For Chris Roe, the musical world of ‘Bad Apples’ began with an idea as mechanical as it was musical: build a system, establish its rules, and then find out what happens when everything starts to go wrong.
“I landed on a weird school orchestra of a mismatch, a bit unbalanced and a bit, too many flutes and some giant saxophones,” Roe says of putting the orchestra together. “It had an unevenness and an oddness to it, which I thought worked really well for the film.”
In this interview, Chris Roe discusses composing the score for ‘Bad Apples,’ from his initial reaction to the film’s unusual premise and the pressure building around Maria to developing a musical language that reflected Jonatan Etzler’s vision of the score as a “system” or “machine.” Roe explains how Bartók and Stravinsky helped shape the score’s palette, which ultimately became an intentionally mismatched “school orchestra” featuring an uneven combination of instruments. He also discusses why he prefers to begin working as early as possible, the extensive process behind the film’s final cue, and the challenge of making Danny’s arc feel unexpectedly heroic without abandoning the strange, surreal sound world established throughout the film. Roe additionally reflects on recording the score at Master Chord in North London, the happy coincidence of finding himself working in another basement, and the unique experience of watching the film with an audience and hearing how different moments of its comedy land in a cinema.
Maria (Saoirse Ronan) is a primary school teacher determined to inspire her class of 10-year-olds, but one particularly unruly student, Danny (Eddie Waller), continually throws her efforts into chaos. As his behavior threatens both her classroom and her career, Maria makes an increasingly questionable series of decisions that culminates in her accidentally taking Danny home and locking him inside. She quickly realizes she needs to undo what she’s done, but an unexpected development complicates matters: with Danny out of the classroom, her students begin to thrive, while the school staff and parents are delighted by the change. Suddenly, Maria is faced with an impossible dilemma as the consequences of her actions become increasingly difficult to escape.
Directed by Jonatan Etzler and written by Jess O’Kane, ‘Bad Apples’ stars Saoirse Ronan, Eddie Waller, Nia Brown, Jacob Anderson, Rakie Ayola, Robert Emms, and Sean Gilder.
‘Bad Apples’ is now available.
Awards Focus: It’s so nice to meet you today. How are you doing?
Chris Roe: I’m good, thank you. Yeah, thanks for having me on. I’m excited to talk about the film.
AF: How did you first become attached to score ‘Bad Apples’?
Chris Roe: I got an email from my agent with the log line of a Saoirse Ronan film, and she plays a teacher who kidnaps her student and locks him in the basement, and not much else. Jonatan Etzler, the director, did a great music brief. He’s obviously a musician himself and really knows his classical music. He’d given lots of references to (inaudible) Bartók and Stravinsky and outside of the film repertoire. I’d sent back some tracks of mine that I thought hit certain—I didn’t hear anything for a while because I think they were trying out my music as temp. Eventually, they got back in touch and I could read the script and I could really see—because when you read the synopsis, you’re like, this is unbelievable. It’s going to be funny, but a teacher, you wouldn’t believe that.
But for me, when I read the script, I could see the pressure building up on Maria and how that you start to root for her and you catch yourself and you’re like, yeah, I can imagine being in that situation.
AF: Did you get any notes in particular as far as the direction of the score?
Chris Roe: I did, yeah. Jonatan had some clear ideas musically about what we should do. He wanted the score to be almost like a system, like a machine. We spoke about the set pieces first in the film, and the opening was one of them. It shows they go on a school trip to a cider factory, and literally, you see the machine working and a spanner being thrown into the works, a shoe being thrown into the cider press, and it all goes wrong from there.
Jonatan had picked out certain recordings. There was a Bartók recording where the strings were played very brutally and had a lot of power and energy. We spoke about and I tried different ways that we could create a musical system. I landed on a weird school orchestra of a mismatch, a bit unbalanced and a bit, too many flutes and some giant saxophones. It had an unevenness and an oddness to it, which I thought worked really well for the film.
