The Film Scorer

As the title gives away, this is one of my rare repeat-guest interviews, this time with Laura Karpman. Coincidentally, the last time Laura and I talked was almost three years to the day. Then, we discussed her scores for The Marvels and for American Fiction, and this time we're talking about East of Eden, her new short film Cosmic Symphony, and Unsung: A Symphonic Suite for the Superhero Women of Classic Hollywood. Compare those five projects - quite a range, eh?

The plan for the interview was really to focus on East of Eden, but as these often go, we were off on a tangent almost before we began. The cool thing about when that happens is that it's completely off the cuff - neither of us had intended on talking about Cosmic Symphony, so I don't have any direct questions prepared and she presumably hadn't been talking about it too much in other interviews. As a result, everything feels more reactive, with some ensuing anecdotes that hadn't been talked about before. It's also interesting hearing how different a composer's job can be when they're scoring a project that they also directed - she ends up "unleashed and free” while also having to fight against the hangups of Laura the director.

Of course, we also dig into East of Eden. The primary focus is on how she approached scoring Cathy, viewing her with empathy and not simply as a "monster". This results in her actively and consciously pushing the viewers' perspective of Cathy through score - something that music almost always does, but that gets unfairly maligned sometimes as "manipulation" (which we talk about too).

Laura also penned an essay about East of Eden and unsung, which you can read here. The essay isn't required reading for this interview by any means, but it's something we reference a couple of times and makes for a very good supplement. Of course, it's also interesting on its own, particularly as it isn't something that composers do often.

Laura's score for East of Eden, and much of her other music is available on all major platforms, while the show is currently airing on Netflix. You can find out more about Laura on her website.

After a teeny tiny little break (completely unintentional), the show is back on the road. Joining me in this welcome back party is Tim Kasher. Tim is probably best known as the frontman for bands like Cursive and Good Life, but he also has a parallel career as a director and film composer, primarily scoring the films he's directed. His latest is the film/score Who's Watching. The film follows a stalker making a film about his victim and he's also a bass player for a local metal band. As a result, we get score written from the stalker's perspective (as if he made it) and healthy doses of underground, grimy metal. Totally up my alley. So we dig into those, our mutual love (and criticism) of metal, the reason (or lack thereof) for bringing Cursive together to write a new song for the film, and plenty more.

Two little warnings here: first, we got a lot of swearing in this one and not just in general, as the band within the film has a pretty explicit name. As a result, I haven't edited any of that out. Second, each of us had some audio issues (my primary audio file ended up getting corrupted and was unusable), so it won't sound quite as crisp as normal.

Tim's score for Who's Watching comes out on October 30 (a little horror just in time for Halloween), while much of his other music (solo and in his bands) is available on all major platforms, as is the film itself.

Olivier Deriviere (Plague Tale, Dying Late, Streets of Rage) joins me on The Film Scorer. Olivier has had two big projects come out within the last year or so, the third entries to the Dying Light (Dying Light: The Beast) and Plague Tale (Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy) franchises. As such, we dig into the music of both games, which are strikingly different from one another, the latter having plenty of heavier, "rage"-filled moments (with inspiration from 28 Days Later) while the latter introduces a number of Greek instruments and choir, with any peace shattered with the roar of a carnyx.

Of course, we also dive into a number of other directions. The most notable of these, for me, is the responsiveness of a game's score to the player's actions. Oftentimes, a game's score can serve as a backdrop in given locations or will have general responses to what happens in the game (such as going from exploration to combat), but Olivier goes much deeper, telling me that his scores can react to thousands of different parameters. For instance, in Dying Light: The Beast, the score responds to various elements of the game's parkour system, changing as the player makes different moves, makes mistakes, or enters into a "flow state", while Olivier used the game Get Even as a sort of R&D laboratory, pushing the extent to which the music and gameplay can interact. In his view, as games get increasingly technical with things like physics, lighting, and graphics, why shouldn't the music follow suit?

Olivier's scores for Dying Light: The Beast and Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy, and much of his other music, is available on all major platforms while the games are available digitally. You can find out more about Olivier on his website.

This week, Lorne Balfe joins me on The Film Scorer. Lorne has about two-hundred credits to his name across film, TV, and video games, including projects like Top Gun: Maverick, a couple Mission: Impossible films, The Crown, Assassin's Creed, Call of Duty, and a whole load more. Not a bad resume...

