Composer Anthony Willis Talks About the Unique Score of ‘M3GAN’
FilmSpeak talks to composer Anthony Willis about crafting the darkly funny score that accompanies ‘M3GAN’.
Two months into 2023, Gerard Johnstone’s ‘M3GAN’ is already a massive success. With the industry consistently shifting due to the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, original horror has thrived in theatres but is still a gamble. For composer Anthony Willis, he never expected the movie to resonate so much with audiences, even knowing how good the film was:
“The way M3GAN [Jenna Davis] was captured was phenomenal. Seeing M3GAN come to life through visual effects and Jenna Davis’ vocal performance was excellent. She made something special for M3GAN, and it lives within the movie.”
On approaching the score for M3GAN, Willis and Johnstone did not want to emulate films like Annabelle and Child’s Play but instead tried to do something original with the music:
“Because it’s a new doll, how can we score it differently? Gerard was always drawn to very organic colors and slightly more sophisticated things than just going for the tech aspect, but more towards the psychology. I always gravitated towards vibraphone for the tech because it hangs out. It has an ambiguous territory between slightly synthetic sounding, a little sci-fi, and slightly industrial. There is quite a lot of vibraphone. It’s oscillating, almost like a synth-pop in the score, especially for M3GAN to process her environment. It’s teetering on that line between being organic and artificial. When she down the rabbit hole into believing that she's this real personality, the music pushes into a noir vibe, a sort of femme fatale vibe. That was the starting point, and it was a lot of fun.”
Director Gerard Johnstone was very involved in the scoring process, with Willis citing that “he is involved in every part of making this movie and making it come to life. For the music, he had particular ideas about songs. He chose most of the songs in the movie. With the score, he pushed it toward a contemporary fantasy aspect. One day, he said, “What if we made this more like a contemporary Alice in Wonderland or a digital Enchantress?”. We looked for a set of seductive qualities. He was attracted to the idea of voices and creepy female voices. He pushed me to dig deeper and explore many different colors. That came down to M3GAN herself. For most of the movie, she's trying to impersonate or fulfill childish innocence. However, when it comes to her execution of protection, it's incredibly inhuman. It's robotic and intense. She’s powerful and has no limits.”
Balancing out horror, action, and comedy wasn’t a significant challenge because “the film itself does a great job at pacing those moments out. You get to embrace the action moments, and then they're often punctuated by comedy. My job is to ensure I punctuated the comedy correctly and not to tread on it. So everything I did had to ramp up the context of the comedy, make a little space for it, and carry it on. It was a challenge to balance out the magic of it with the darkness of it because those two things are quite extreme. The intense aggression versus the more innocent music is very far apart. But I kept experimenting and trying to balance things out. Ultimately, I’m very pleased with the result.”
The first piece of music Willis composed for the film was the original song “Tell Me Your Dreams,” which sets the tone for the rest of the movie’s comedic atmosphere:
“I wrote a tune for Gerard. I sent it to him, and he liked it a lot. He immediately sent back these great lyrics, which included the “Tell Me Your Dreams” title. It was brilliant. We needed it in its most raw form for them to shoot the scene and program the voice movements of the animatronic M3GAN to it. Gerard wanted it to be a full-on Disney parody, like “Somewhere Out There” from An American Tail. It is tough to do because, on the one hand, it needs to be hilarious that she starts singing and catches people off-guard. But it couldn’t just be funny. On the other hand, it needed to be a sincere moment for everyone to feel so emotional. That kind of nostalgic tone was exactly the right one to achieve that. It’s amusing to see how audiences have flipped out when they realize that the doll is singing to them. I think it embodies the special feeling that this film brings, and I got to do a song like that on a horror film was a lot of fun.”
And “once it's been established that M3GAN likes to sing, then the “Titanium” moment was so great. This one was a little more straightforward but a great lyrical choice. Gerard said that we could do it like a soothing lullaby and something that's worrying her to sleep but something that still allows M3GAN to get into it. At first, it sounds a little creepy. And then it gets warmer and slightly bigger. It has been something people have probably talked about the most in terms of the music of the film. It’s the one that's getting a lot of plays on the soundtrack, which is exciting.”