Poor Things Interview: Composer Jerskin Fendrix On Creating A New Musical Language

Warning: Mild SPOILERS for Poor Things

Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things is a science-fiction romance film based on a 1992 book of the same name by Alasdair Gray. The movie centers on Emma Stone’s Bella, a reanimated woman who aims to experience the world as wants and desires are awakened within her. In addition to Stone, the film stars Willem Dafoe, Mark Ruffalo, and Rami Youssef in key roles; early reviews have praised the cast’s work on the film and cited Ruffalo’s hilarious and desperate performance as one of the actor’s best.

An equal star of Poor Things is the unique world that Lanthimos and the rest of the filmmakers have created, which features unforgettable sets, varied locations, and playful use of color. To help fully immerse viewers in the world and carry them through to the playful Poor Things ending, Lanthimos turned to English musician Jerskin Fendrix. Poor Things is Fendrix’s first feature film score, and the songwriter and producer’s unique approach to its composition makes it a standout element of the film.

Related

Poor Things Review: A Strange & Joyous Odyssey Features Emma Stone At Her Best

Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things is a horny, hedonistic, and hysterical gem of a film with an all-time great lead performance from Emma Stone. 

Screen Rant interviewed Jerskin Fendrix about defining his score, how he approached the film’s many sections, and more. Note: This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Jerskin Fendrix On Poor Things

Screen Rant: How do you describe this score to people?

Jerskin Fendrix: Oh, God. I mean, I try my best not to. I think it helps to know the genesis of it. I saw the script and I saw the designs, so I knew that it aesthetically was going to be as completely extraordinarily insane as it was. And based off the very early interactions, we decided we didn’t want to think about any other music. We didn’t want to think about other composers, any other film scores, or any other songs. The whole point was having zero reference and to try, from scratch, to think of a musical language that would be unique, and fully honestly serve the world, the characters, and, most importantly, Bella.

Weird is the word that is used. I know it’s different; not that it was deliberately trying to be different, but it was deliberately trying not to be the same, because I wanted this different language to use. On the occasions I have described it to friends, I think I’ve described it as cute and I’ve described it as naive.

I love that.

Jerskin Fendrix: In terms of the process, Yorgos has got a great way of directing people like me, which is to give as much independence as possible so that someone feels totally responsible for their contribution to the form as a whole. He’s not backseat driving, particularly. He’s not saying, “Oh, let’s change that, let’s change that.” I think he really wants that care to be taken that you only get when you know someone isn’t going to pick up your clothes for you, as it were.

Because he had never used a composer before, and I’d never worked with a director before, I thought it was great to just get on the same page. I wanted to understand why he wanted me in the first place, what I could help the film with, what I could bring to it, what parts of the story and scenes I could illuminate, and, basically what my responsibility was, artistically. Then, once we were on the same page for that, there weren’t too many questions.

I would write a bunch of music based on my feelings about the story or the characters, and he would say yes or no. And if he said yes, it was in the film and I had no further say in it. It’s a quite severe way of working, but it’s good. It really makes you work harder than you’d expect.

You composed most of the score before picture, right?

Jerskin Fendrix: Yeah.

What was it like implementing the music in the film, then, if so much was already written?

Jerskin Fendrix: Mixed. I don’t know. There were a few scenes very early on, I think, where we were just chatting about the film in general, and we kind of both agreed, like, “Okay, this bit needs something really…” in whatever direction. So, there were a few pieces where I specifically wrote it for one scene only, and it went to that one scene only.

The great thing about being able to write in advance is that you’re not constricted by form. You’re not thinking, “This has to be a beautiful, unique piece of music, and it has to be one minute 32 seconds, and rise in tension at this beat, this beat, and this beat.” It gives you so much more space to dream, feel those emotions, and not be fettered by this constraint. So, to some extent, I think some of those pieces influenced how Yorgos would’ve filmed the scenes or how he would’ve edited them, timing-wise.