Now, although he normally releases about ten scores a year, 2026 has been a much quieter year for him, conducting at the global tour of Top Gun: Maverick in Concert and working on the new adaptation of The Cat in the Hat, coming out in November. We talk about each a little bit, but it also gives us an opportunity to really jump away from focusing on any single project. Instead, Lorne and I spent the hour and a half we had chatting about a pretty wide range of topics, getting really deep into the film scoring industry and the business side around it. We also have a bittersweet moment where we talk about composer and conductor Nick Glennie-Smith, who Lorne knew and worked with for many years before he passed away in mid-August.

One note - Lorne and I were chatting away before hitting record, so the interview starts a little in media res. But don't worry, nothing juicy got cut off.

Today, Takeshi Furukawa (Avatar: The Last Airbender, Star Wars: The Clone Wars) joins the show! Takeshi's latest projects have been scoring the both seasons of Netflix's live action version of Avatar: The Last Airbender as well as Planet of Lana II: Children of the Leaf, the sequel to the hit indie platformer Planet of Lana. It's no surprise, then, that we planned on talking about both Avatar and Planet of Lana II quite a bit, and we do get into them some. For Avatar, we primarily focused on the constraints of the live action version, including the change in medium, the change in tone, and the production only receiving permission to use certain existing themes from the animated original. On Lana, we really focus on the expansion of the score, whereby as the game increases in scope, so too does the music. This included added to the breadth of music and palette, and in particular Takeshi finally getting his hands dirty with synths.

The most notable thing, in my opinion, however, doesn't fall to any specific score. Rather, it relates to Takeshi's career as a whole. Our interview ended up being maybe the most open and personal a composer has gotten on the show, with Takeshi discussing his anxieties and fears as a composer, culminating in the worry that one day he'll "disappear", that “I’m afraid that people are going to get tired of me.” It feels ridiculous to hear him say this given the skill and diversity of his scores, and the high profile of the projects he works on, but I'm sure it's a very real concern for many composers, well-founded or not, and I hope it provides comfort to other composers listening in.

Takeshi's scores for the Avatar: The Last Airbender series and Planet of Lana I and II, and much of his other music, is available on all major platforms while the show itself is available on Netflix and the games are available digitally. You can find out more about Takeshi on his website.

Hard to believe that we're already about a quarter of the way through season 6 - feels like we've only just started. To commemorate this occasion, I'm joined by Kara Talve. Kara has been the principal composer of The Simpsons for the last few years, serves as the principal composer at Bleeding Fingers Music (the Hans Zimmer-founded composer collective), and has scored projects like Prehistoric Planet (and the upcoming Harry Potter series). In fact, we spend much of our conversation talking about Prehistoric Planet, for which she received her fifth Emmy nomination just a few hours before we conducted this interview.

Prehistoric Planet gave us plenty to cover: the constantly changing styles and genres (in part due to the ever-changing locations and "characters" of the show), building unique instruments, driving the story due to minimal character or narrative, and more. The instrument side of things was particularly interesting to me. A lot of the time it feels like a gimmick that perhaps has a connection with the film but doesn't actually noticeable change the sound of the score. But then you get something like the terror tone, an instrument based off of the fossilized larynx and trachea of Llallawavis scagliai, creating an otherworldly evil sound. To make this and other instruments, they consulted with paleontologists to get measurements, frequencies, and other aspects related to these creatures. Kara even mentions that using bone in percussion gives a resonance you don't normally find, which reminded me of the use of a deer skull as percussion in Agalloch's seminal album The Mantle.

Kara's score for the first two seasons of Prehistoric Planet, and much of her other music, is available on all major platforms while the show itself is available on Apple TV. However, for unknown reasons the score for season 3 remains unreleased (and Kara makes a call for its release during the interview). You can find out more about Kara on her website.

Gavin Brivik is the latest guest on The Film Scorer! I've been familiar with Gavin's work for quite a while, probably dating back to his score for the 2021 film Wild Indian, which was one of those situations where I hear someone making great music on under the radar indie films and wonder when they're going to break out. How to Blow Up a Pipeline helped put Gavin on the map while scoring seasons one and two of The Pitt has really changed things, earning him an Emmy nomination in the process. One of the driving keys to Gavin's success, in my opinion, is that he's a longtime listener to the show, which is actually how we start the conversation and why it has an in media res beginning - it was too good for me to keep out.

