‘Rise’ Composer Ré Olunuga on Giving The Right Notes to the Antetokounmpos’ True Story
Composer Ré Olunuga talks to FilmSpeak on using the right amount of rhythm as motif to build drama and elevate the acting on display in Akin Omotoso’s Rise, now streaming on Disney+.
Composer Ré Olunuga had the huge responsibility of scoring Akin Omotoso’s Rise for Disney+, which tells the true story of how Giannis Antetokounmpo became one of the greatest basketball players to have ever graced an NBA court. Eventually, his brothers Thanasis and Kostas joined him (with their younger brother, Alex, playing in the G League) and they eventually became the first sibling trio to win the NBA championship. And on holding the responsibility, Olunuga wanted to be true to the story being told:
“The biggest responsibility for me was that it was a real story. It’s a real experience, and they're NBA stars. But this story was about the journey their family lived. So that was the strongest consideration for me. As much as we have all these fans around the world because they are amazing athletes, I wanted to be true to what came before anything else. And that's what I held on to. I did not want to overdramatize anything, but I wanted the audience to still feel the reality of the emotions that this family is going through.”
And on conveying emotion through music without overshadowing the dramatic power brought on by the acting, Olunuga said that “there isn’t one way to do it.”
“Sometimes you experiment by trying different things, and something feels just right. With this film, there are a few things that I wanted to do. Because, even as real as it was, it is also just an amazing story. It’s a perfect story for Disney. So I definitely wanted it to feel like a Disney score. But on the other hand, there are things that I wanted to contribute to the idea of what a Disney film sounds like. And then we get into the performances.
The score has to work in tandem with whatever's happening on screen. They're always these pockets where you can fit the music in a certain way. And sometimes you're mirroring the emotional energy that the actors are presenting on screen. You're accentuating it for the audience. Because the performances were so great, but they were also subtle because they had to feel real.”
On working with director Akin Omotoso, Olunuga expressed his love for his work and the fact that “he brought so much love to the story”:
“From the first conversation that we had, we were on the same page. I read the script before I had a conversation with him, and I was blown away. I was blown away by just everything [Giannis’] family went through and the extraordinary opportunity of a film like this, where the success actually happened. No, it's not a fantasy, it's not some kind of aspirational possibility. This actually happened, you know, he did get drafted. And he did take the [Milwaukee] Bucks to the championship.
It was incredibly moving. And the first conversation I had with Akin and [producer] Bernie [Goldmann], I talked about whatever opportunity would be to present a story like this musically, as a modern-day epic, but also to tell the story with the resources that you can have with a Disney project.
But you always want to bring it back to that sense of truth and reality. Within that, you’re able to achieve it with very subtle, lyrical lines in piano, whilst leaving room for the epic moments, through the training montages and the games and things like that. Through these moments, there's an energy that you want to bring to them.”
On the challenges of crafting a dramatic score for a film grounded in reality, Olunuga said that it happens at the start, especially by finding the right musical palette that would serve the story:
“Once I found the palette of what I wanted the music to sound and my end to the story everything else is easy. Everything else just flows. I knew that I wanted rhythm to be a huge part of the score, especially rhythm as motif. It's an idea that I had before for many, many years, and haven't had the opportunity to use it on a score. But the idea of using rhythm as a motif really worked with this film. Because the game of basketball has this rhythm to it. But that is also the energy that I wanted to give to the audience and to have them have a sense of moving forward in time and being connected in that way to the story.”
The most important element for him in crafting the score was to take the audience on an emotional journey, to which the film culminates brilliantly when Giannis Antetokounmpo gets drafted to the Milwaukee Bucks in its final scene. The music swells up and gives the right amount of emotional levity the scene needs to make it effective, even if we know exactly what will happen. To that end, Ré Olunuga recalled seeing this particular sequence at the film’s premiere, with Giannis in attendance:
“I keep getting messages from people and I saw it in the premiere. I saw people crying, and that was a unique challenge because everybody knows what was going to happen. Especially watching it at the premiere where Giannis is there, it’s so great that it worked out amazingly.
So with that piece of music, the tension has to be very subtle and slowly sneak into the audience's consciousness. And, in creating that atmosphere for a while, it gave me the opportunity to just bring this amount of happiness at end of it. It’s hard to describe your own music, but I want people to experience it on their own and to feel the happiness, but also have the context within that of [Giannis and Thanasis’] journey. It has been a tough journey, and an uphill climb. But they arrived. They arrived at the end of it.”