I know as well that a lot of the music was played on set because he was trying to achieve this very immersive place where the set was all-consuming, and the atmosphere and the music was part of that. So, I think there was something symbiotic. I wrote a couple of pieces after seeing the film where the gaps needed to be plugged, but only literally one or two, I think.

Do you remember the first piece that you wrote?

Jerskin Fendrix: I remember the first batch; the first two ones I wrote which I think really worked. One was the very, very opening piece of the film; the four string notes. I felt those very early on as a theme for, especially, this kind of overhanging shadow around Bella’s past life, which kind of looms in the foreground or the background of the whole film. So, those four notes and that opening theme were quite early on.

[The other was] the theme for the Alexandria slums, where Bella sees human suffering for the first time. We agreed we just wanted something that represented how horrifyingly overwhelming something like that would be for the first time for someone so sensitive. Those two were written quite early on, and they were very solid gut instincts about those bits in the film.

One of my favorite things about what you do with the score is how everything is just a little off. I really love the Bella theme with the pitch bends happening, and then there are so many other instances where something’s dry and the instruments are just out of time with one another. Were you manipulating things after the fact, or were you talking to players and being like, “Please mangle this a little bit in your performance”?

Jerskin Fendrix: Firstly, I did do a number of things after the fact, and the technique to achieve that was that we recorded every instrument separately. We never had an ensemble in the room at any point—it was only one player at a time playing one part at a time—so we had total control over being able to do processing, and there was an amount of more subtle and less subtle processing to a lot of the instruments.

And then, with some of the woodwind players, for example, I like going through takes and trying to work out what’s the most elegant performance of something possible, and then what’s the stupidest performance of something possible. Often, when people are asked to play stupidly, it means that they’re not thinking in a technical way at all. They’re not focusing on what they’ve been taught at a conservatory or whatever, and they’ll just end up focusing on the feeling of it and the melody rather than thinking about whether their embouchure is entirely correct, or if their phrasing is totally good, because they’ve been given permission to forget that. Something very pure comes out of it, I find. Also, a lot of the performances were just me playing away in the studio, so I got to tell myself what to do.

I know you’re a versatile musician, I’ve listened to your solo work as well, but do you play a ton of instruments?

Jerskin Fendrix:I wouldn’t say a ton. I can’t play anything you can blow into, so we had to bring in all the woodwind players and the percussions and so on. But I play keyboards and violin and all that sort of thing for the film. And then there are a lot of sample sounds; there are a lot of synthesized sounds, a lot of sounds that sound like one instrument but are actually a different instrument. Who knows why we decided to do that, but yeah.

Are there any unexpected or wild instrument elements in this?

Jerskin Fendrix: I don’t know. I think it’s possible to get into a trap, compositionally, where you find an obscure weird-sounding instrument, and that fact in itself means that people can be a bit complacent about how good the composition is. I’m always a bit averse to extended technique. Part of my musical education was on the academic composition side, and that was basically, “How many extended techniques do you know?” And I hated that. So, I try not to get too weighed down by the gimmicks, as it were.

One instrument I really enjoyed using was the uilleann pipes. Originally, I wanted to use Scottish great Highland bagpipes, because the book is set in Scotland. I wanted to have something harken back to that, but I realized the capabilities of the uilleann pipes, which are Irish bagpipes, were actually far more suited to the palette and the timbre I was going for.

There’s a great bit with that, which I’m very proud of. Towards the end of the film, Bella goes back to Victoria’s house, and there’s a bit where—and this is kind of heavy—she finds out the reason she killed herself. At that point, you don’t want a piece of music that’s dramatic, or minor, or sad. You want the sound of the most momentous level of existential despair; you’ve come back from the dead, and you find out why you decided to die. That sound had to slice through you, with nothing to pad it out. I won’t give too much away, but we did something weird to the pipes to achieve this blare of dread.

It felt to me like the music evolved as Bella did, and as the film went through all of these different places and went from black and white to color; it felt like you were growing along with her and the film in the score. Is that something you were deliberately trying to do?

