Oscar-nominated composer Daniel Pemberton is a quadruple threat — at least — this year with scores in four movies, as well as the TV series “Slow Horses.”
The British film music writer composed the soundtracks to movies including “The Drama,” with its mischievous flutes recorded at Abbey Road Studios; “Masters of the Universe”; and Oscar contenders “Ink,” “Project Hail Mary,” and “Musk.” On this week’s edition of IndieWire’s “Screen Talk” podcast, co-hosts Anne Thompson and Ryan Lattanzio spoke to Pemberton about his multi-hyphenate journey to composing, which began in video games but included breakout work on Ridley Scott’s “The Counselor.”
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“With ‘Hail Mary,’ it was like it had no map, and it was like we gotta make this up as we go along. And that’s thrilling, but also terrifying. And so we spent a huge amount of time, like, just trying out ideas, experimenting, finding unusual textures and sounds, approaches, and that would slowly feed itself into the movie or end up in the bin,” said Pemberton, who also wrote an original song called “Let Me Sell You a Dream” that’s sung by David Byrne in Alex Gibney’s “Musk.” (Gibney was the special guest on last week’s episode of “Screen Talk.”)
Elsewhere on the podcast, we also review (i.e., eviscerate) Taika Waititi’s confoundingly awful dystopian sci-fi movie “Klara and the Sun,” an adaptation of Nobel Prize-winning author Kazuo Ishiguro and starring Jenna Ortega, who’s on a big-screen losing streak after terrible reviews for her last several movies. Like her co-star Amy Adams, she’s faring better these days on television (see Netflix’s “Wednesday”).
We also catch up on “I Play Rocky” and the latest developments in the awards season race — plus, the C-suite freefall happening at Netflix amid the ousting of film head Dan Lin.
Listen to the episode below or on your preferred podcast platform.