Tina Kakadelis
Steven Soderbergh’s Presence is not your regular ghost story. Shot from the point of view of the ghost, the film looks at how trauma lingers and spreads through a family household. An unconventional ghost story like this one calls for an unconventional score. Soderbergh called up Zack Ryan to do the job in what would be their second collaboration. Following the film’s theatrical release, Zack Ryan sat down with Film Obsessive’s News Editor Tina Kakadelis to discuss his teenage rock band roots, his working relationship with Soderbergh, and the way he captured the film’s underlying melancholy.
The transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
Film Obsessive: I saw that you started as a drummer on the Sunset Strip. That seems like a very far cry from scoring films. Can you talk a little bit about that jump from drummer to composer?
Zack Ryan: I grew up as a rock and metal drummer. In ninth grade, I was in my first band and we had our own material. We were playing rock clubs in the San Fernando Valley and in Hollywood. I continued doing that as I got older. I was obsessed with playing in bands and really wanted to be a professional drummer for a long time.
I got to a point where I just wasn’t getting better and I kind of plateaued. Other people I knew were getting better. I thought, I don’t have that thing you need to really excel and keep improving. At the same time, my CD collection had started to include a lot of film soundtracks. A lot of John Williams, Alan Silvestri, James Newton Howard, James Horner, and [Jerry] Goldsmith. This stuff was creeping into my collection.
About the same time that I got burned out on playing drums, I got interested in writing. I was in the school band program and decided to try to write some music for the school concert band. My band director said sure, bring it in and we’ll read through it. So I did, and it was horrible (laughs), but there was enough there where I thought, I like this, there might be something here.
I learned a lot from that experience, so I just started experimenting, having no idea what I was doing. I was about a senior in high school at that point. A guy I had been in a band with was out in Boston at Berklee College of Music, and he wrote me a letter, an actual letter, snail mail. He said, you got to come here, you can major in film scoring. I think, at the time in the mid-’90s, that might have been the only school where you could get a four-year, proper bachelor’s degree in film scoring. I went out there and just dove into it.
Did you also love films when you were young? Or was that a later love that you found?
I watched movies all the time. My family had a huge VHS collection and my dad worked on film crews. He was a grip, so I spent a little bit of time going to visit him on set. I will say, there was one moment that I do look back on and think, this might have been the moment where I decided to try to be a film composer.
My dad worked on the movie Wyatt Earp with Kevin Costner. My brother and I went to Santa Fe to visit the set. I got to see the movie being made, the facades of the western towns, all that. About a year later, we went to a cast and crew screening of the finished film. It was that classic moment, you know? The lights go down, the curtain opens, and then I hear this solo trumpet and I go, oh, wait, so someone did this within the last year, like, that’s a job. I kind of put two and two together and started exploring that world a little bit.
You have about 30 projects under your belt. What excites you each time you start a new project?
I like jumping genres or jumping styles. If I had to sit around writing the same thing every day for an entire career, I’d just pull my hair out, you know? For me, it’s the opportunity of going from a thriller or a supernatural story to a comedy to a romance. That keeps me excited and it keeps things fresh.
Presence is your third collaboration with Steven [Soderbergh], right?
Yeah, second as a director, but he produced the docuseries that I worked on, Leavenworth, which was the first time we really worked together.
What is the working relationship like between the two of you now?
It’s great. Working with Steven is unlike any collaboration I’ve ever had. He’s completely unique, and he’s in a position where he can make the process whatever he wants it to be because he’s the director, he’s the cinematographer, the camera operator, and the editor. For the first time in my career, I was truly working one-on-one with one person. He and I would really just communicate with the work that we were doing.
The first thing he directed that I worked on was this mini series called Full Circle for Max. I wrote music while he was shooting, and I was sending him batches every week. About ten minutes of music a week. He would listen to it, start cutting it in, and send me back scenes with the music in there. I would get a sense of how he wanted to approach it and how he wanted the music to function within the narrative. Sometimes I would tweak it for length, size, or orchestration and send it back to him. Or maybe I’d try a new idea.
I think we spoke twice over the six hours of the mini-series that was made. It was really a show-and-tell kind of a relationship.
Was that the same situation for Presence?