Jerskin Fendrix: Yeah. I think there’s a lot of the music that really is trying to convey parts of Bella’s experience and psychological interior that she is not as able to, or doesn’t have the opportunity to. So, yeah, I think the instrumentation starts increasing in complexity, and the spectrum of tone widens and gets a bit warmer. There are more questions, musically, as it goes on, and I think there was an element where you wanted to kind of show her evolving.

There are so many locations as well, but with a film like this, I think it would’ve been a mistake to be like, “We’re in Lisbon, here are some mandolins or Portuguese guitars,” or “We’re in Alexandria; here’s an Alexandrian instrument.” There were so many new locations, but, for me, it didn’t really matter what the countries were. It was more like, “What was the didactic experience contained in these locations?” She learns about love, she learns about material pleasure, she learns about suffering, all these things, and in each location, I was just trying to bring these into the music.

Some of the cues I loved on the soundtrack were the Portuguese dance pieces. I loved the low, driving stuff in the second of those pieces, and the way the tone of the score blends into something that’s a little more like source music. Can you talk about putting all that together?

Jerskin Fendrix: That was one where I did do a bit of studying on Portuguese folk stuff, although I don’t think any serious Portuguese folk musician would see it as particularly authentic. But it was a really nice opportunity to think, “What’s the difference between the actual score and what’s really happening in this world?” And there’s still something off with it and something that, historically, goes on a bit of a tangent, but it was a bit more grounded.

Also, we had to play it all live. I had to go there with the musicians in Hungary and rehearse everything, and obviously write it in the first place, and then perform it. All the takes we did as well; we were there on set for four or five days to get that scene right. And it’s her dancing to it every time; we’re not adding anything after the fact. We’re really playing in the room while they’re doing all that acting and dancing and so on. So, that was great. That was so much fun, actually. It was a great pleasure to be invited on to do that.

Now that I know you did that, do you have a favorite experience from being on set? I know this was your first film.

Jerskin Fendrix: That was my first experience on a film set being in a scene ever, and having to be responsible for all that stuff as well as having to look presentable. That was a joy. And it was great to see firsthand how hard these guys work because the days and the intensity… I was baffled by how the actors managed to keep up such energy.

Seeing the sets in general… the first one I really saw was Lisbon, when I first arrived in Budapest, and I was shocked. It was insane. It looks like it does in the film. There’s so little green screen; so much less than you would think. It’s wholly immersive. You’re there in person; it all works. All the doors lead to the places, and there are no separate sets. It’s like one functioning city under a roof. It was great.

This is a heck of a first film to score. Is there a certain kind of project or genre that would interest you as a follow-up?

Jerskin Fendrix: I don’t know what interests me. I don’t know myself too well. There’ll be more stuff.

You know what I’ve always wanted to do? I grew up in the late nineties at the time when The Lion King, Mulan, Hunchback of Notre Dame, and all these massive—almost Gothically massive—operatic Disney musicals were the big kids’ films. I’d love to do a Disney musical. That would be a f***ing dream. That’d be so cool; do the songs, do the score, do everything. They wouldn’t let me, and with good reason, but I would love to do it.

About Poor Things

From filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos and producer Emma Stone comes the incredible tale and fantastical evolution of Bella Baxter (Stone), a young woman brought back to life by the brilliant and unorthodox scientist Dr. Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe). Under Baxter’s protection, Bella is eager to learn. Hungry for the worldliness she is lacking, Bella runs off with Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo), a slick and debauched lawyer, on a whirlwind adventure across the continents. Free from the prejudices of her times, Bella grows steadfast in her purpose to stand for equality and liberation.

Check out our other Poor Things interviews:

• Ramy Youssef
• Emma Stone
• Mark Ruffalo & Willem Dafoe
• Tony McNamara
• Holly Waddington
• Robbie Ryan
• James Price & Shona Heath