All this is just window dressing, however. While we touch on The Pitt, Pipeline, and my own Film Scorer project, we really planned to dig into his latest score: Faces of Death, which is sort of a legacy sequel to the 1978 film of the same name. As a result, we end up going down perhaps the most philosophical conversation that's ever been had on the show, largely stemming from the question of "What makes a piece of art evil?" and going from there. But don't despair, there's still plenty of film music conversation, and we even break the news that Gavin is scoring the Rainbow Six Siege games series, which includes a collaboration with Metal Gear Solid.

Gavin's score for Faces of Death, and much of his other music, is available on all major platforms while the film itself is now available on Shudder. You can find out more about Gavin on his website.

One of the great pleasures of this show is talking to people whose work I really enjoy. Although I'd known Keegan Dewitt's music for a number of years (probably first taking notice with 2018's Gemini), his score for last year's The Chair Company really floored me, with the distinct and ever-changing palette and approaches intriguing me almost as much as the show's labyrinthine plot. So with all that said, it's great to have Keegan on the show. However, we really focus on Keegan's latest project - scoring the hit romance series Off Campus.

As such, we spend much of the conversation talking about his score for Off Campus, including collaborating with the show's time (particularly the music supervisor's and series creator Louisa Levy) and a little snafu where he accidentally disclosed some confidential behind-the-scenes info early on in the show. Along the way, we cover a number of his other projects, discuss how to score comedy and romance in new ways, and the three reasons to take on a project.

Keegan's score for Off Campus, and much of his other music, is available on all major platforms while the show itself is available on Amazon Prime. You can find out more about Keegan on his website.

On the latest episode of The Film Scorer podcast, I'm joined by John Paesano (Daredevil, Marvel's Spider-Man)! I've been a fan of John's for a while, with Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes being a recent favorite, so it was an extra pleasure chatting with him. His latest score is for the Netflix series The Boroughs, in which he channels an 80s/early-90s big, symphonic, melodic adventure style of scoring. Given that the show itself is designed to be very score-heavy, with music going right in the forefront, it takes full advantage of John's score, a welcome refresher given how much less-common the style of scoring has become. While he talk a fair bit about The Boroughs, it's only one of many topics, which include Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, the hesitancy of using symphonic scoring, and (my favorite) a chance "encounter" we had more than fifteen years ago.

John's score for The Boroughs, and much of his other music, is available on all major platforms while the show itself is available on Netflix. You can find out more about John on his website.

Here we are, season 6, episode 2, things are in motion, momentum is building, and I'm joined by one of my favorite composers: Cristobal Tapia de Veer (The White Lotus, Smile)! Cristo's latest project is the 2026 BBC adaptation of Lord of the Flies, featuring some incredible child actor performances and an increasingly psychedelic and psychotic score. We focus our conversation around that score, but inevitably veer off into different directions, also covering some of his past works with Lord of the Flies director and his longtime collaborator Marc Munden as well as Smile director Parker Finn, our shared interest in metal, the inspiration and magic of the unknown, and plenty more. I even ask point-blank about what happened in The White Lotus. How does he answer?

Cristo's score for Lord of the Flies, and much of his other music, is available on all major platforms while the show itself is available on Netflix.

After a long wait and seemingly unending anticipation, Season 6 of The Film Scorer Podcast is here! To kick off the new season, I'm joined by the very rare repeat guest, the great Colin Stetson! Colin and I talked several years back (much longer ago than it feels), right around when The Texas Chainsaw Massacre came out, really digging into the weirdness of his score. This time, our focus is technically on his score for the new show Something Very Bad Is Going To Happen, but we get off track almost immediately and seemingly never recover, talking about the show as well as his series of improv/collaboration releases, Chainsaw, playing on audience expectations, and trying to imbue projects with real and honest human experience. Frankly, it ended up pretty wide-ranging.

Colin's score for Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen, and much of his other music, is available on all major platforms while the show itself is available on Netflix.

