Although film composer Ben Lovett had been a friend to each of the directorial crew of The Signal, the creative trio of David Bruckner, Jacob Gentry and Dan Bush, before agreeing to compose its score, his involvement with the project was as much based on close friendship as on simple semantics. “Bruckner and I drove around Atlanta one night when I was in town visiting. I was essentially accompanying him on location scouts, but I didn't know for what exactly. We were on the roofs of buildings, and we just wandered all over Atlanta at night, which looks really cool at night, especially when you get up high."

"They had started preproduction that day on Terminus, which got its title from the original name for Atlanta; all the old train systems that ran through the South terminated there. He was explaining to me the idea of the movie and the philosophy behind it and kept talking about, “...the signal, the signal, the signal...” and after a while I was like, “You guys should call this movie The Signal. It's a cool word. Terminus sounds like a Transformers villian.” I think they had like five different titles, “The Signal, Terminus, The Terminus Signal," things like that. Anyway they were tossing around all these different titles, and I was like, “If you call it The Signal, I’ll do it.”

With that singularly random statement, Lovett had found his sophomore film score project, one that would demand from him a heavy 75 minutes of score to be completed on a limited budget. Sitting in his Los Angeles-based studio, Lovett here talks about the importance of his friendships, his work on Gentry’s feature film Last Goodbye and the challenges of scoring a love scene in a horror film.

SM: Feel free to walk me through everything: your collaborations with Jacob and your work in film music composition.

BL: Jacob and I met in Athens, we were in school there at the University of Georgia. It was 1996 and the DV revolution was just starting to unfold. I suppose in a way it changed all of our lives, all this new technology was suddenly empowering kids with the ability to make movies, it was a whole new medium. The first Sony—I can’t remember what that first camera was called--…had just come out and Jacob somehow convinced his roommate to buy one....with his tuition money! I was introduced to them through a mutual friend and was basically tricked into doing music for the movie they were setting out to make, and I only say that because I never would have thought that I knew anything about scoring a film. I never would have offered those services because I didn’t even know that I had them. But Jacob was just like, "So what!" All these people I met at that time, and many since, had this common thread of being very ambitious and productive yet rarely discouraged by the fact that none of us really knew what we were doing.

That first film, Requiem, was really the beginning of the journey for me. I never told anyone that only a year or two earlier I borrowed a friends' guitar and went, "Hmm..what's this do?" I was terrified but simultaneously inspired beyond comprehension so I just went for it. The success story of that film was simply that it got made, that we finished it. I've realized in the years since how rare that can be. We all learned a lot making Requiem and soon this community started forming around what we could do. When I say “we,” the collective of people then was starting to encompass actors, other writers and some musicians, it was just a big group of friends, but it felt like family of ideas.

Eventually the core of that family decided to migrate to Atlanta because we were all in Athens, and that’s, of course, the closest big city. It was all kind of like, “Well, fuck school. Let’s go make art.” I'm torn between knowing that's terrible advice and wishing it wasn't. Once there we started to concentrate on the specifics a little more, it was like “Let’s have a name for this thing we're doing. Let’s have a logo and make some stickers. Let’s treat it like a punk rock band, set up shows and screenings.” Looking back, I'm not certain if the parties drove the art or the art was an excuse to party but a symbiotic relationship definitely formed there and POPfilms was born.

That’s when Dave Bruckner entered the picture, as the Pop collective was forming he was responsible for a lot of the momentum. I have a lot of respect for Dave, we connected immediately and I worked on a few of his films. Everything back then seemed to be short films, there were just too many ideas so the goal was to make one, party, do another one. My tenure in Atlanta was brief, I was only there for a year and a half. It’s funny to think about that because we did so much. There was so much output then.

Then I took off and left Atlanta, got out of doing movie scores. I went back to making records, working with bands, writing songs on my own and doing things like that, which I had always been doing simultaneously while doing all the film stuff. All the film music was just sort of an extension with my relationship with that particular group of people.

