Tina Kakadelis
“My first love has always been film music,” says Will Bates, composer for Daniel Roher’s film, Tuner, which had its Canadian premiere at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival. Roher’s name may ring a bell, as he was the director of the Academy Award-winning documentary Navalny. Tuner, Roher’s first narrative feature, is a crime thriller about a piano tuner turned safe cracker. Long before Bates began working on Tuner, he was in awe of the great composers who came before him.
“I sang for a while, then I got into the saxophone, and later, electronic music and dance music. Despite all of that, writing music to picture has always been the number one thing,” Bates emphasizes. “The first record I bought was Ennio Morricone’s The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. That was an awakening of like, how did someone come up with all those crazy colors that seem so cliched now, don’t they? But it is extraordinary to hear that language being invented.”
Bates became involved in Tuner because of his work on Immaculate and Dumb Money, two films produced by Black Bear. Producers from those films made the introduction between Roher and Bates, and the two hit it off. Bates joined Tuner when a rough cut of the film already existed, with on-camera music from the characters.
“Daniel was like, we want someone to give the score a completely separate voice,” Bates explains. “We have this wonderful on-camera music, and we need the score to operate on a different path. That was really interesting to me. There is influence from the characters and the piano, but to try and find this other voice for this film was really enjoyable and challenging.”
“I had this suggestion to Daniel right at the beginning where I was like, obviously we need to tip our hat slightly to the jazz music already in the film. What would it sound like if Bill Evans had a bunch of modular synths? Daniel was like, I want to hear what that sounds like.”
“I made a soup of electronics,” laughs Bates. “I don’t normally put saxophones in my scores. The fact is, normally, the sax is what gets thrown out straight away. I wrote the melodies originally on sax. My wife heard the cues before I played them for Daniel, and she’s like, they always take the saxes out, Will, maybe you should replace it with some synths. Okay, fine, so I redid all the melodies on synth.”
“When I played everything for the first time to Daniel and Greg [O’Bryant], the editor, they were like, oh, this is great, the melodies are lovely, these sounds are so interesting…but wouldn’t it be nice if there was just some sort of human thing as well?” Bates recounts. “I was like, okay, fine, I’ll play the sax versions. When they heard those versions, they were like, that’s it! The hair on my neck was standing up, I was like, wow, for once the saxes aren’t getting thrown out in the first go-round.”
Why is there no love for Bates’ beloved saxophone? Clarence Clemons’ saxophone is one of the most recognizable aspects of Bruce Springsteen’s music. If it’s good enough for The Boss, why not the world of film scores?
“I love that instrument, but it did have a bit of a fall from grace,” Bates admits. “I think people just have a little bit of an aversion to it. I wouldn’t even dream of putting horns in Dumb Money. I think the idea of a solo instrument is freaky to some people because it makes you instantly think of a certain thing.”
“In the case of this film, it was just very appropriate and it makes the score feel kind of classic,” Bates continues. “It alludes to the background of Dustin Hoffman’s character, and obviously Nicky’s character. The fact that it’s cushioned in a different context is what made it survive. I have an unusual instrumentation around it. It’s not just the guy from The Lost Boys with his shirt off playing sax. I think that’s what everyone’s afraid of.”
A score works differently in documentaries and narratives. It serves a different purpose for each type of film, and Tuner marks the first time Roher waded into the unfamiliar waters of narrative storytelling.
“Every relationship always begins the same,” Bates says. “The director says they have no idea how to communicate about music. The easiest part of it is to just start talking about something. I tend to write a lot at first so we have something to start kicking the ball around with. Daniel knew exactly when something was right and he knew when something wasn’t right. That’s like 80% of the work for me.”
“Documentary scoring is very different. I do a lot of docs as well, and I do start the process in exactly the same way; searching for that melody,” explains Bates. “There’s generally a lot more music in a documentary. You’re more in the background. That was different for Daniel to realize that, oh, we can really use score to kind of bring out certain aspects of the story. I think it was a good learning curve for all of us.”
Oddly enough, this is the second time Bates has scored a film about a tuner of some kind. In 2019, he scored The Sound of Silence, a film about a “house tuner” who calibrates the homes of people in New York to help adjust their moods. It’s a little more alternative science than the skill of piano tuning that’s present in Tuner, but both films are united by main characters who are extremely attuned to sound.
“I feel like I thought of that connection right when I got the gig, and then I forgot about it, and you just reminded me,” laughs Bates. “I suppose there’s the intricacy to the music that connected me to both of these characters. They’re both somewhat tortured by their gifts and internalized their idea of music. It allowed me to be kind of scientific with it, which is fun, but also very feelingly.”
With the world premiere at Telluride and the Canadian premiere at TIFF, there are a lot of feelings happening with Bates and the rest of the Tuner crew. These are the sorts of festivals you dream about having your film play at, and to get to experience it is a thrill like no other.
“We work on these movies in isolation and forget sometimes that we’re going to be watching this with a wider audience,” smiles Bates. “In a way, watching it at Telluride, where it felt intimate, and then TIFF was obviously on a bigger scale, it reminded me that it’s a real crowd-pleaser. At the beginning of the screening at TIFF, Daniel said, “I wanted to make a movie movie. I think that, being in Toronto, being in that crowd was like, yeah, man, you really did it. It’s a real ride.”