AF: Generally speaking, do you prefer to start working on the score from the moment you read the script or do you wait until you see footage?
Chris Roe: I do like working right from whatever I can, whether it’s the script or just the idea of the film, because I think that time is so useful to have to experiment. Even though I was brought on quite late in the process, they’d shot the film and everything for this. We did have a good month or so of just trying (inaudible) and landing, getting that palette right.
Once you start working to picture, you’re led in certain directions, which I think is good once you’ve set up your instrumentation and the rules of the game, the things that you’ve got to work with, and then when you work to picture, you can just trust your instincts and you know that everything’s going to be linked within this overall palette. So, yeah, I like getting on as early as possible, really.
AF: It’s my understanding that it took 12 iterations to figure out the tonal balance of the final scene.
Chris Roe: You’re right. Yeah, something like that. It was definitely one of the hardest cues. Jonatan is a great director. I really enjoyed working with him because he never shut anything down. So it was never like, this doesn’t work. Or it was sort of just, this is cool, but maybe let’s try, or I like that little bit of what you’re doing, focus on that more.
We knew how important the ending was to—without giving anything away—to root for Danny and who earlier in the film you really hate. It was how to manage that shift for the audience in how you should feel for this character. And yeah, it had to have a heroism to it as well. We tried some temp that was quite a traditional Hollywood big orchestra and it did a certain job, but we needed to bring that back into the sound world of the rest of the film and the odd world we’d set up. I think that was the challenge. It was how to bring something that’s more heroic into this weird, surreal world.
AF: Next to the final scene, were there any cues that evolved the most from start to finish?
Chris Roe: I think one that we worked hard on was there’s a turning point in the film where Maria goes back to the classroom after having panicked and kept Danny in the basement. So no one knows yet. The rest of the class starts to do really well and they have this inspection. It had to be a dream like state almost for Maria.
She gets back to school and the floor is shifting beneath her feet and everything feels a bit—she doesn’t know how the rest of the day is even going to go but she’s panicking, but then there’s this turning point in the scene where everything starts to go right and we also had to end it—she gets the class to sing the school song so just as a technical point, that was my end point for the cue. So we had to make sure the music fit alongside that, but in an ironic way. It was going against this happy moment in her class where everything’s going right, but it had to undercut that somehow.
AF: Is there a studio that you like to record at because of the way it sounds?
Chris Roe: Yeah, for this film, we recorded at Master Chord in North London and it was a happy accident really because we were a day into recording and we realized that we were in a basement as well. I hadn’t planned it like that but it was a happy coincidence.
But also, the reason I wanted to pick that studio really was that it had a dry acoustic and it was very controlled. Some studios have their own sound of the room but we wanted the score to be able to be very claustrophobic in places and quite dry and to hear all of the detail. So yeah, it was one of those things that worked in both ways really.
AF: They didn’t try and lock you up in the basement, did they?
Chris Roe: (laughs) No, we made sure that there was an escape route if we needed it.
AF: Did you have the opportunity to be in attendance for the premiere at TIFF last year?
Chris Roe: I couldn’t make the premiere sadly, but I saw the film at the London Film Festival, and then now it’s coming out. There’s been some preview screenings this week, and I just love to see it in a cinema with an audience. I find it a bit like going to the theatre when you’re the first person to laugh, and then that sets off the rest of the audience.
I think with comedy, it’s really interesting to see which bits land and which don’t. It’s different in different screenings, I think—just how shocked people get by the like second and third act. But yeah, it’s really fun to see in a cinema.
AF: Yeah, I’m the same way, especially with comedies. Watching alone, it’s just not the same.
Chris Roe: Yeah, I know, right? I don’t know what it is. It’s that kind of communal thing, isn’t it?
AF: Yeah. It was so nice to meet you. Thank you so much.
Chris Roe: Oh, thanks so much. Yeah. Nice to meet you.