q&a with Meena Ysanne, july 2020

-Describe your process working on the Vans spot. 

The director, Joel Fox, gave me free reign to respond to his video, simply asking me to make it sound ‘crystal-y’. I created an 'audio swatch' of the palette of sounds for Fox’s approval before I dug deeper into the project. I always prefer to do this for directors before I start the heavy lifting, so they know the direction before we get in deep. Once he’d signed off, I composed the soundtrack, and then modified one detail, at his request. It was our first collaboration, and was super fun to co-create during lockdown, while we were on opposite coasts. It was exciting to do this for Vans, which is such an iconic and cool brand. They were totally trusting and hands-off, with no agency expressing creative ideas, which is pretty amazing for such a serious brand. Usually anything involving a brand means a ton of marketing people directing the makers, but with this spot, it was simply Joel’s core idea, my audio, and a producer coordinating.

-When did you start composing? 

I studied composition and conducting at the Royal College of Music in London, so I have a European classical foundation, on which I’ve built my own idiosyncratic and unique compositional approach. My extensive work in film and TV has given me an ‘unclassical' perspective, and I rely equally on my ‘real world’ experience when I’m composing as I do on anything I learned in the conservatoire setting. Studying in India, traveling in South America, performing in Japan, and jamming in Brooklyn have had a huge influence on my sound. The start of my journey was in London, but as life  is nonlinear in terms of my career evolution, pinning the composition start date to my college days isn’t accurate if we’re looking at, for example, my compositions for Lonely Planet Guide, which were influenced by Lebanese microtonal scales, or stuff like the Vans spot, which is influenced by the sum of my life experience. 

-Describe your collaborations with movie directors you’ve scored soundtracks for. 

'To Be Friends' was produced by Aaron Eckhart (Batman Returns / Thank You For Smoking) and directed by his brother, James Eckhart, and as this feature film was telling the story of a violinist and a cellist, I was brought into the creative process before the actors were cast, right at the start. I helped the director select the lead actors, based on my input about their acting skills ‘fake-playing’ their instruments, and from there, I had weekly meetings with Eckhart. We worked very closely on the emotional narratives of the film, from pre-production right through to delivery of the score in post-production. I was on location - living on set - for one month to continue this process, and liaise as the emotional nuance and musical narrative of the film progressed, and advise and coach the actors on how to fake play their instruments. The final film is extremely slow and spacious, with a lot of silence, and simplicity in the acoustic textures, so the resulting soundtrack isn’t dense with wall-to-wall music at all. But the nuance arose from this level of integration, and the length of the journey to delivering the final score.

'The Owls' was directed by Cheryl Dunye, a legendary black LGBTQ director whose first feature, ‘Watermelon Woman’, is recognized as a classic, ground-breaking movie of the 90s, both within queer black cinema, and in the wider movie realms. It was an honor to compose the original soundtrack to The Owls for Dunye, and as different an experience as possible from ‘To Be Friends,’ in that it was a rollercoaster of last minute cues, and fast and furious wild energy working at break-neck speed with a large team and unforgiving deadlines. The movie is wall-to-wall music, almost zero seconds of silence for this fast-paced thriller, and as such, the score has huge variation in terms of the musical styles and emotional themes. I created it with full input from the editor, who gave clear requests for each cue. The result is exciting.

Both of these feature films were equally creatively satisfying and rewarding in different ways. Loved working on both!