In the captivating world of movies, where visuals and emotions come together to create memorable experiences, the role of a composer is often unheralded but undeniably crucial. I had the privilege of speaking with award-winning composer Spencer Creaghan who worked on I Don’t Know Who You Are, the M.H. Murray-directed film that graced the silver screen at the prestigious Toronto International Film Festival. With a masterful blend of musical ability and a knack for sonic storytelling, Creaghan crafted a captivating score that breathes life into the dramatic tale and helps move the action forward. In this interview, we get insight into this visionary artist’s inspiration, creative process, background in metal, and more.
I Don’t Know Who You Are‘s lead actor Mark Clennon is a musician making his transition into acting with this film. Which got me curious, how did you get your start in composing?
Spencer Creaghan: That’s a great question. I have actually always wanted to be in film since I was about 10 or really young. I got into movie music through heavy metal bands, of all things. I was really into heavy metal and a lot of the bands I listened to were inspired by film soundtracks. Through the process of making movies as a kid, working with film, and placing music in, I started realizing I have a bit of a knack for telling a story with music. Over the course of my teenage years of writing music and playing in bands, I learned that the music that I wrote was very narrative-heavy and very existential which works quite well with film music. I kind of found my place as a film composer and realized maybe this was the path I was supposed to be on and spent the rest of my life focusing on that. Even to the point I chose the university I went to because there were filmmakers right beside the music building, so I was able to start working with filmmakers, one of which was M.H. Murray. We started working together pretty much the first year of school, if not the first week of school. That relationship ended up building and now here we are 11 or 12 years later and we have a film at TIFF.
That’s awesome! So, that connection is what got you involved in I Don’t Know Who You Are and other projects as well?
SC: Yes. I think I owe a lot of the career that I’ve had to working with M.H. I think M.H. and I have had a pretty good collaboration since the start and he’s helped me shape how I think about music in film, using it as another character, using it as a place of worldbuilding, using it to help mean something deeper. He’s helped me to understand that. I think that I Don’t Know Who You Are is a good evolution of where we began to where we are now and it’s a stamp of how far we’ve come along this 12-year chapter.
Is there anything from metal that you took with you into composing?
SC: The grandiosity is a big one. Heavy metal tends to be big loud epic music. It’s very emotional music. When it’s angry, it’s angry. When it’s sad, it’s sad. It gives you everything. The metal that I was very much into as a kid is called symphonic metal. It has orchestras and choirs, those sorts of things. Listening to bands in that world gave me a different way of appreciating what an orchestra can sound like away from classical music. I like a lot of that music as well, but it’s interesting listening to bands blend orchestras with drums, guitars, and other kinds of instruments. It helped me understand that these don’t have to be separate, you can blend a lot of things. I Don’t Know Who You Are is a pretty good example of that. We have everything from saxophone to a choir to a kalimba and Spanish guitar. It’s a really nice merging of different elements and metal helped welcome that concept for me. For heavy metal, you just need to have drums and a guitar and that’s kind of what makes it metal. Everything else is just whatever you want to add on top of it. That experimentation and freedom have allowed me to come up with some combinations that I wouldn’t have had it not been for that influence.
Totally! The film has this heightened sense of drama and you mentioned the sax as well. Did you get a lot of runway to experiment and explore with putting music together?
SC: Absolutely. That was one of the things I loved most about the process. In one of the first conversations M.H. and I had, we decided no piano and no synths because that’s what a lot of movies in this style would probably do. We’d keep it to instruments that maybe the character would have had around the house and we wanted to do something completely different. Early on, he let me experiment with choirs and orchestras and see what that would add. The saxophone was something we were going back and forth on. The obvious answer was that he’s a saxophone player so we should put sax in the score. Sometimes the obvious answer is the right one. We’ll just use it in moments of romance and sexuality. I think by keeping it to only those moments, allowed the character Benjamin to relate to the saxophone in more of a passionate way. It’s heard once in the assault but I think it’s pretty quiet and I’m not sure how much people picked up on that.
How did you pull a team of musicians together for this?
SC: That’s a good question. On a micro-budget film like this, there’s often not really money to record a big orchestra or choirs so we have to work with whatever that we have. The saxophones were played by one of my team members. Her name is Abigail Neale. She’s been working with me for the past two years. I knew she played all wind instruments. I’d been wanting to have her on as a performer for a while, so this felt like the right film because I could talk with her as a composer, not just a musician. The violins were played by myself and another violinist that I work with a lot, Nelson Moneo. I’ve worked with him for about five years now. He’s amazing. There were some soprano vocals that were sung by a longtime collaborator of mine, Armenia Sarkissian. I’ve worked with her for about 12 years. We know how to work together, so I sent her what the music was and she just added on top of that. The guitars were performed by a friend of mine Daniel Schlombs. We wanted to keep it really intimate and unique, so I pushed myself away from using a large orchestra whenever I could so I could see what else could happen. I’m pretty pleased with what ended up coming out.
I think that approach lended an organic feel to the music which added a lot to the film.
