Ayla Ruby
Jeff Russo has composed some of the most notable scores for film and television, including For All Mankind and Bosch: Legacy. Ripley is Russo’s latest endeavor. The mini-series is from the Academy Award-winning writer and director Steven Zaillian (Schindler’s List) and Netflix. This isn’t the first time the Patricia Highsmith novel has been adapted for the big or small screen, but it is the latest endeavor, with a fresh take on the character being played by All of Us Strangers‘ Andrew Scott.
Russo’s score threads old-world sounds with tense notes appropriate for the black-and-white psychological thriller. There’s even a ton of playfulness – at least as much as you can have with a character like Tom Ripley. Over Zoom, we talked Russo him about his journey to the project and how the black and white color scheme for the show didn’t necessarily change his composing. He shared how traditional Italian and Sicilian music influenced the score, plus so much more. Read ahead for the full conversation about Ripley. (PS, if you’re fans of the Alien franchise, Russo even briefly talks about what’s next with that.)
[This interview has been edited for clarity.]
Ayla Ruby: So we’re talking Ripley, and I’d love to know a little bit about your journey to this project and how you got on board and what appealed to you about it.
Jeff Russo: Well, I had worked with Steve’s Zaillian before on a show called The Night Of back in 2016. We were having dinner one night and he said, I’m adapting Patricia Highsmith’s novel. Do you know of it? And I was like, well, yeah, of course. I knew the book and I had known that there was a few movies based on the material. I had never seen the movies. And he asked me actually about that. He said, have you seen the movie? And I said, no, I hadn’t seen the movie yet. And he was like, good. But should I see it? And he said, no, don’t watch it. And I said, okay, I’ll read the book. And I did. And that’s how we sort of got started on that.
Ayla Ruby: Oh, awesome. So when you’re reading the book and then eventually the script, how does that work for you? Do you start to hear things or start to picture things and how it could work? Or are you just more immersed in the story and then you go back?
Jeff Russo: Well, I started reading the scripts and I started sketching some ideas, themes and the such. And when I started sending him stuff, one of the first things he said was, this is all very nice and very beautiful, but we’re not making a romance, romantic sort of thing, which is where I sort of was veering towards. He said, we’re making a thriller about a psycho killer. And I was like, okay then. So then I started writing some other, I started sort of reformulating the themes that I’d written into this sort of new paradigm and I was off to the races at that point.
Ayla Ruby: So let’s dig into I guess the collaboration a little bit. So obviously music is your thing. You live music, you talk music. How does it work when you’re collaborating with someone like him who film is their primary language, not music, or TV is their language and characters, but not music? How do you work together to come up with this world?
Jeff Russo: How do I come up with the world?
Ayla Ruby: Well, no, because the music supports the characters. It supports the story.
Jeff Russo: I just try to get inside of it. I try to get into the character, into the emotion of a scene, into the emotion of the tone of things. I really do get a lot of that from the script, but in this case, I got a lot of it from the script and I got a lot of it from the script, but mostly I got it from what I was seeing, as I was seeing, as he started sending me cuts, I started seeing this absolutely stunning looking film. And what I realized is the music, the bar for the music had to be raised as high as it could go. And I started second guessing myself like, oh my God, how am I going to do that? How am I raise it to be that good? I mean, Robert Elswit is a stunning cinematographer, and Steve, his vision is so clear and so extraordinary.
It was kind of daunting. But when you start just thinking about the story and thinking about the emotion of things, I started to sort of slip into it. Steve is not a big fan of character themes, and I thought I typically write character themes. I typically write motifs for certain characters, but in this show, there was really no need for a character theme. It was really situational and all relating to Tom. And so it was really every theme was Tom’s theme. And that sort of went hand in hand and coincided with what Steve was thinking about, which is he didn’t really want character themes. He wanted music that was going to relate to the scenes and those tied together because there were moments that were related to each other, which sort of leads me to what he asked me to do, which was he asked me to, after I had started writing episode one and two, he had asked me to jump to episode seven, write episode seven, and then see how that informs what you’re doing in episode one and two.
And it sort of reset my idea of how to go about writing this score. And I went and I wrote episode seven. Then what I realized is all of that music did really inform what I thought about doing for episode one and two in a deconstructed way. So I took themes that I wrote for episode seven. I started deconstructing them to see how they might work in those first few episodes, and it actually ended up working.
Ayla Ruby: Oh, okay. So it sounds like it almost changed your view of the story and how in the earlier episodes versus what you had done in seven.
Jeff Russo: I’m sorry, say again.
Ayla Ruby: So it sounds like it kind changed having that story or having those themes in seven changed your relationship with one and two.
Jeff Russo: Well, it didn’t necessarily change my relationship with it. It just gave me sort of a new way to look at it. Instead of thinking of the score in a linear way from beginning to end, it was like, well, let’s look at where he ends up and how will that sort of relate to where he begins, because he does take this journey and that journey is sort of down into the darkness of the depths of his mind, and I really wanted to be able to follow that. But I guess it’s easier to follow that path if you know where you’re ending versus at the beginning. You know what I mean?
Ayla Ruby: Yeah. Now, so you said you started composing when you would get cuts of this, how did the black and white of the series kind of influence your composing at all, or did it not?
Jeff Russo: I don’t know that it affected my composing. The black and white certainly added to tone what the show feels like. And I think that didn’t affect how I wrote, but it definitely affected how it made me feel as I was looking at things. So I would’ve probably told the story. I probably would’ve told the story in the same way had it been in color, but maybe I would’ve orchestrated it differently. It’s hard to say. I only know it as black and white, so I don’t know if it changed what I was doing. All I have is what I saw.