So I turned my focus into some other things. I traveled a lot. I spent a lot of time on tour…I kept winding up in LA doing various projects and various jobs. I got very enchanted with the West Coast and just the weather out here. It just felt like some gravitational force was pulling me westward. I yielded to that and went into the flow and the current of what the universe wanted and wound up here. I didn’t come here to score movies, but I certainly enjoyed the process of it, which has always been the most important and most motivating part of it for me, the actual process of doing it. I knew I wanted to explore it further at some point so what better place to be than Hollywood? Ironically, the only two films I’ve worked on since I’ve been here were with the same people who I was doing them all along…the roads just crossed back in a way we sort of all knew it would, it just seemed natural.

But it wasn’t until this trip back last January that I really reconnected—I guess the only way to bring back that particular feeling was to be around the same people, in the same place, doing the same thing. That’s what really brought it back. When I came through Atlanta there was just this energy in the air around this new project, everyone seemed to be buzzing with excitement and united in a way I hadn't seen in a long time. So, when they told me about how they were all going to do this film together, and that Dan Bush was involved, and I’d not done a movie with Jacob in three years, and I’d not done a movie with Bruckner since I was in Atlanta, which was almost five or six years, it just seemed obvious. Then they told me Scott Poythress was in it. I thought, “Oh shit yeah. I have to do this.”

I wanted to do The Signal because it’d been years since I’d done a film, and there’s no other project that possibly could have come along that I would have been interested in working on more than a horror film with my old friends, which extended to not only the directors, but every principal actor and damn near everyone on the crew. Even the mutual friend who first introduced Jacob and I over 10 years ago was on board. So I was like, “Let's do it old school. I’ll work for whatever you’ve got.” Everything we used to do in the past…they paid me in beer or high fives. Money has never really been an issue. Obviously, the more money you have the more you can do with it, but I have had to learn to be really resourceful and try and out do my own means whenever possible.

SM: Moving from Last Goodbye to The Signal, what was your process for each of those films? How were they similar, or how were they different?

BL: It all starts with sound, that’s typically the starting point for anything I'm doing. Much of the way I compose is very sound design dependent. It’s like I’ve got to start growing the vegetables that I’m going to then make soup out of. I’m not worried about the soup yet because the guests aren’t on their way. It’s not time for soup. I have to first decide what seeds I’m going to put in the ground, how I’m going to nuture them, try to grow them and then finally pull them out of the ground. Once it's all said and done you might end up going, “Oh, I ended up using more radishes than carrots...Who knew?”

Last Goodbye was really run and gun. There wasn't a lot of time and I did the music to that as (roommate Brian Burton, DJ and producer Danger Mouse) and I were building our studio. By that time years had passed since the last time I'd worked on a movie and I was back to where I started, not having any idea what I was doing really. The process for each project seems to be different regardless. It’s all intuitive, each one is it's own experiment. I've never thought of it any other way.

The music in Last Goodbye attempts to puncuate thought as opposed to action. I seem to really respond to this a lot creatively, and this approach seemed to fit the needs of the film. During post production Jacob and Alex (Motlaugh, producer of both POPfilms' features) would send me chunks of footage, rough cuts of various scenes, all out of order. That film is kind of a jigsaw puzzle, it messes around a lot with backwards and forwards in time, things sort of happening out of sequence and in a very non-linear fashion. In that way, what ended up happening was I was getting one of those puzzle pieces at a time and trying to figure out how to fit them together. The characters in the film feel so isolated, so alone, and the music wound up being very different scene to scene with only a few consistent sounds or melodies. Everything is disjointed and struggling to make connections, music and characters alike.

I get really into what the actors are doing, that is to say, the nuances of the performance. If the music doesn’t seem like it’s got any awareness of what the actors are doing, there can be this disconnect, and you miss that moment if you’re trying to make it into something that it’s not, to imply something that's just not there. You have to play to what's there, regardless of what idea you had for a particular scene from reading the script. It seems that in the constant flux of all the variables on screen at any moment, all the independant art forms in play...the music, the lighting, the cinematography, etc....sometimes a moment requires one of them to speak up and help carry a scene if the supporting elements aren't getting the point across. Likewise, sometimes you have to sit back and give those other things room. In that respect, I'm often not scoring the character's experience in the film, I'm scoring the audience's.

