Nicholas Britell

“I am going to start with a personal project. I’m going to start with The Underground Railroad. Every single state on the journey of this film, we traded in the score like it was almost a different planet at times. It was like working on multiple movies. But one of the more profound experiences I’ve ever had, and shout out to Barry Jenkins, Colson Whitehead. Yeah, very special experience.”

“One of my all-time favorites, Citizen Kane. Masterpiece. Interesting footnote on this is that this was actually Bernard Herrmann’s first film score. Bernard Herrmann, one of the greatest of all time, and one of the things that I love about this, in particular in Herrmann’s work, is you first hear his angular, chromatic sound of how he moves. There’s a kind of brooding nature to his music in this. He also wrote the opera excerpt that is in the movie, which is pretty amazing, and I love the way that… I love when composers and directors work on the music that’s in the movie, as well as the music that’s underscore, that’s sort of in our world, so, I can’t wait to watch this.”

“This might be my favorite movie of all time, The Double Life of Véronique by Kieślowski. I saw this… I was probably, like, 13 or 14, and I remember watching the movie and just saying to myself, “I didn’t know that was possible. I didn’t know you could make a movie like that.” And the score is one of my favorite scores of all time. It’s by the Polish composer Zbigniew Preisner, and just a total masterpiece. Again, actually, one of those films where the diegetic and the nondiegetic, the music inside the movie and the music in our world of score, are constantly interacting. There’s a piece of music that Preisner wrote, and they pretended that it was actually a sort of old piece by a Dutch composer named Van den Budenmayer, and so you watch the movie, and inside the movie there’s this incredibly gorgeous vocal concerto that’s performed and that piece of music is somehow woven into the fabric of the movie itself. And I can’t say enough about it. It’s a very beautiful, mystical, strange movie, but might be my favorite movie of all time.”

“Tokyo Olympiad. This is another one of those movies, actually, that the first time I saw it, I remember just sort of… It was like a revelation to me. Not just the film itself. It seems like it has its own almost philosophy of filmmaking. There’s something so grand and beautifully composed about the filmmaking, but it also has a beautiful philosophy of humanity and life in it. A very optimistic take and a very, very special moment in time, I feel, the 1964 Summer Games in Tokyo. I also love the interaction of sports and music, and I think this is about as good as it gets with that.”

“I’m gonna grab one more here just because this is too many, but I’m taking Malcolm X. Incredible film. Not only on a film level, and also Terence Blanchard’s score, the opening with the flag and incredible trumpet overture. All-timer. Amazing.”

“La Jetée. What I love about La Jetée is it’s got so many different elements that are in and of themselves very unconventional for a film. So it’s half an hour long, approximately. It’s a short film. Still photography, voice-over narration, science fiction, time-travel elements. It’s hard to put into words what it is, but it makes you really think about the possibilities of filmmaking and how the forms of filmmaking are up to us. There’s an infinite possible nature of how we approach moviemaking and the structures of movies and the types of movies and the art that we make, and I think this is a movie that makes you step back and say, “How am I making… What am I doing on a project?” or, “What are we all doing? Are we in forms just because people are doing certain forms? Or are we doing the forms because that’s the best way to tell a story?” La Jetée, very, very impactful for me.”