And if you haven't yet, be sure to check out our prior conversation here: https://thefilmscorer.com/colin-stetson-on-scoring-texas-chainsaw-massacre/

Season Six of The Film Scorer Podcast is almost here! The new season launches on Sunday, May 31st, with new episodes continuing every other Sunday after that (more or less). Season five had some huge interviews, like Oscar winner Daniel Blumberg, Max Richter, Oneohtrix Point Never, Thomas Newman, and even the noise rock band Chat Pile, so you never who will show up this time around. But I'll give you a taste of what's to come - Season six kicks off with Colin Stetson and Cristobal Tapia de Veer, and it only goes from there.

So subscribe on your favorite podcast platform, follow The Film Scorer on Instagram, Twitter, Threads, and Bluesky, and keep those ears open!

Although we're now a couple months into 2026, I finally present you with the "best" film scores of 2025. As usual, there are some very mainstream scores in here that most observers would agree with and there are a few left field choices. If you're a longtime listener, that shouldn't surprise you. As with all of these lists, although I say they're the "best", what I really mean is these are my favorites. Who's to say what's really the best? Surely not me.

This was a much harder list for me to put together than in recent years - there were a few scores that I immediately knew were going to make it, but a number of others where it took a lot more consideration, noticing that the passage of time had changed how I'd viewed a score (for better or worse); ultimately these lists are just a snapshot in time, but some decisions were made based on how I felt now while others were made based on how I felt in the past. It's a good reminder as to the subjectivity of each of these lists, at how you felt when seeing the film impacts your memory of it (and its score) forever on. But all things considered, I'm happy to say that 2025 was another solid year, with a deep set of great scores that stretch far beyond the same handful that received most attention during the year-end awards and recaps.

If you can't control yourself, look below to see what scores I picked, though you'll miss out on the why of it all (and given some of the choices, the why is pretty important).

• Baby Invasion – Burial
• Sinners – Ludwig Göransson
• Anemone – Bobby Krlic
• 28 Years Later - Young Fathers
• Eddington – Bobby Krlic and Daniel Pemberton
• Marty Supreme – Daniel Lopatin
• Fantastic Four: First Steps - Michael Giacchino
• The Accountant 2 - Bryce Dessner
• F1 - Hans Zimmer
• The Shrouds - Howard Shore

Awards season is nearing its end, with the BAFTAs later today, February 22, and the Oscars coming on March 15. I'll always say that, although I'm by no means a massive fan (or detractor) of film awards, I'm always happy that it's the one time of year where film music gets to be widely celebrated. The nominee slates also provide great peaks into the state of modern, mainstream film music, and this year's selections are a great cross-section of style and approach. And of course, it gives me an excuse to talk about them a little bit, so read below then listen on.

Of the nominees, I interviewed Max Richter for Hamnet and also interviewed Jerskin Fendrix near the end of 2023 for Poor Things (which I would have swore was not that long ago...).

This year, the nominees for both sets of awards are the same:

• Bugonia – Jerskin Fendrix (Interview)
• Frankenstein – Alexandre Desplat
• Hamnet – Max Richter (Interview)
• One Battle After Another – Jonny Greenwood
• Sinners – Ludwig Göransson

You poor fools - imagine thinking that The Film Scorer was actually on hiatus? Far, far from the truth. Ending the fifteen second break I took after interviewing Daniel Lopatin is Simon Franglen! For those that don't know, Simon is fresh off of scoring Avatar: Fire and Ash, having already scored Avatar: The Way of Water and working with longtime collaborator James Horner on the first film. This is a much less tangential interview than normal, with essentially our whole focus revolving around Avatar: creating and expanding the palette, the scope and breadth of themes, his prior work with James Horner and carrying a core team through all three films, and, above all, making sure the boss (Jim Cameron) is happy.

Simon's score for Avatar: Fire and Ash and the rest of his music is available on all major platforms. Avatar: Fire and Ash is currently in theaters, and if we're lucky there might be a few more Avatar films on the way some day. You can find out more about Simon on his website.

Here we are, in the dead zone between seasons, where all should be silent. But a voice calls out from the darkness. Who could it be...?

Well my friends, that voice belongs to one Daniel Lopatin, also known as Oneohtrix Point Never (alongside your humble host, of course). Daniel has just scored Marty Supreme, and I can vouch that both film and score are great, certainly landing upon my top tens of the year. Unsurprisingly, then, Daniel and I spend most of the conversation talking about Marty Supreme, including musical anachronism, inspiration from sports films, and long nights spent with Josh Safdie.