Similar, but it’s funny. For Full Circle, I was brought in during the first week of shooting and I think he had like two-and-a-half more months of shooting to do. Steven shot Presence in 11 days. It didn’t matter if I was brought in early (laughs). He was right in the middle of the schedule and I sent him some music.
Then he sent me the movie and he didn’t prepare me, which I think was wise on his part. He didn’t prepare me for the visual approach at all. I didn’t know this was from the point of view of a ghost until I was watching it. I learned that fact the same as a premiere audience would have seen it, without having any heads-up about how this thing was shot. My first impression was immediately imprinted into me, and I think that probably informed what my approach was overall.
Since you knew going in that the genre was going to be horror, were you building a score in your head, and did that change when you saw Steven’s visual approach?
No, I didn’t. I hadn’t been thinking about any sort of genre approach until I saw the first cut that he sent me. The interesting thing about genre and the score within a genre is that the audience has a certain set of expectations. They go into a theater and they go, okay, I’m gonna watch a ghost thriller or supernatural thriller, so this set of things is probably going to happen when I’m watching this movie. What’s interesting is that Steven’s visual approach kind of told the audience that there was a spirit in the house right off the bat, so the music didn’t have to provide that feeling like it probably would in a lot of other films in the same genre.
We didn’t have to lean into the fear factor at all with music because it was already provided visually, so that freed us up. What other ways can we use a film score as a tool for this story? Because of the nature of what this story is with this family and all that dysfunction and tension within it, and particularly with the Chloe (Callina Liang) character, there’s a sense of loss and grief. We were able to track that angle of the story more closely with the music, rather than providing jumpscares and an ambient atmosphere of spookiness.
Would you say the piano is the main instrument for the film score?
Yeah, it’s really a piano and strings score. It opens with a solo piano, which was Steven’s idea. He wanted to start this thing off with a grand tour of the house and give the audience the layout. I think that’s one of two pieces of music in the film that really comes from the perspective of the ghost. It’s going around this house by itself and there’s that opening piano piece. There’s a sense of loneliness and melancholy, but it’s also sort of peaceful and serene. I think that was Steven’s way of setting the stage for what the ghost represents.
The score feels sparse, but then also full-bodied, like the presence is unseen but has a massive effect on everything in the house. Where did this balance come from? Did you do a lot of sending ideas back and forth to Steven, or did that just kind of naturally come about?
I would say it was more natural. There wasn’t a lot of back-and-forth revising. It was taking a moment and writing some thematic material. For the Chloe character, there’s a piece of music that appears twice in different arrangements each time. They’re meant to represent Chloe’s part of the story and the loss she’s feeling over her friend. That was a bit of a balance of, in a movie like this, how do you write a piece of music that’s meant to represent those emotions and the feeling of sadness, but also when you take a step back and you go, wait a second, we’re in a supernatural thriller here?
You can’t just write a sad piece of music. It has to feel like it’s a part of this greater story, so there had to be a sense of mystery and the unknown about it. That was a tonal balance to come up with for that particular piece of music so it can ride the line between sadness and supernatural.
In the selection “Bonds” there are these shrill, kind of dissonant notes being held for a really long time. They feel like your take on the traditional horror movie score jump scare sting. Is that something that you were going for, or is it kind of like a happy accident that came about?
You know, I can say it was conscious. It wasn’t, hey, I’m going to do this thing that feels like the genre, you know? You sit down to write a piece of music and I think there’s a lot that’s just instinctual in you. You write a piece of music, then you take a look at the picture it’s playing up against, and you turn the dialog back on. Suddenly, you go, this feels right, or this feels completely wrong. There’s just a sense of finding what the ear will accept when you’re watching something like this.
I can’t remember specifically doing that moment you’re referring to, but I’m sure it was just a feeling. This feels like it needs a little bit more of that, you know? I’m going to do what feels right as opposed to, I’m working in this genre, and I got to tick some of the boxes that people are looking to hear in this world.
My last question for you, do you believe in ghosts? And has that changed since watching Presence over and over again as you scored?
You know? I’m open. I’ve never experienced anything that really freaked me out in that way. My mom was big into this stuff. There was a lot of Ouija board stuff going on in my house when I was a kid. She’d get together with friends and have a séance. I think it was really more for fun, but I think she was intrigued by all that stuff. I consider this to be a nice tip of the hat to my mom’s interest in the ghost world.