With The Signal I wanted to do everything differently. I did a ton of work before I saw anything. I worked from the script, and from my ideas about the story based on conversations with each director. Originally I didn’t even read the script start to finish. Knowing that each director wrote their own section, I started in Act One, which was Bruckner’s act, and I just read that. I read that several times without advancing into the next part of the story. I made extensive notes and breakdowns and began writing things for Dave’s part of the film before I ever really knew where Jacob was going to take it. My goal was to give each act in the story it's own sonic character, sounds that were independent from one another, then melodically create a thread that would tie them all together afterwards.

Having that prep time was invaluable to me. I’ve definitely never discussed a film philosophically more than this one. That also tends to be from the fact that there were three directors so, you know, three times the conversations and perspective. I found out very quickly during those conversations that each of these guys had very different ideas about what they going for in this film. I knew that in their hearts they all intended to make one movie, though each had a job to tell their own part of the story and bring their own artistic vision into the picture which was distinct and different. When I finally saw a cut of what they were doing I knew the music would have to play a very important role in this whole thing, not just artistically but structurally. I was going to have to be the thread that tied the three films together into one movie.

SM: Was there one particular moment that you knew could be made better by using the music to tie things together?

BL: Yes, definitely. We need to believe that Mya (Anessa Ramsey) and Ben (Justin Welborn) are in love, and yet we spend very, very little time with them together. We see them together at the very beginning of the movie, then the rest of the time they’re trying to get back to one another and we never have them on the screen at the same time. There was a lot of discussion about that first scene of the film, which is commonly referred to as “the blue scene” because it was very blue looking when they shot it. We all talked about that scene a lot, and from a music standpoint, it was one of the very last scenes to make it to the finish line, probably the last because it was the most important one. We were starting a low-budget horror film with a six and a half minute dialogue about a relationship, which is a risky thing to do…everyone agreed though that it was so important because if we don’t believe what’s going on between Mya and Ben it’s hard to imagine what either of their motivations are throughout the movie, to not just run for their lives. There's also another level to it, which I always enjoyed. I like the fact that the audience is immediately faced with a bit of a moral dilemma right from the opening bell. It’s like, “Here are our heroes. Here’s our love story, oh wait.. she’s cheating on her husband..that dude is messing around with some guy’s wife.” This situation is complicated both for the characters and the audience, and you have to sort of decide who you are going to sit with.

That scene was the hardest for me to write. I’ve never revised and rewritten a cue for a film more than I have that one scene. It was very hard to do that because on top of any creative reasons why that’s difficult, I was doing this on the side, in and around a million other things, just like everyone else was..this movie was a side project for everyone involved, and no one really had the luxury of turning their focus onto it for an extended amount of time until the end—after Sundance, once the lid blew off. But despite it, Dave just kept pushing and kept pushing....we had so many conversations about it, and I tried all these different things before finally finding it, which I never would have done without his guidance. That scene is the penultimate collaborative scene in the film between a director and a composer. Once that scene found it's way a lot of things fell into place. I was able to take elements of that love theme and put them where they needed to be in the movie to keep us connected to our central characters. Music is the emotional language of the film, and is probably the most interchangeable and tangible part of that moment when you are making connections between things in the storyline. When (the music for that scene) fell into place, I was able to solve a lot of problems: the little holes, the parts where the stitching wasn’t too tight, where it wasn’t very well reinforced.

Once you have a love story, you know, you have a story.

SM: Where did you pull your sounds from, and what kind of instrumentation did you use in order to garner the sounds that would make the layers?

BL: Lots of noise. And strings. The most intriguing part of this movie to me has always been what the signal is and does and the fact that this is a thing you see and hear. That gave me a lot of creative freedom and a lot free license. When it’s this noise which makes you go crazy, that opens up a whole area that you can define as you wander into it.

