Composers Reinhold Heil and Charlie Clouser on scoring TV shows

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Reinhold Heil

SundanceTV’s series Deutschland 83 ends its run Aug. 5 at 11pm ET, so this is a good time to get into the mind of the man who composed the musical score for the series, Reinhold Heil. In a twist, Heil and another composer, Charlie Clouser — who most recently scored Wayward Pines — both interviewed each other recently about their art and business, exclusively for Channel Guide. They chatted about everything from finding the right tone for a series to what happens when the series they have invested their creative energy in is canceled, and here are some of the highlights.

Reinhold Heil: Nina Hagen, I was in her band in the mid ’70s and stuck with the rest of the band, without her, had a pretty successful run in Germany and a few of the neighboring countries in the early ’80s, during exactly that time [depicted in Deutschland 83]. That band was not as artsy. It was commercially successful. It was pretty eclectic. We did some more sophisticated stuff, but there was also a bunch of very pretty pieces. Of course, those were the special ones that charted, and people still talk about. I think it’s one of the reasons why they gave me the job for Deutschland 83.

Charlie Clouser: The score is very modern-sounding.

Heil: That’s what they wanted. They actually did want that. It took a while for us to kind of find the sound. If you actually follow the entire series, it gets a little bit more electronic towards the end. The beginning was … There were other people involved giving their opinions. I think you see a bit of a trajectory and it’s interesting. I also have a feeling when I watch Wayward Pines, which I have gotten to episode five, so I have big insight now into where the story’s going or where it could possibly be going. It definitely … the first development has been taken, so to speak, and I actually did feel a difference in the approach with the score. I thought that was an interesting thing there. There’s a bit more variation there, which has to be because of way the story is going. Did it take you that long to kind of find your footing with the show lines, or had you worked with them before?

Clouser: I hadn’t worked with anyone on Wayward Pines before that project but it was kind of interesting how it transpired, because I hadn’t read the books. I came into replace a composer that they were trying to work with for a couple of months on the pilot episode, and they were approaching a deadline for the first episode. I came in and did a couple of audition pieces. They said “Great. You’re hired. Let’s go.” I began work on the first episode without knowing the larger scope of where the story was going to go. In the first episode, it’s sleepy mountain town and everybody in the town is in on something, but you don’t know what it is. … There as no hint in the first couple of episodes of the epic story line that was to come, so I kind of began the thing with a claustrophobic sonic pallet, and wanted things to sound very small and that they were … as though the music was happening inside the head of Matt Dillon’s character, Ethan. …  As it went on, I learned about the storyline and the epic and expansive nature of the larger story arch, I kind of learned about that as we worked our way through the episodes. At one point, I jokingly was giving a hard time to the show runners and saying “Why didn’t you tell me that this was going to turn into this epic large scope of story. I might have been able to hit at some of that in the earlier episodes. They said “We’re glad you didn’t, then that definitely created this shift in the scale and the tone of the score, as the story develops.” It started out with me just being unprepared and not having read all the books and researched it sufficiently, because they were in a hurry to get started, and it turned out to actually be a benefit, because then that really exaggerated the shift in tone of the score, as the story went on.

Heil: I get it. I think that shift really happened at the beginning of Episode 5 [of Deutschland 83]. … Now, of course, I’m intrigued. That’s always my problem. I always want to stick with something, when it intrigues me. I sometimes wish it wouldn’t, because I don’t have to time to really watch. On the other hand, I really do like to watch, and I have to watch what other people are doing.

Clouser: I’m the opposite. I love to get sucked into stories and waste tons of time. I think I’m three episodes into Deutschland 83 and I love the tone that you’ve gotten out of it, and also they really did a great job of the look, everything from the costumes and makeup to set design and just the photography has a sort of a dingy feel that although I wasn’t in Germany in the early ’80s, I would like to think that’s what it looked and felt like.

Heil: Maybe that was the reason why they asked me, because they knew that I was there at the time as a grown up person already. I was in the music scene and I was in Berlin. I had a first hand encounter with a lot of the things that were actually happening in Berlin. It all happened in the context, in a historical content, the stuff that happened. Totally fiction. The story itself is fiction, but the context is totally historic, including certain … I don’t want to spoil it for anybody, but including certain major events that are happening, actually happened in West Berlin, as I was living there.

