“We have Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma. My backstory on Alfonso is that, pre-Roma, Billie and I played a show in Milan, we got word that Bu Cuarón, Alfonso’s wonderful daughter, was coming to see our show. We were playing really small venues at the time, little clubs for 250 people, and we would kind of say hi to everybody before the show and Bu was there and we got to meet her and she was a total sweetheart. Alfonso had brought her to the show. And, you know, I have also… during that period of time, Chris Rock brought his daughter to a show and walked up to us and was like, “I don’t know who you are, but my daughter loves you.” And I was like, “Great, fantastic. That’s all good. Nice to meet you.” And so I was pretty prepared for the same story to be true of Alfonso. So I just walked up to Alfonso and said like, “Thanks for coming. Thanks for bringing your daughter.” He was like, “The sound that is at the end of the song ‘hostage,’ that go like… what go like that?” And I was like… I was so surprised that he had taken the time to listen to the music and had ideas about it and opinions. And so we talked about music for the 30 minutes before we played, then we played a show, and then we kept talking afterward. And he was like, “Will you send me a playlist? I will send you a playlist.” And so we started sending each other tunes, and he sent me a bunch of really great stuff. He kind of hipped me to… I knew about FKA twigs, but he hipped me to a couple FKA twigs songs that I loved. And my pride and joy was I sent him “Ponyboy” by the artist Sophie, who has been a big influence on me. And so I really credit Sophie and “Ponyboy” for him offering me the scoring gig for Disclaimer. I was in London, on tour with Billie, this is now many years later, it’s 2022, I guess, and I went to visit the set of Disclaimer, and it was like an episode of a TV show or a scene in a movie about filmmaking, if that makes sense. It was, like, sets rolling in and out of frame. And in between setups, Alfonso would be like, “Come with me to the edit bay.” He would show me these scenes in the edit bay, and then a PA would run into the edit bay and she’d be like, “You have to see the hospital set. You have to come check out the hospital set,” and we’d go check out the hospital set. He’d be looking around and he’d go, “Has Chivo seen this?” And Chivo would come and he would just be like, “Have you seen this?” And Alfonso goes, “No, but the… the blue on the walls and the blue on the floor are all wrong. The wrong blue.” And Chivo’s like, “I was thinking the same thing.” They were so immediately aligned about this stuff. And then the PA came back over and was like, “The dogs are here.” And he was like, “…” And we went over and there was a… there were, like, six dogs sitting lined up. And he looked at all the dogs. And he loves animals, he’s very sweet to animals, and so he’s being sweet to all the animals, and he goes, “The fur is too white on this dog. Could we make the hair darker on the dog?” And the owner was like, “No.” And he was like, “We’ll need to find a darker dog.” And I remember saying to one of his producers on set, I said, “What day of production are we on?” Because he was operating the way that I operate on, like, day one. And she said, “75.” And I think that it reminded me that that is the goal, ultimately, is to just care about the thing you’re making and every detail of the thing you’re making as much as possible. So, a great lesson in passion and focus and investment in the project that you’re working on. I have learned just as much from standing over his shoulder as I have from watching his amazing movies.”
