Tina Kakadelis
What could be more romantic than spending Valentine’s Day running away from a masked killer? Murder makes the heart grow fonder in Josh Ruben’s Heart Eyes, which follows a young couple, Ally (Olivia Holt) and Jay (Mason Gooding), as they try to survive the holiday with a masked killer on their tail. Since it is a slasher movie set on Valentine’s Day, there does need to be a balance between the swooning and the stabbing. Part of that balance comes from Jay Wadley’s score for the film.
In celebration of the theatrical release of Heart Eyes, Jay Wadley sat down with Film Obsessive News Editor Tina Kakadelis to discuss his punk rock roots, the organized chaos of aleatoric strings, and his hard pivot from horror to the highly-anticipated remake of The Wedding Banquet.
Film Obsessive: This is the second time I’ve interviewed a film composer in the past two weeks who has started as a drummer in punk bands, which I find very interesting. How did you make that leap from drumming to film composing?
Jay Wadley: Growing up, I was in choirs and stuff like that. When I got to middle school, I was playing in grunge and pop punk bands. It was all happening at that time: punk, hardcore, all that stuff. Drums are one of the few instruments that I just really gravitated toward and started teaching myself. I snuck into my brother’s rehearsal space. I was listening to Nirvana and taught myself how to play drums. I got into the punk scene after that and it took over. I was recording my bands and producing.
Then, in high school, I was in all-state choir and I got exposed to some really interesting, experimental modern choral music that had really interesting sonorities that I hadn’t heard before. I think my brain just lit up. I started writing choir music, but most of it was post-apocalyptic lyrics, very kind of modern in aesthetic.
From there, I went on to discover other modern composers like John Corigliano and bang-on-a-can composers like David Lang, Evan Ziporyn, and Meredith Monk. That’s how I got into the classical world instead of Mozart or Beethoven. My music that I wrote in grad school was pretty atonal. There were some minimalist elements in it, but it was a lot of aggressive stuff.
I had a question pinned for later about the decision not to go the atonal route, but I guess I can skip to it now. In a time when so many horror movie scores are atonal, dissonant sounds, your score for Heart Eyes is bombastic and melodic. If atonal is your background, why not go that route for Heart Eyes?
There’s elements of it in there, but Heart Eyes is a particular type of horror film. It’s one that calls back to the classics of the ’80s and ’90s that have a bit more of a Hollywood aesthetic to them. They’re not just fully terrifying psychologically. It’s a fun film! It’s a film that calls upon those references and that period of time, both in horror but also in rom-com. It’s a slasher first. It’s scary first, but it does have a heart and a romantic undercurrent to it as well. An atonal score wouldn’t have been able to serve both things, I think.
We wanted a strong theme, something that felt of that era. Maybe like Chris Young or Alan Silvestri for the romance. I wanted to play off those tropes in a way. If it had been a different type of film, I probably would have leaned more into the abstract and atonal stuff.
Heart Eyes needed a strong theme and we wanted to have one of those classic stalker melodies. Some people have compared some of it to Bernard Herrmann elements in the strings. To me, I was kind of thinking Stravinsky, but whatever (laughs). I think, ultimately, why we landed here is the score needed to feel modern and fresh but with a nod to that period of time, because that’s what the movie’s playing with and that’s why it’s so fun.
Going back now, how did you get involved with Heart Eyes?
Josh Ruben, the director, and I have been friends for quite a while now. I don’t remember exactly what year we met, but I feel like it was 2010 maybe. Funny enough, we met each other on set. I had been hired to do some arrangements and mash-ups for Allison Williams from Girls. Before she was on Girls, she was trying to put out some YouTube videos, so I did some arrangements for her and we became good friends.
On set during the shoot, I met Josh, who was producing the project, and a bunch of people from the College Humor crew. Together, I started doing parody work and music for sketches. One of my early claims to fame was a Nickelback parody called Look at This Instagram. Josh and I have been friends ever since, and this is our first time actually getting a chance to work on a feature together. It’s been such a joy, you know? Josh is such a student of film and of these genres, he just knows it so well, and it was fun to play in this world with him.
You talked a little bit about wanting to make that distinct theme for the film’s killer, like Michael Myers in Halloween. Can you talk a little bit about the three-note melody you ended up with?
I think what allows the theme to have a lot of mileage is its simplicity. You can play it normally and then you can invert or modulate it. You can really work that in so many different ways. The idea was to have something that can always be a big statement that isn’t too long, but you can also build off of it. The idea is, giving the killer this little motif that describes them.
Some of the string parts are aleatoric. Can you describe what aleatoric means to non-musical people and how that works in composing?
Totally. Aleatoric is essentially just a modern writing technique where you can kind of give instrumentalists defined parameters on what you want them to do over a period of time. It can be very specific on notes and not on rhythm or very specific on rhythm, but not on notes. Or it can be gestural, like swinging up, going down, or all these types of different descriptive ways of dealing with music so that you create texture. It has an element of chaos and improvisation to it.
For a lot of horror scores, you use graphic notations that were kind of developed from Krzysztof Penderecki and some early modernist composers. Essentially, you describe the sound you’re going for and you give the musicians some sort of visual representation, then they experiment within that language and you find the sound.
A lot of horror scores are scratchy tones and wild gestures that are aleatoric. You give (the musicians) a general sense of what you want, maybe some sort of visual representation and some sort of description. It could be a line or a bar that continues for six beats or six bars. You start here, you move up, then you go to a scratch tone, and then everyone reaches to the highest note possible at the end, right? It’s just a different way of writing stuff that wouldn’t really make sense to be so specific on what every note people should play because then you’ll have too much homogeneity. You want something that’s pretty wild and crazy. It’s chaotic, but it’s organized chaos.
Organized chaos is a great way to describe it. There’s a bit of a choir in the background of your score. It seems like loving choir is a very deep thing within you. How did you decide to incorporate that into the score?
From a creative standpoint, the idea was to have a little bit of a hint toward the gothic nature of classic scores. If you see the film, no spoilers, but there are elements where the characters land in something that has a little bit of that gothic vibe. We planned to call it back to that genre.
In this score, all the choral stuff is programmed. There’s not actually any real live voices, but it’s layered in a way that it’s hard to tell. You’re not hearing specific lyrics or anything like that, which was pretty cool.
I haven’t seen the film yet, but the score just made me so pumped to go see it. I’m going to try today.
It’s a fun movie! You’ll be laughing, it’s bloody, you’ll be cracking up, and it’s got great heart to it as well. It’s just one of those films that you have to see in theaters, and it’s so much better when you see it with a group. It really, really highlights the collective experience of going to the movies.
My last question for you is about The Wedding Banquet, because I loved the original and I’m excited about this remake. I imagine it’s very different tones for the two scores. What was it like switching from Heart Eyes to The Wedding Banquet?
I’m lucky that so many of my scores are so different. It’s a blessing and a curse. I can’t ever rely upon what I just finished in order to keep the momentum going. I kind of always have to try something new, but yeah, the scores are very different.
Heart Eyes is big orchestra, violins, wild, crazy. For The Wedding Banquet, it was more sort of Pacific Northwest lo-fi, guitar-driven, simple, and pared back. Not doing too much, just doing a very light lift in these more emotional or playful moments.
So polar opposites?
Polar opposites (laughs). It definitely keeps it interesting, that’s for sure.