I enjoyed the idea that the phenomena of what the signal is in this film has perhaps a consciousness of its own. That it might have some awareness of itself. So I wanted all the sounds related to it to be as organic as possible...Obviously, the signal is traveling through communication devices and electronic things like TVs, radio, computers and cell phones so you had to be in that digital realm in some way, but, I didn’t want the source of it to be all computery. So, I did a lot of sound recording of natural occurrences. I went into physics, basically. Sound is merely a disturbance in air pressure, and I started by disturbing as much air as I could. I shaped and recorded a lot of feedback, electrical interference, things like that. It’s only when accidents happen that you induce some organic process into a digital world. Feedback and things like this are when you’ve involved nature in a series of interconnected points in an electronic system. So I started by plugging a bunch of shit into one another that shouldn’t be plugged in to one another, and I was just making a lot of cool noise initially, trying to see what ways I could take both studio instruments and normal household things like radios and vacuum cleaners and get them to interfere with one another. That laid the ground work. The actual sound of the signal in the film came from one of these experiments. Then I started making instruments out of the sounds and sprinkling the stuff I was doing on guitar and rhodes piano with the noises to begin building cues. All the strings came in later, and that was essential. I needed a lot of strings because I needed a lot of suspense. This isn’t a horror film that really relies on the mechanism of grossing you out. It’s more a suspenseful kind of horror film and suspense is often entrusted to the music and in the dissonance you can create melodically.

Along with Lovett, the score, he mentions, pulled huge influence from musicians Matthew (Cornbread) Compton and Paloma Udovic.

BL: Cornbread worked on all of “the waltz” parts of the score, which all occur in Act Two during Jacob’s set of the film. Jacob had this waltz scene in the script, where Anna is dancing around the room with her husband's dead body. Cornbread came in and we talked about what the scene needed and what ideas I had and he wrote this great piece which pretty much became the theme of Act 2. The way the bom-bom-bom quirky waltz pieces juxtapose against the violence in some scenes is really fun. Cornbread really brought a lot to the table, his involvement changed the scope of the overall score. I try to find any excuse that I can to work with musicians who I am really into, for me the only thing better than sitting around playing music is sitting around playing music with someone else.

Paloma is the most talented violin player that I’ve ever worked with. The first time that I worked with her was while making the Heavens’ record (Ben produced Heavens debut 'Patent Pending' on Epitaph Records). I'd hired an arranger for a string part I had in mind for one of the songs, and Paloma was one of the violin players hired for the session. I could just sit there in an entire room of people playing, and I knew which one I was listening to was her...I was blown away, something about her playing. I'm a sucker for strings and violin in particular, but something in her playing struck me, and I was excited to have the opportunity to work with her again.

When The Signal came around, we ended up spending a handful of nights, quite a few of them, trying things. I had to be very economical with our time, since there wasn't really anything I could pay her. Most people would not believe me if I told them what this movie was made for, budget-wise. I didn’t want to ask too much of her without being able to offer very much in return. Regardless, she stuck it out, and every single violin in The Signal is her playing. To me that’s really substantial because there are a lot of violins in that score.

All the strings you hear are only three people: violin, viola and upright bass, there’s no cello. I didn't plan it that way, I just could not find a cellist who would work on the movie for free. As I started going though, I really enjoyed the high-low string bass and violin combination. It allowed all the sound designy elements to fill all the space in-between.

Working with Paloma was invaluable to me because I work too off the cuff and too experimentally to write everything down and pre-orchestrate all the strings parts. Some are written, and some are me banging on a piano going, “It needs to be this note, then it needs to go to this note, but the next note you can go wherever you want it to. Just see where you take it. We’ll do two or three takes, and I’ll pick the one I like.” (Paloma’s) intuitive playing and being able to work with someone like me who has a very 'shoot from the hip' kind of style was again, invaluable—I couldn’t have done this score without her patience and talents.

SM: What is one question that you’ve always wanted to be asked about the way you approach film music composition that you’ve never been asked?

BL: That’s a really good question. That’s sort of me doing your job.

SM: Exactly.

BL: Scoring films and producing records can both be thankless jobs. For me the process of doing it is what’s most important. You learn so much each time, not just about the technical aspects of filmmaking or whatever, but about the importance of storytelling. Storytelling and the ability to communicate ideas with people is what has advanced culture. So I think it’s an important kind of art, and it’s necessary.

As far as what I want someone to ask me about the process of it, I'm not sure. I have little interest in talking at length about the technical aspects of making music, what gear is used, etc...because all of those things are just means to an end. At the same time to intellectualize it too much is to suffocate it. The one I always get though is, “How did you make that sound?” Hell, I don’t remember. It fell in my lap. It was already there; I just captured it. I waved my net around in the air, and there it was. I feel like I have very little to claim responsibility for in these situations, I'm merely an antenna, all the possibilties already exist.

For more information visit www.benlovett.com