'Bliss' Composer Will Bates On Scoring the New Owen Wilson Movie and A Decade of Collaboration With Mike Cahill
“Every time I do a new project with Mike, it always is kind of pushing me to do some sort of new thing that I've never done before.”
Will Bates. Photo Credit: Kevin Shea Adams
‘BLISS’ is the newest sci-fi story from writer and director Mike Cahill starring Owen Wilson and Salma Hayek. Premiering February 5th on Amazon Prime, the film is a love story set against a simulated reality and blends futuristic visuals with the analog aspects of human emotion. Composer Will Bates similarly combines digital synth sounds with a traditional orchestral score to capture the mind-bending tone of the movie.
In addition to a beautiful score, Bates also wrote the original song, “You and I,” with lyrics sung by his friend and fellow musician, Skye Edwards of the band Morcheeba. Her breathy harmonies combined with rousing violin stings are thrillingly juxtaposed and as Bates puts it, “everything being cranked through, I just kind of wanted to like, push everything into the red for a moment.” Having a musical history with Edwards, he explains their collaboration for this film “happened really organically.” He continues, “[Mike Cahill] shot this movie in the summer of 2019. We were kind of getting to the end of the post-production process and Mike was kind of like ‘You know, I’ve been thinking about shooting an epilogue for the movie and Amazon are into it.’ ”
Bates adds, “So, he wrote this epilogue and we talked about there being a vocal version of the love theme during this sequence at the end of the movie and, as I think happened to so many movies in production or post-production at that moment, they had to stop shooting. Obviously, they couldn’t shoot the prologue until like, the spring of last year. So, I was like, ‘I’ve got this old friend in London, who’s a wonderful singer’ and he knew the band Morcheeba. He was like ‘Oh yeah, call her.’ ”
From there, Bates went off and wrote lyrics for “You and I” and Cahill loved it so much, he “recut an entire scene in the movie to feature the song which is this wonderful scene where Owen and Salma’s characters have like, magical powers and they’re in a roller skating rink and then making people fall over and stuff; it’s really great.” Amazon also just released a music video for the song which was shot during quarantine with a crew essentially “yelling instructions through the letterbox,” Bates jokes.
Photo Credit: Amazon
Bates and the writer/director Mike Cahill have had a working relationship and friendship for a decade now collaborating on such projects as “Another Earth,” “I Origins,” and “The Magicians.” “Yeah, it is a decade which is so great. We met in New York through some mutual friends. And I worked on ‘Another Earth,’ and then ‘I Origins,’ and then he started getting into television. We did the first show and right after the premiere of ‘I Origins,’ he told me that he was going to start doing this show called ‘The Magicians,’ just the pilot. And I’d never done television before and I was like, all right, I'll give that a go. So, we just started doing that and then that, of course, led to five seasons of ‘The Magicians.’ And then he brought me on to his next show, which is called ‘The Path’ which, that led to three seasons and then another show called ‘Nightflyers.’ And then another one called ‘Rise.’ So, we've done a lot of television in between the second and third movie that we've done together.”
The simpatico relationship between the composer and director lends to the creative process with both influencing each other’s work and Bates mentions, “he always brings me on quite early. I mean even for ‘Bliss,’ I read the script for ‘Bliss’ in 2017, you know and I think that we even started talking about music way back then, which is nuts. So, it's always been a case of writing sketches. The goal is always to have my stuff in there when he's editing. So, we never really used temp. We never really have reference tracks or anything like that it’s just always like this very symbiotic kind of trusting relationship that is- I'm so grateful for and I think is a very precious thing for composers and directors and any creative collaborators to have people that you just like, really love and you know, we have a- there’s just such mutual respect with the two of us that we can really do some cool, weird stuff together.”
While some directors can get married to temporary music scores during editing, Bates says, “If anything, it's the opposite, where I'll like write a little sketch, and give it to Mike and then six months later, we'd like you know, I've done the sketch and I've orchestrated and I've got players, and it's bigger, and like more developed, and he's like, ‘I liked it when it was really raw,’ you know, so that's happened at times. But yeah, generally we kind of avoid temp, which is great. It's always about kind of finding something that's very specific, like a tone that is specific to a certain project and we've done so many things together. But I feel like every time I do a new project with Mike, it always is kind of pushing me to do some sort of new thing that I've never done before. So I feel like it's, it's always a real fun challenge.”
