"Screw You Guys" - The Newton Brothers Talk Composing 'Midnight Mass'
This piece was originally published on FilmSpeak.
Andy Grush and Taylor Newton Stewart are professionally known as The Newton Brothers. They’ve been composing film scores since 2011, but their individual journeys with music go back much further. They both grew up playing the piano and credit family members and teachers for helping to foster their love of music. As for how they began composing, Andy and Taylor are both huge film fans. “We’re huge film nerds, big time,” Andy says, laughing. “I grew up beyond impassioned by films,” Taylor adds. “I’d go see E.T. and want to be Elliot, you know?”
“I’d always be like, wow, why do I feel so emotional and so sad and so heroic,” Taylor continues. “And then my mom would be like, because it’s the music!”
Despite primarily scoring thrillers, horror films, and tv series, Andy and Taylor don’t have a preference in genre when watching movies themselves. Andy cites The Batman and No Strings Attached as recent films he thoroughly enjoyed, and the two couldn’t be more at odds. Taylor agrees that it’s not so much the genre of the film that matters, but the storytelling. In particular, Taylor mentions how he appreciates the ability of science fiction and horror films to “disguise the project” better than other genres. “Is it a monster movie or is it about a family?” Taylor says.
It’s no surprise that The Newton Brothers and Mike Flanagan found their way to each other. Flanagan, most recently, is known for his series work with Netflix and his sequel to Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. Flanagan’s career goes much further back than that, but an overarching theme for all of his works is exactly what Taylor described. Flanagan uses horror as the vehicle for fascinating rumination on grief, religion, forgiveness, etc. His works are populated with ghosts and ghouls, but rarely do those ghosts exist simply as jump scares. Instead, they are manifestations of fear, love, and a multitude of other emotions.
Midnight Mass is not the first collaboration between The Newton Brothers and Flanagan. The three of them have worked together since Flanagan’s 2013 breakout film Oculus. Midnight Mass marks the ninth project the three have collaborated on, and with upcoming projects from Flanagan like The Fall of the House of Usher and The Midnight Club, both for Netflix, it doesn’t look like it will be the last.
Flanagan has described Midnight Mass as his most personal work to date, and has alluded to it in his other projects. Fans had to wait until 2021 to see Midnight Mass fully realized on the screen. The show mostly takes place on a small, secluded island in the Pacific Northwest, but it was filmed in Canada. For the first time, Andy had an acting role. He was the organ player at the island’s church and was able to see firsthand what it’s like to be immersed in the filmmaking process. Andy called it “an incredible experience,” and his time there altered the plans they had for the score. “I was very aware of what Mike and Trevor [Macy] had set up up there in terms of the visuals and the story…and the music needed to be another character in the show,” Andy says.
Andy and Taylor also spoke about their choice never to allow the music to be overwhelming. Andy equates the supporting music they made for a particularly moving scene featuring Rahul Kohli as Sherif Hassan as “like holding a baby. Your hands don’t matter, you just can’t drop him…Rahul doesn’t even need that much support. Just surround him with a hue of music.”
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In the final episode of Midnight Mass, Erin (Kate Siegel) has a long monologue about what she thinks happens when a person dies. It’s a stirring, evocative, powerhouse performance that makes the audience catch their breath. When the time came for Andy and Taylor to score it, Flanagan already had an idea of what he wanted the music to sound like. “I want something very small, very delicate,” Andy says of Flanagan’s wishes.
Taylor and Andy wrote a piece that fit Flanagan’s criteria, but they also wrote the very different version that ultimately made it into the show. They sent it to Flanagan and received an email with the subject “Screw You Guys.” In the body of the email, Flanagan wrote that he thought their bigger score would feel out of place, but said he was “sitting there sobbing like a baby…I hate you guys,” Andy recounts.
In Taylor and Andy’s eyes, that was the best response to their music they could ask for. “You hope that every single piece of music you write becomes this amazing journey…once in a while something just lands where everything comes together and…every part of that scene is just dancing with the other parts of the scene,” Andy says.
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