Director Jordan Peele shot Michael Appels five years ago with “Get Out.” Now, for Peele’s “Nope,” the Emmy nominee twice wrote his most ambitious score yet.
“It has all these different elements,” says Appels. “There is the awe and the wonder that the characters experience, but there is also the irony. Western aspects are legit and sarcastic.”
No combines science fiction, horror, and television broadcasts in a funny and sometimes terrifying experience. After their father is killed in a freak accident, Hollywood horse trainer siblings OJ and Emerald (Daniel Kaluuya, Keke Palmer) discover that there’s a UFO swirling in the clouds above their farm, and that might just be a sham. Their neighbor, former child star (Stephen Yeon) who runs an old-fashioned theme park in the West, finds a way to cash in on the phenomenon.
Hables had to find the right music for all of this. He even wrote park music that he heard emerging from bushes and buildings as tourists wandered, inspiring him with a brilliant take on both classical American Western music (Jerome Morros, “The Big Country”) and Italian Western pasta that followed (Ennio Morricone, “The Good,” The Bad and the Ugly”) for the same film.
“You can tell how much fun I had,” Apples laughs.
The composer’s early music of “No”, calm and pastoral, gives no hint of the frightening events to come. “Some of the signs have heart, because this is really the story of OJ and Emerald, their relationship as brother and sister, and this adventure they find themselves in,” he says.
However, the wonder and mystery they experience when they realize they are about to capture footage of a real UFO turns out to be something even more frightening. “Dread and awe overlap in this film,” Abeles explains.
So he resorted to writing complex chords including dashed styles, familiar from some of John Williams’ work in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, although Appels is quick to point out that the random, chaotic notes are “terrifying and confusing”, and that the piece’s superficial resemblance ( Flying objects that visit the Earth) is a coincidence.
Appels was recorded in May with the 75-piece Los Angeles Orchestra and 32-voice choir. Unlike Bell’s “Get Out” and “Us,” where Applees prepared scripts to be sung, “No” required a wordless chorus “for that sense of amazement.” But instead of the usual “oohs” and “ahs” heard in many movie clips, Abels had the singers “change the vowels” to create an odd acoustic sound.
“It’s very accurate, but it gives it a different kind of otherworldly quality that you don’t normally hear. I did my best to put Jordan Peele on it,” he says.
The composer says that Bell hates electronic sounds. “He is very aware of creating horror in a natural world. The moment he hears a sound electronically, he is taken out of the world he is trying to create. So I use virtual instruments when it comes to compositions and sound design.”
The director and composer are in constant dialogue during the months of creating the score. “He’s able to hear a single signal and give his feedback right away,” says Abeles. “He can instantly say what he likes, what he doesn’t like, or where he needs to go. He also loves a challenge – making him think of the scene or the music in a different way. And that includes every craftsman he works with.”
Peele even relays references to different places in the movie than the ones they were intended for. Abeles notes: “When he first started doing it, it was unsettling, but now I really like it, because I hear music differently and understand where he’s trying to go. It’s really helpful.”
Abeles spent more than three months writing music for “La” at the same time he was preparing his first opera, “Omar,” at the Spoleto Festival in South Carolina in May. The West Coast movie premiere with Los Angeles Opera on October 22.
Based on the true story of a West African Muslim scholar who was kidnapped into slavery in 1807, he collaborates with Rhiannon Giddens, a Grammy Award-winning American origins writer and performer. Also coming for Abels: “Breaking,” a fact-based drama starring John Boyega, set to premiere in late August.
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