BY STEPHANIE ESLAKE
Writer, producer, or composer?
James Edward Barker didn’t settle for just one of these career paths. Rather than taking his pick and sacrificing his remaining creative passions, James chose to embody all three professional identities. (And once you read about it, you’ll never be able to complain about how busy you feel.)
He took on each of these roles for his latest film The Courier, starring the prestigious Gary Oldman, Dermot Mulroney, and Olga Kurylenko. It’s released through Signature Films, and Rollercoaster Angel Productions — the latter of which James co-founded with director Zackary Adler.
In this extensive interview, James tells us about his work on crime action thriller The Courier — which he described in a statement as a “contemporary, relevant and high-octane rollercoaster ride”. You can watch the trailer below.
In the past, the British composer has also scored films such as Lean on Pete and Mara. For The Courier, he worked with fellow composer Tim Despic.
Hi James. So, how is it that you’re a composer and pretty much everything else, too?
I’ve always been a closet writer! I’ve written a few scripts now, and have always heavily been involved in and ran development during my short tenure as producer across all my projects. But yes, this is my first ‘published’ screenplay.
Zack — the director of The Courier — brought me the script in August 2018 and, as much as we loved the screenplay as it was, we needed to shape the project into something that was ours and so we set about working on what we believed would enhance the overall scope and arc of the story.
A lot of that work involved changing the gender of the main character, The Courier, played by Olga Kurylenko; and developing a character for Gary Oldman to play. When Zack showed me the script initially, he wasn’t aware of me also being a producer. When I mentioned that to him, and the fact I had worked with Olga on a project I had produced called Mara, he was really excited about us forming a much closer relationship. So I came on board as producer and writer, and led the charge with him in casting the whole project and working with him creatively to mould it into something he wanted to direct.
Writing, producing, and composing just all seem to fit naturally into my world
For me, producing is such a joy to do because it allows you to engage with a wider team of people for a long period of time, rather than be stuck in your studio composing on your own. I think I need that in my life: I really enjoy playing that role and, funnily enough, I find it a lot less stressful than composing. And writing for me is really just another creative outlet.
I love stories and I love telling them, but I’ve loved it even more writing with Zack. We’ve formed a bond where we innately trust each other with our words, and we know when the other one really wants a certain passage or line to stay in and we get behind that, because we know it’s important to them. But, at the same time, we also leave the egos at the door and trust the other person’s constructive criticisms.
Composing is in my blood. I’ll never be able to escape that, and I never want to. And writing, producing, and composing just all seem to fit naturally into my world and at the moment hasn’t caused any internal conflicts!
Take us back to the start of your time with The Courier. Why did you want to write this project — and at what point did you decide you also wanted to take on the musical score, too? Or, because of your past film experience, did you know from the beginning you wanted to craft the music, too?
To be honest, whenever I read a project, if I hear the score in my head whilst reading it, and then that’s why I want to help get it made. If I can’t hear the score, then I can’t seem to connect with it as much.
If you’re about to engage with any project, be it writing or producing, you know you’re about to dedicate a huge chunk of your life and time to it. So you have to want to do it, otherwise you’re not going to have the creative satisfaction you need from it to give it 110 per cent.
With regards to The Courier, I wanted to work with Zack again — I had scored his film Rise of the Footsoldier III — and you often feed off another person’s enthusiasm for a project. Zack was really keen about the initial script for The Courier, and so it was a very easy decision: I think we made the decision to partner on it within a few hours of sitting down in LA and discussing what he wanted to do with it.
Composition is such an enormous job in itself. How did you divide the time management while working in so many aspects of the film?
Well, the writing and producing happened concurrently. A script is always evolving. Even during shooting, there are days where something needs a little touch up or change because of certain events you just can’t control, or just because Zack and I decided on the day there was actually a more natural way for an actor to say or perform something.
It was tough managing the composing with the producing for the reason that we had such a tight schedule on this because of the deals that were in place for distribution. But we knew that going in, it wasn’t a surprise — not that that made it any easier!
We shot the film in February and we had to have had it delivered by mid-September, so it was a really quick turnaround. So yes, when I came on board the project at the beginning, I knew I would need to team up with someone. So I called up Tim Despic, with whom I’ve scored multiple projects in the past, and asked him if he would score it with me, and luckily he said yes. We both worked extremely hard and didn’t sleep properly for weeks, but we’re really proud of what we achieved within the timescale and budget we had.
When it came to your musical ideas, at what point did you begin hearing this score in your mind?
I heard it instantly. But to be fair to Zack, he did too — and even though we didn’t start the score until after the first cut, Zack and I would often play around with tracks whilst Nick cut the film.
Zack and I were there every single day of the edit, so it was an organic process that built over time. And then when I was ready to start scoring the project, I was able to pass that direction over to Tim very quickly to bring him up to speed.
Your intimate knowledge of the story must have given you some strong ideas about the style of music you wanted. Tell me a bit about the technical side — the instrumentation and style you knew you had to achieve.
We didn’t have a lot of time, and we had a limited budget, but we needed it to sound big. It’s also a very complex score in that there’s a lot of characters to navigate around, and there’s a lot of distinctive fight sequences. Zack made the decision early on that because we are trapped in this car park for the majority of the movie — and that’s where the four major fights occur — we needed each fight to have its own look, style of fighting, edit, and score, so that the fights would be exciting and keep the audience engaged. So that was our starting point.