SC: I’m glad you said that. Organic was a big word we kept going back to. We didn’t want it to sound micro-budget or digital or anything like that. We wanted it to sound alive. That’s something that M.H. wants a lot. He wants the score to be alive and a character and breathing. That’s something that we had to push for to really get in the film.
How did your approach to the music on I Don’t Know Who You Are differ from your work on the SyFy series SurrealEstate? Also a drama, but with more of a supernatural twist.
SC: I think the ethos for a lot of my works is the same, make the music one more character in the picture. Find something in the picture that the music can grab onto that isn’t necessarily in the forefront but with the music grabbing onto it, we can take it from the unconscious background and bring it to the subconscious foreground. I Don’t Know Who You Are takes a lot of its influences from French and Lebanese films and more European writing where the music doesn’t happen very often but when it does happen, it’s very bold. It’s very operatic. It’s very big, but it’s also very small. While SurrealEstate takes more of its influence from Hollywood films, it’s much more epic. It’s much more orchestral. However, I find that the score is a blend of gothic rock meets Irish instruments meets orchestral stuff. It’s very folky, but it’s also very heavy and epic. I Don’t Know Who You Are is a bit more ancient and operatic. But of course, both of them use folk instruments, ancient instruments, and orchestras. And both are very thematic in many ways. There are similarities between them just in how I write as a composer, but if you listened to them side-by-side, I often wonder if people would know they were done by the same person. I don’t know if they would.
What is it that draws you into projects? The story, the people working on it, etc.
SC: I love your questions. You have wonderful questions. Whenever I take on any project, I want to see if there’s something I can grab onto that excites me. For I Don’t Know Who You Are, I was pretty blown away when I read the script. I thought it was a pretty powerful story that needed to be told. I loved how it reminded me so much of ancient operas. It felt like an Italian opera or like a Greek tragedy, but yet like such a new story that hadn’t been told before. I don’t know if I’ve seen a movie like it before. I feel like this is tapping into something universal. It immediately excited me. We could avoid all the tropes of indie filmmaking. Let’s just do something bold and different.
On SurrealEstate, it’s pretty similar. I wanted to work on something that was emotionally riveting. This is a show about haunted houses. But it’s also a show about family, love, trauma, and what we bring with us when moving on. These are pretty powerful ideas, even though on the surface it may seem like a ghost show. Underneath, there is something well beyond that. I think I Don’t Know Who You Are is pretty similar. On the surface, it’s the story of one man’s weekend but underneath the surface, it’s about discovering where you fit in this world, life or death, fate, destiny, love, and passion. I think what draws me into projects are the director and producer. Do they embrace those depths? Because if they do, we are going to have a blast and be able to play around. I can come up with a saxophone opera. And they’ll go, “That’s amazing.” They don’t run away from those ideas. M.H. is someone who wants to hear those ideas, so it is really wonderful working with him.
It sounds like it’s a great collaboration. How soon into working on I Don’t Know Who You Are did you pick up on operatic or Greek tragedy elements to it?
SC: When I read the script, I picked up on the Uncut Gems energy and I wondered if we were going to go more fast-paced. Then when I saw the cuts, it was a lot more meditative and he took his time in these scenes. This is not a fast-paced action movie, it’s more of a drama. I wondered then if we could input more of that operatic aspect. M.H. temped the film with the score from Three Colours: Blue and that let us know we could lean more into the opera. That’s one of the best musical scores ever written of all time, so trying to replicate that was impossible. But we were able to capture what that was bringing in. It felt ancient. It felt like a story that had happened time and time again. Even as M.H. and I were discussing the ending, M.H. didn’t want it to feel like it was a happy ending. He wanted it to feel like it could keep on going. This is just one person’s story, but this is going to keep happening in life. It’s probably happened for thousands of years. Unfortunately, there are always going to be systems in place to prevent people from getting what they need and there are always going to be people that are going to do awful things and not disclose what they have. There are going to be people who will be afraid of what they might have or what they might be in society. We wanted to have that fated aspect in the film. Once we knew that was where we were going to land, it allowed me to work backward and decide to use ancient instruments and opera. Even with the saxophone, I wanted it to feel like it had been around for a long time.
I took a lot of my inspiration from the film Red Violin. It’s the story of this violin that existed for generations. I thought, what if HIV was like that? It has been around for a very long time but what if we could capture that in the music as something we could tame but could rise again? For some people, it could be the end. And for some people, a new beginning. I wanted to find where that balance was because HIV is nothing to scoff about, but it’s also not the end for a lot of people either. We wanted to find a way to let the music capture that sense of history that we felt was missing.
Mission accomplished. What’s next for you now that I Don’t Know What You Are is out in the world?
SC: M.H. and I are discussing his next film. I can’t talk about it too much, but we’ve already discussed what it will sound like. In M.H. fashion, it’s not what you would expect at all. I have a metal record coming out around the same time with a San Diego band that I worked with, Carnifex. They’re pretty big in the deathcore scene. I wrote all the orchestrations. It’s a pretty heavy record. I like to say that record is like if you took the score to There Will Be Blood and combined it with death metal. Besides that, I’m just going to see what other projects come down the pipeline. M.H.’s film is going to be a blast and I can’t wait for people to see what we’re going to do next.