Composer Kris Bowers wasn’t even 10 years old when Venus and Serena Williams competed in their first matches on the professional tennis tour. But within Bowers’ own family were the ingredients that made him an ideal candidate to score “King Richard,” director Reinaldo Marcus Green’s biopic about the sister’s ambitious father, Richard (played in an Oscar buzzworthy performance by Will Smith).
“My own dad was inspired by the Williams sisters and Richard Williams,” Bowers explained with a smile in this new episode of ’s “How I Did It” video series. “My dad decided before I was born that he wanted me to play piano. [My parents] really did everything they could to put me in the best situations to succeed because they wanted to make sure we had a chance to achieve something great.”
Bowers achieved more than just a great result. “King Richard,”He did it using the exact same instrument his father had hoped he would learn. The piano is critical to the success to Bowers’s score — both to emphasize familial warmth in the film, but also cleverly as a percussive vehicle for understanding the sport of tennis.
Bowers explained from the Warner Bros. Eastwood Scoring Studio, Burbank, California what music parlance calls a “Music Parlance”. “prepared piano.”It looks almost like someone left their laundry on the piano strings. He said that the term is actually used to describe “putting anything you can think of inside of a piano, like nails, coins, pieces of paper.”
The technique dulls the strings’ vibration but, as in “King Richard,”Produces a sound that resonates with unique, piercing power. “In the beginning of the tennis match [in the film], we strip everything down just to prepared piano, so that it feels incredibly tense. And I wanted to create this rhythmic drive, so that the ball hitting felt like it was part of the music and the hits were almost punctuating parts of the score.”
Bowers, whose credits also contain “Respect,” “When They See Us”And “Bridgerton,”Also, he described how he used his piano score to tie together his individual musical themes in the film for Venus, Serena, and Richard.
Check out the video above for more details, including an adorable home movie of Bowers playing a Billy Strayhorn jazz classic on the piano when he was a boy.
“King Richard”Currently playing in theaters, and streaming on HBO Max.