There is also a very complex five-and-a-half-minute sequence fairly early on where we are running The Courier’s, The Witness’, Mannings’, and The Courthouse’s story line at the same time, and they are all playing out and being edited to a piece of music that Mannings has started playing on his record player. In the edit, we looked at a Muse track from The 2nd Law, but we couldn’t afford that, and we couldn’t find anything else that worked as well. Then Zack had this great idea of ‘what if Mannings was listening to some classical music that then turned into the score, but gradually shifted into something more contemporary?’.
We created this epic track that ends up incorporating everything from classical to trance to heavy rock
My favourite classical piece of all time is Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No. 3, and when I played that to him, we both agreed that it worked so well. So Tim and I re-recorded the first few bars of it, and then we wrote a 4/4 beat under it and created this epic track that ends up incorporating everything from classical to trance to heavy rock. The time signature and changes were extremely tough to piece together, but we got there in the end. I think as well it was a 112 track mix, which personally gave me a few headaches whilst producing and mixing it, because you want everything to sound like it has its own space and not crushed by the mix — but I think we got there!
Regarding instrumentation, I think just because of the influences we were laying up against the edit, we knew what we wanted, but it was a complete amalgamation of instruments — we had everything from your typical orchestral line-up, but then church organs, a huge amount of FX, guitars, and the complex array of analog pedals and the sounds we created from them. There are quite a few non-descript female vocals as well. And then we had the Opening Titles track. Zack pushed us to create something for that that was almost a Bond-style piece of music for a montage of visuals and information he wanted to put together for the title sequence. For us, it still had to incorporate the main melody theme, that really was written for Amit Shah’s character — The Witness — as his character really ties everyone’s together; he’s the centre of the spider chart as such.
Zack also wanted some lead vocals, and he introduced me to Sadie Pickering and Marcus Wheeldon. In pure Gorilla style, they recorded a whole array of lyric lines that either Sadie, Marcus, Zack or I had written down for Sadie to sing, and then she jumped in her wardrobe in north London and recorded them down over a very basic edit of a track Tim and I had written called Killing Frank. Then, she sent me hundreds of phrases and lines — and oohs and aahs! When it came down to it, I had 24 hours straight to edit a new version of that track — and then edit all her lines to find some sort of marriage between the two that worked. Then, having had no sleep, I jumped in a taxi for my two-hour journey to where we were mixing the film, and then slotted it in in the last day of the mix! It was crazy. But again, I’m really proud of the result, and I know Zack and Sadie are, too.
Wow! So, beyond the instrumentation, what does writing a film teach you about the narrative of composition? That is, what does it teach you about the storytelling that can be achieved through a piece of music, and how does one discipline inform the other?
If you get involved in a project as early on as the writing the script, you imprint the story in the DNA of your creative brain! So it’s just there when you come to composing it. It’s a very natural and satisfying process, because normally when you score a film, you’re brought in at the eleventh hour, and you have to watch a cut of the film and then try and jump inside it. It’s a bit like trying on new clothes for the first time: you have to get comfortable with wearing them, and it takes time. But if you’ve helped create and shape that project, you’re already totally inside that space and it does help enormously.
Funnily enough, though, I would look at your question in the opposite way. Because for me, composing films — and I’ve done over 30 features — has taught me about the narrative of writing a script. The great thing is as well is when I am writing a script now, I don’t need to write to music, because I am hearing the score and I am writing the words to the score in my head!
It’s a little bizarre, now that I say it out loud.
You are in the unique position of being a producer who also understands the needs of composers. How would you like to see those in the industry working harder to support each other? How can producers be more considerate of composers, and vice versa?
I think I know what it’s like to be on the both sides of the coin. So I can easily empathise and sympathise with the crew when I’m a producer, or when I’m a composer vice versa with the producer.
Composers shouldn’t be brought in at the eleventh hour, and they shouldn’t be given no time and no money to do their work
I think in general, though, producers need to realise that the composer along with the writer, and sometimes the sound designer, are the only three people on a film that are creating something completely out of thin air. So you need to give them the space to do that.
Composers shouldn’t be brought in at the eleventh hour, and they shouldn’t be given no time and no money to do their work. They need to have the space and time and budget to be able to produce what is expected of them.
If you think about it, sometimes a band of say five people will have a record deal, and they’ll write and record one album of say 40-45 minutes — which they may write in 6-8 months — with normally someone else producing it, and then tour for ages and then maybe three years later another album comes out. With a film composer, you might have 6-8 weeks to write an 80-minute film score with a 150-piece orchestra. And you might to not only have to write it all, but produce, record, and mix it yourself. And if you’re a regular film composer, you’ll have to do that on five films a year.
So as a film producer, they should be aware of what they’re asking of their composer.
At the end of the day, what advice would you give to other artists working in the screen music industry, who are interested in venturing into different roles?
My advice would be: don’t be afraid to do it, and don’t allow the industry to put you in a box. Why can’t you wear more than one hat? Directors are writers, they are editors, they are even producers; and producers are writers. So why can’t composers have multiple roles, too?
John Ottman was always an inspiration to me, being an editor and composer. That always fascinated me; not that I wanted to be an editor, but the marriage between the two and what a great marriage that would be — to sit their in your suite, jumping back and forth between editing and composing!
So go with your gut, trust yourself, and don’t look back.
Image supplied.