Daniel's score for Marty Supreme is forthcoming (though having heard an advance version, I can vouch that it's great) and the rest of his music is available on all major platforms.

The end is here! Well, the end of season 5 at least. That's right, after over twelve months the season is finally over (making it, I think, the longest season of The Film Scorer yet), and what better wait to celebrate than to chat with Max Richter?

Max's (Ad Astra, The Leftovers) latest (Oscar nominated) score is for the incredible historical drama Hamnet, a fictionalized account of the death of William Shakespeare and his wife Agnes's son Hamnet and how it inspired the creation of Hamlet. Unsurprisingly, we spend most of our conversation on Hamnet, but despite the quick interview we manage to cover a lot of other ground too, such as the use of "On the Nature of Daylight" over the years, the troubled production of Ad Astra, and how a musician's intent goes only so far once their music reaches an audience.

Max's score for Hamnet is forthcoming (though having heard an advance version, I can vouch that it's great) and the rest of his music is available on all major platforms. You can find out more about Max on his website. In addition to Hamnet's pending release, Max just announced some 2026 tour dates.

There are a few perks to running every aspect of this site and podcast, the biggest being picking who I want to interview (and avoiding whomever I don't). Part of that, sometimes, is using film music as an excuse to interview bands that I just broadly like. Enter: Chat Pile. The Oklahoma noise rock band has one score under their belt, the 2022 indie crime flick Tenkiller, which they released as a score album after their debut God's Country, and have provided some songs for other films, most recently a track for the end credits to V/H/S/Halloween. Not to mention, they routinely talk about movies, including during their gigs. All perfect hooks to have them on, and so today I'm talking with vocalist Raygun Busch and guitarist Luther Manhole.

As such, we jump around quite a bit: from their experience scoring Tenkiller, how movies brought them together and provide a mutual love, and some recent (and not to recent) scores that they've enjoyed (I'll note that at one point Ray is talking about the Bossa Nova score for Black Orpheus before getting interrupted by his dog...). We wrap up on a bit of a detour, actually talking about the economics of albums and touring, and how much a role cost of living plays into that.

Chat Pile's music is available on all major platforms, chief among them being Bandcamp, or you can seek out their music physically. You can find out more about Chat Pile on their website and they have a new album on the horizon, In The Earth Again which they've co-written with Hayden Pedigo, coming out October 31st.

Although this podcast is called "The Film Scorer", every so often it's nice to chat with someone who does significant work in another medium instead. Today, that someone is Jesper Kyd (Hitman, Assassin's Creed). Jesper has been scoring for games for over thirty years, working on some of the biggest video game franchises around. But he's also worked on a number of films (like the Indian films Tumbbad and Crazxy), leading to the best answer I've ever gotten to the question "what's the difference between scoring for video games and movies?"

Jesper's latest score is for Warhammer 40,000: Darktide. In fact, Jesper has been scoring this game for years - it first came out in November 2022, and with new maps, characters, events, and other updates he keeps writing new music for it. The result is four separate releases, the latest of which was just in August of this year, about 25 minutes of dark industrial electronic music for running and gunning. I must have spent a dozen hours listening to those releases getting ready for this interview, and let me tell you: I was ready to join the 40th millennia's endless war.

Jesper's score for Warhammer 40,000: Darktide (Volumes 1-4), and much of his other music, is available on all major platforms. You can find out more about Jeremiah on his website.

I know I keep saying that the end of this season is imminent. And it is, but it seems like every time I think it's about dead it springs back to life for a little while longer. Reviving it this week is Jeremiah Fraites. Jeremiah is going to be best known as being one of the founding members of the hit alternative folk band The Lumineers, but lately he's expanded his horizons a bit. Specifically, Jeremiah has scored two films this fall: the Stephen King-based The Long Walk and the biopic Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere. We spend most of our time talking about both scores, particularly The Long Walk (since Deliver Me from Nowhere isn't out yet), and of course that becomes a jumping off point for the conversation. We also cover things like how film has expanded music (including visualizing music as you write), getting his wife involved in the scoring process, the differences between writing original score and original songs for films (The Lumineers wrote some songs for The Hunger Games), and plenty more.

Jeremiah's score for The Long Walk, and much of his other music, is available on all major platforms while The Long Walk is currently in theaters while Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere hits theaters on October 24th.