig in the City, The Witches of Eastwick — it’s the same story, but told differently. And that’s what I’m trying to do musically as well.”
Prior to working on his score for Furiosa, Holkenborg didn’t need to revisit his work on Fury Road because “it’s all here,” he says while tapping his noggin. “Welcome to the brains of musicians. We remember the first song that we played on the guitar. We remember what we wrote on the piano 25, 30 years ago. It’s like muscle memory that certain athletes have.”
Being aware of what had come in Fury Road was essential to making Furiosa on every level. For example, Holkenborg knew from Miller that when his score for the first movie included a flourish meant to invoke Furiosa’s memories of “the green place,” “it would have complications for what we would do on Furiosa.”
Behind the scenes of Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (courtesy of Warner Bros.)
Also, the requirements of Furiosa were quite a bit different from Fury Road, given a key distinction between the two films. “The most important thing to remember here is that Fury Road is a third-person-perspective movie,” Holkenborg says. “There are so many different things in this movie, so it’s hard to go under the skin of each character. It’s impossible because there are too many of them.”
Meanwhile, he continues, “Furiosa is an odyssey that takes place over plus 20 years, and George was very specific [while making Fury Road] that it’s going to be first-person perspective. Whatever the movie will be, whatever the acting will be, whatever the music will be, it’ll always be the Wastelands through the eyes of Furiosa. Which changes everything.”
Specifically, this means that “the score in the first hour is relatively relaxed — it’s not super-present the way that it was with Fury Road, because we have to build her view on things.” Thus, a scene in which a six-year-old Furiosa witnesses an unspeakable tragedy doesn’t feature a sad melody, because “a six-year-old in the wasteland doesn’t even know what a string orchestra is. But what is happening in that moment is that her heart is almost exploding out of her chest and there’s sheer panic in her head. That has major implications as to what the music is going to be.”
For “pretty much everything that is not strings, didgeridoo, and duduk” on the soundtrack, Holkenborg found what he describes as a “really weird” Buchla synthesizer system, one that he says is “quite more scientific than any other synthesizer. It never found its way to the mainstream. And it always became this really obscure thing. I acquired one a few years ago, and I knew immediately when I started playing around with it that it was the thing for us to use for this movie. It really defines the quality of the sound of Furiosa.”
Holkenborg says Miller communicates what he’s looking for from the music in terms of the film’s characters: “He would say, ‘I need something that pictures the darkest of Gods, the caves of hell — the darkest person who could ever be on Earth. I need something for that.’ Which we hear on the main title, and it comes back multiple times in the film.”
Additionally, Miller asked Holkenborg to create “a heartbeat” for the character of Furiosa, that would be heard throughout the whole movie. “I don’t know how you’re going to make it, but I need something that is pushing us forward, that is being felt than heard,” is how Holkenborg describes Miller’s request. “How do you create music that is felt but not heard?”
Fortunately, Holkenborg knew the answer, thanks to his Junkie XL experience. “Coming from the electronic music world, it’s almost a part of my DNA,” he says. “The heartbeat is really pushed in the very low frequencies, so primarily the really big subwoofers that are in the front of the theater, that fill the space with theater-rattling frequencies.”
The result, Holkenborg say, had a visceral impact on early viewers: “They said, ‘I felt so uncomfortable at certain moments in the film, and I don’t know why.’ They wouldn’t say anything about the music, because people don’t register a heartbeat as music. They register it in their chest and in their stomach. They just feel it. That’s what a heartbeat does, because we have a heart. So when something is competing with our heartbeats, we usually feel uncomfortable.”
To make sure that the effect was felt, Holkenborg specifically asked Miller for the opportunity to serve as a re-recording mixer on the film — an opportunity to go back to his early work in the industry as an engineer. “That’s how I started. Engineering is part of my upbringing. It’s been part of my aesthetic. All my life I’ve been mixing my own albums. So I just asked George, and he thought it was a brilliant idea.”
In that role, Holkenborg worked alongside Robert Mackenzie (an Oscar-winning sound designer and mixer whose credits include The Power of the Dog and Hacksaw Ridge) to mix “the final results of the film that you saw. It was an eight-week adventure where you have to imagine a very massive theater — there are no chairs in it, there’s just equipment. And Rob and I are looking at a massive screen close to the size of IMAX, alone with a few other technicians and George, and we’re listening exactly at the same level as it is in the theater, so you know the exact impact of what you’re doing.”
Adds Holkenborg, “I just love the rock and roll aspect of music. Even when it’s just an orchestral score, I try to mix it as if it’s a rock and roll band, and I think that that has a specific sound and people pick on up on it. And I just really love what I do.”
Holkenborg hasn’t saved any ideas for another potential Mad Max movie, since “we never know if there’s going to be another movie.” However, he adds, “you have to make sure that you can live with the choices that you make right now. Because if there’s going to be something else, you need to make sure to create that throughline, because George has a story that pans over more than 50 years in the Wasteland. He’s got everything detailed out from when Immortan Joe was just a kid. So I have to make sure that whatever I come with musically is a match to what he already has in his head.”
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is in theaters now, and the score is now also available.
Here’s Why the Furiosa Soundtrack May Leave You Feeling Unsettled
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