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Charlie Clouser

Clouser: Here’s another question I had written down that said, like me, you have somewhat of a background with electronic music in the beginning of your career, and synthesizers and so forth. As I listen to so many of your scores, there’s so much acoustic sounds and unusual instruments and unusual processing of the acoustic sounds. Do you find that one approach or one style of instrumentation is more difficult than the other to get the kind of results that you want and/or do you find that directors and producers prefer one flavor over another and does that kind of guide you in one direction or another or is it truly your love of sonic experimentation that drives you in one direction or another?

Heil: My love of sonic experimentation is definitely unbroken. I think with the technology going where it’s going, I wish I was born a little later, because I love where everything … the ease with which you can actually treat sound and manipulate sound to sonic experimentation. It’s very much depending on what the filmmakers want and a lot of filmmakers wanted and what I try to say to them “If you want a contemporary, but at the same time sort of sonicly organic sound, then it makes sense to actually set in and perform organic instruments, and then manual the sounds not too much, but in a way that makes them unusual and at the same time, still maintain the organic character.” I try and bring a little bit of that into pretty much every score. Even if they ask me to do just a more traditional orchestral thing, I try to always make it a little bit of a hybrid, but again, the filmmaker will dictate and you will, at the end of the day, do what they filmmaker wants, and it’s all a dialog that happens there. … At the beginning of each project it’s the way of finding out the languages … find a common language because music can’t really be talked about properly, so you have to explore what the filmmaker means when he says something. That’s one of the more difficult processes at the beginning of working with somebody. I had that with Deutschland 83, because I had never worked with these people. It was the same with Helix. With Helix, I was trying and I was getting such a good feedback, in terms of my near approaches that I was really happy to see that I’d finally found somebody who found an outlet for a bunch of the experiments that I was always trying to set for the filmmaker but it didn’t really fly.

Clouser: I try to make the score for Wayward Pines sound always unsteady and uncertain and have an element and wobbliness and out of tune-ness that would tie into Matt Dillard’s character traumatic head injury. At the beginning of the series and as the series progresses and he becomes more steady on his feet and kind of takes control of his situation, I tried to make the score get more solid and firm and leave behind some of those more wobbly and unsteady elements to kind of follow his characters progression from an injured person who can barely walk out of the hospital to kind of the guy in control of this whole situation.

Heil: That was cool, I am impressed. … Normal reality is that you often don’t know until months after the show ran whether you are even going to get a new season and that’s why they have to kind of leave it half open half closed so to speak.

Clouser: That’s definitely happened on a series I did a few years ago on NBC called Las Vegas,  which ran for 115 episodes or so and it was always up in the air whether there would be another season. We used to in the first couple of seasons they would renew it fairly early on and by the time we … Well this is when we were doing 23 episodes a season but by the 5th or 6th one you would know, okay we are coming back for another series because it’s doing well. When it finally did end we were kind of surprised that we got the 6th season out but then we figured, okay we are cruising along but when it finally did end it ended very abruptly to the point that when the word came down because we were actually doing the post production and they were doing the picture editing and stuff in building right above where the set was and when the word finally came down. … I was actually at the post production facility doing a music spotting session and all of a sudden we start hearing a lot of scuffle and buffle out in the offices and after we came out of the spotting session we said, “What was going on out there?” and he said, “Oh, we are cancelled and it’s effective immediately. We’ve just wrapping up this episode we are shooting and they are trying to return all the equipment that they have been renting for 5 years. They are trying to get it out of here today.” … This stuff had been in place for years. We had been on this location for 5 years or so and when they finally dismantled it was like being at the loading dock after a U2 concert had ended and 18 wheelers lined up and they are just a bunch a roadies just wheeling this stuff onto the truck as fast as they can.

Charlie Clouser’s score for Wayward Pines can be heard by streaming the show on Hulu. Reinhold Heil’s score for Deutschland 83 can be heard on SundanceTV; the series ends Aug. 5 at 11pm ET. Heil also composes the score for TNT’s Legends, which returns this fall.