And I never saw anything in color. So it’s like I only ever saw it that way. So I can’t say whether or not it changed or affected how I looked at it. I mean, anything I looked at has an effect on me and how I go about writing something. So did it change how I approached it? Not specifically. He gave it to me. I looked at it, I wrote the same way anybody would’ve given me any project and here write it. Okay, look at it, write it. So I didn’t have a chance to look at it in color and wonder how I would do it in color, and would I do it differently if it would be black and white. So the answer to your question is probably no, it was what it was.
Ayla Ruby: Yeah, I think that makes sense too. Yeah, that totally makes sense. So there’s a lot of, obviously this series, tension is very important throughout the whole thing. Can you talk about using music to maintain the tension and did that change at all and the scenes in New York versus the scenes in Italy?
Jeff Russo: Well, the scenes in New York were few, right? We only had a few in the first episode to about half way. And yeah, that was a little bit of a different vibe.
It starts with this tone that doesn’t really change, but as the story unfolds, you sort of see more and more into the soul of Tom. But you catch a glimpse of it very early on end of the first episode, you definitely catch the glimpse of him looking into the mirror and sort of being that crazy dude that he is. So it wasn’t really all that different, and I didn’t treat New York differently than I did Italy except for that when I got, I was about halfway done with the score, maybe not even halfway, about a third of the way done with the score, Steve had called me and said, we should have some Sicilian and Italian style music that we can feather in to really put us in place and make it feel sort of believable. And I said, absolutely.
I started writing these sort of Sicilian, Italian pieces of music, and what I realized is that also lends to the sort of fun of the show, because as dark and as crazy as it is, it is fun. You still do have sort of a fun time watching him weasel his way out of situations and seeing the motors work and the gears turning in his head and some of the visuals are so breathtaking. That’s fun to me. So I wanted to be able to give it a little bit of a light fun tone as well.
Jeff Russo: That Italian, Sicilian style of music I think helped with that as well.
Ayla Ruby: Were there any musical influences going into that? Were there any-
Jeff Russo: No. I mean, it was just sort of me thinking about what traditional Sicilian music sounded like. Instrumentally is a lot of guitar, a lot of mandolin, a lot of accordion. And I used that. I did some research into that. I mean, with a name like Russo, I feel like I have at least some idea of what that means. And I am not pretending to be Italian because that’s far from my background in terms of, I mean, I grew up here in New York, but my point is the feeling was familiar to me. My dad listened to Italian music when I was a kid and a lot of classical music. So I did have some idea, but I sort of dove deep into dove deep, dived deep. I don’t know.
Ayla Ruby: It’s Friday. I understand.
Jeff Russo: I did do a deep dive into sort of traditional Italian and Sicilian music and came back with that instrumentation and feeling.
Ayla Ruby: I know we’re starting to get close on time, but was there anything that was challenging or just really gratifying professionally as a musician or just that you were able to pull off with this project?
Jeff Russo: Well, Steve is an exceptionally extraordinary filmmaker, and his trust in me is really a special thing. So he did give me a lot of leeway. He gave me a lot of slack to be able to write what I was feeling and to really get into it. And that’s always fantastic. We spend a lot of time thinking about where music will be very meaningful and where we don’t need music. I mean, episode three and episode five, they’re both episodes that don’t have a lot of music mean, especially in episode three. And the entire boat scene has not only no music, but no dialogue for 15 minutes or some very long period of time. And really the only sound you hear was created by our sound designer, which is the creaking of the boat and the moaning of the boat on the water, which was just incredible. Those types of moments in making a film, because filmmaking is a collaborative effort.
And it’s funny because last night we were doing a panel and it was Steve, Bob Elswit, the cinematographer, our production designer, our two editors, our sound designer and me. So basically all the creative people involved with really making this, I mean, obviously there’s a lot more people than that, but all of the sort of creative leads that were involved were all in the same room, which we had never been. I had never met the production designer, why would I meet the production designer?
He or they or whoever they are, but in this case, it’s a man. He’s in charge of making the production look a certain way, like building sets and designing the things and finding the sets and locations and stuff. And our cinematographer is shooting. I’m not usually involved in that. Sometimes I’ll go to set and immerse myself in the tone of what’s happening in order to set myself up for what I’m going to do, but generally speaking, I’m not really a part of that. So when we were all sitting there and we all realized, wow, we’ve never really spoken to each other, and yet here we are, we’ve all been collaborative in a way.
It really hit home. It’s like it takes a village to make a movie and to make a television show, and this village that we made, and Steve sort of put trust in all of us, and that kind of trust is thrilling to an artist, and we all sort of put to bear our skill and our art to create this thing. And so I would say yes in that way, that experience is incredible. And you don’t really get to have those types of thrilling experiences all the time. You try every project you do, you want to come out the other side thinking like, holy moly, that was incredible. And it happens sometimes and it doesn’t. But in this particular case, it really, really did happen really, really deeply.
Ayla Ruby: Well, that’s wonderful, and that’s a great sentiment, I think. Is there anything else you want people to know about the music for Ripley or anything you’re working on next?
Jeff Russo: I mean, I’ve just started the new Alien series from Noah Hawley, and that’s coming along swimmingly, so that’ll be fun. That’ll be fun. I don’t think that anybody will get to see any of it until sometime at the end of next year, but that’s been pretty thrilling.
Ayla Ruby: That’s awesome. Well, cool. Thank you so much for chatting.
Jeff Russo: Thank you very much.
Comments
Loading…