‘Bliss’ fits the bill for new challenges as Bates got to work with a full orchestra for the first time to compose the score. “Yeah, I don't know how but I've managed to get through my entire career without having that experience has always been like- I use string players but it'll always be like, a quartet or quintet or soloists. So, I feel like I have made a pretty good career blagging the orchestra so it was lovely to finally call up and be like, ‘Dude, we can do an actual thing now. And again, like talking like using friends it was, it was lovely to sort of finally do a project that had a few more resources than normal and call up some musicians that I've worked with over the years and put everyone in one room. Like, the conductor was actually the cellist from ‘Another Earth’ and ‘I Origins.’ There’s quite a featured solo cello in both of those movies and since those projects, he’s now like, the musical director of the Orlando Philharmonic Orchestra is like, kind of become a bit of a badass. So, he was the conductor, which I thought was kind of a nice, sort of poetic little thing.”
In regards to leitmotifs and melodies, Bates says, “It really depends. I think generally, I'm really drawn to melody. And that's always, to me, like, unlocking that melody unlocks the whole job for me. And that's sort of always the beginning of the writing process. And then of course, yeah, sometimes, you know, something that's too busy can be distracting and you have to do what's necessary for the scene, but I think I, I beat myself up a lot trying to get that tune. Like, it's always melody that that draws me in and I think that's the eureka moment when you land on that. That tune, you know, could only live with that character or that situation. Like that’s that feeling that we're all chasing, I think to get that moment. But yeah, generally, even if it’s, by the end of the process, has been sort of taken, it's had a sledgehammer taken to it. It's been, like, manipulated beyond recognition. Every every project always begins with melody.”
“My happy place seems to be the fusing of the organic stuff and the electronic stuff.”
Will Bates. Photo Credit: Kevin Shea Adams
Bates also revealed some of the influences on his writing. “I mean, I think it all started for me when I was five or six years old with John Williams and ‘Star Wars.’ You know, like, when I realized that all those pieces, ‘Superman’, ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark,’ ‘Jaws,’ that all my favorite things were all written by one person, it was just like, how is that possible? And I think from that moment on, I was like, I want to do that. And so he has a lot to answer for. Bernard Hermann is a huge influence. I think my string writing has a lot of Hermann in it. The first record that I bought was Ennio Morricone's score to ‘The Good, The Bad and The Ugly,’ so I love him too. He's kind of so all over the place, like his stuff can be so experimental and crazy. And then he'll do that kind of electronic stuff is super weird and out there and I think is wonderful.”
‘Bliss’ treads the thematic tides of human consciousness and technological singularity which Bates explored through the score: “I love synths. I’m kind of an analog synth junkie, my studio is just filled - this is my home studio - but my other studio in North Hollywood is kind of like a synth museum these days. And for whatever reason, I feel like science fiction, just connects well with those colors and my happy place seems to be the fusing of the organic stuff and the electronic stuff. You know, when I use electronics, I like to manipulate it and in as human a way as possible and kind of blur the lines between what's electronic and what's real, what's organic. I think, you know, when you, I guess you'll see ‘Bliss’ next week when it comes out but that's kind of the whole idea of the movie like what, which reality is the one that's the real reality. And you know, the electronics and the kind of gritty sort of sci-fi elements with the kind of human lush romantic textures, you know, just kind of really made sense. There was so much opportunity to do some fun, weird, thematic kind of Easter eggs in this film. There are weird little musical messages that are placed in there that are similar to the way that he's doing it with the camera. There's a lot of cool cinematic tricks to kind of make you feel deja vu and stuff like that. You know, we were talking about doing that in a musical way as well.”
Finally, Bates has worked in several genres and says, “I think I've been lucky enough to work with directors that jump around a lot, do all sorts of random stuff. I also work in different areas, like documentaries and then some of the filmmakers and documentaries end up making features or narratives. So, I feel like I've done a lot of different things, but the one thing I've never done is a Western. I guess that goes back to Morricone…it might have all started with buying that album and there's something that really draws me to that and you know, as a Brit, I love the desert and I find it so evocative and alien. So, yeah, that's one thing that I've never done. So that would be fun. Every project is so unique and challenging and different and it's important to me to bring something new to the table every time I start a new thing. And, you know, the best way to get inspired to do something completely different is to have it been a completely new genre, I guess, that I've never tried before.”
‘Bliss’ is available to stream on Amazon Prime Video February 5th. Check out the audio of the full interview with Will Bates below.
You can also watch the video for “You and I” below featuring Skye Edwards (courtesy of Prime Video).