Henry Jackman’s music for “The Gray Man,” the spy thriller debuting Friday on Netflix, is as cutting-edge and exciting as any score you’ll hear all year. Yet he wrote all of the film’s key musical elements without ever seeing a frame of film.
It’s what happens when real life collides with a movie career.
Jackman, the L.A.-born composer who composed the three last movies, was born in London. “Gray Man”Directors Joe Russo and Anthony Russo, including two “Captain America”Films and “Cherry”In March 2021, he became a father for first time. He said he had planned to take nine month off work. “to be the perfect dad.”
Before Ryan Gosling’s $200-million action movie, in which Ryan Gosling plays a CIA agent (nicknamed “The Russos”), they had notified him. “Six”Chris Evans, an ex-colleague who is insane, has targeted a victim. But they weren’t going to need him to begin writing before December 2021, when editing would be well under way.
“We had a discussion about Six’s internal trauma, and how he’s got a bit of a ‘ghost in the machine’ issue that won’t go away,”Jackman speaks Variety. “I thought, well, I can’t just sit here dealing with my son peeing on me and screaming all day long, so I’ll quickly knock out this piano idea.”
Jackman then went to his home studio during his free time and started putting together musical ideas. “I used a reverse reverb effect and fiddled around a bit,”He said that he was able to create a two-minute piano with effects demo, which might have been useful for scenes of emotion.
This piece opens the 17-minute “Gray Man”Suite on the soundtrack album, whose creation took nine months. “time off” and now serves as an overture of all of the film’s themes.
Jackman read the script and couldn’t stop adding material to that opening theme. He created an offbeat percussion sound and invoked the classic “Mission: Impossible”5.4 rhythm, and “went on this massive mission designing percussion sounds.”This music is highly produced and includes tick-tock sounds, eerie noises, and minor chords. “very espionage,”He says.
“I chipped away at this piece a bit like (producer) Trevor Horn used to chip away at an Art of Noise album for months and months. It almost became an artistic endeavor in itself. At no point was I even thinking about Joe or Anthony (although) every now and then I would think, I really ought to play just a couple of bars of this for them.”
But he didn’t. “Every week this suite got longer and longer. I started messing around with some jazzy chords, a new idea in the brass,” he says, citing David Shire’s classic “The Taking of Pelham 1-2-3” score, “like an atonal kind of jazz”Hansen, a sadistic psychopath who chases Six around the world, made that his signature.
He added a driving bass line, and a variety of other sounds to the mix. “big, Mancini-esque long brass statements,” referring to Henry Mancini, whose ’50s and ’60s scores included such detective and caper films as “Peter Gunn,” “Charade”The “Pink Panther” series.
Jackman sent his masterpiece of 17 minutes to his directors nine months later, while the Russos were still editing. “I didn’t really want to play it. I just wanted to hide,” he admits, apologizing in case they felt it wasn’t appropriate for the film. Joe Russo loved it and sent Jackman live reactions after he had played through the film.
Jackman started to write scene-specific music with the approval of the Russos. The majority of the important compositional work was completed. “Almost all the content, a huge proportion of cues in the score, have its origin somewhere in the suite,”He points out.
He flew to London in April 2022 to record the orchestral sections of the score with an 80-piece ensemble of mostly brass and strings (recorded separately due to COVID restrictions). However, a significant portion of the score had already been recorded. “I spent ages in engineering mode,”Jackman: “I really enjoy taking sounds and shoving them through late ’70s analog equipment, overdriving and distorting them. Almost all the percussion is heavily hand-made.”
He thinks this unusual process – writing not to the picture, but rather away from it – benefited the film. “If you’ve got the detail of each scene, you’re going to get distracted into the mechanics of the cue. If you are looking for something unique and exciting, then explore your ideas and follow them to discover their internal logic.
“You put all of that in the melting pot and keep stirring. Hopefully something pops out that you haven’t quite heard before.”