Composer Anne Nikitin On Scoring The Elizabeth Holmes Saga In Hulu's 'The Dropout'
Between Dopesick, Pam & Tommy, and even the upcoming Candy, it seems as if Hulu’s developed a habit of ripping real world stories from the headlines and adapting them as limited series. While the others deal with themes such as drugs, sex, and death, The Dropout stands out for its blatant attempt to decipher the mysterious and meme-able Elizabeth Holmes.
For those unfamiliar with Holmes or the reason she rose to notoriety, she built the now-defunct health tech company Theranos. Initially believed to be the home of a brand new revolutionary blood testing technology, it was ultimately revealed to be the front of a fraudulent operation led Holmes, who was lying and exaggerating about her company’s capabilities.
The Dropout captures every ounce of Holmes’ rise and fall, from her home life to her love life and even that questionably deep voice. While Academy Award-nominee Amanda Seyfried’s portrayal of Holmes is spot-on and too good to turn away from, it’s composer Anne Nikitin’s synth score that compels viewers to care.
Despite having worked on Netflix’s live action adaptation of FATE: The Winx Saga, Nikitin has a knack for scoring real life stories. This is evidenced by her work in both of Bart Layton’s films The Imposter and American Animals. Though she originally felt she was sliding right back into her comfort zone with The Dropout, in an exclusive interview with FilmSpeak Nikitin surprisingly admits that she struggled creating music for the show at first.
She says that very early on in production, the score went from being orchestra-based to synth-based. However, she had never worked with synths before. She said, “I started writing a whole bunch of tracks away from picture, just based on the script, and based on rough ideas of the first edit. And we were putting them into the cut [but] they weren't really working that well.”
Amanda Seyfried in The Dropout
She explains that there was one particular track she “doodled” together that wound working the best and becoming “the sound of Elizabeth Holmes.” That track, titled “Beijing”, became the basis for the rest of the project. The name is fitting considering Beijing is the place where the series implies Elizabeth Holmes was reborn. In the series, a trip abroad to China forever changes her life and instills an insatiable hunger to succeed regardless of any consequences.
As Nikitin discusses, the series does take some liberties with Holmes story. By the end, however, it’s apparent that Holmes was a truly complex person. Her lies and deceit and aside, she was smart. That’s what fascinated Nikitin so much. She says, “She actually was a very talented scientist, and I think very passionate about science. [She] just was completely led down the wrong way for all the wrong reasons.”