Free Guy. Christophe Beck Interview

Free Guy. Christophe Beck Interview

Film composer and writer of the underscore soundtrack Christophe Beck in this exclusive Interview speaks about scoring the Free Guy film by Disney.

Christophe Beck began playing piano at age 5. He then studied music at Yale and attended the USC film- scoring program under the tutelage of legendary composer Jerry Goldsmith. He began composing in television at the personal recommendation of Disney music legend Buddy Baker. He has a career that bridges genres and garners well-deserved acclaim. Beck displays his range from scoring Marvel Studios’ action- adventure Ant-Man to Fox’s film adaptation of Charles M. Schulz’s comic strip Peanuts. Recent projects include Frozen II, the documentary Watson, The Christmas Chronicles and Marvel Studios’ Ant-Man and the Wasp. The prolific composer scored the Oscar and Grammy-winning animated film Frozen (the soundtrack album has sold over 3 million copies).

Beck is the musical voice of iconic comedies of the last decade, including: The Hangover, American Pie, Hot Tub Time Machine and Pitch Perfect; poignant films, including Cake and the true-life-based drama We Are Marshall; documentaries Red Army and the award-winning Waiting for Superman; rom-coms Under the Tuscan Sun and Crazy, Stupid, Love; along with action films Year of the Dog and Edge of Tomorrow, as well as the drama & crime film American Made.

Beck’s breakthrough success came by composing music for the TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer for which he earned an Emmy. Beck is unique in his versatile ability to develop the tone in any genre. His music combines a masterful use of complex dynamics to create tension and convey a vast spectrum of emotion. Beck’s scores add depth, intrigue, humor and sentiment, and his music contributes powerfully to the aesthetic of each film he scored. He received his most-recent Emmy nomination for his music for the WandaVision TV series aired at Disney+.

- Christophe, first of all let me congratulate you on your recent Emmy nomination for the soundtrack of the WandaVision TV series on Disney+!

- Thank you very much! I appreciate that!

- When you joined the Free Guy film project, could you already imagine, what kind of a soundtrack it needed?

- We have had lengthy discussion with director Shawn Levy. So I came to a conclusion that this film would have 4 layers or universes of music. First one is the Story. I didn’t have very much to do anything with creating this part. Basically, here you hear the songs of other various artists that usually help selling the title to a wider audience. The big part of this film’s world is a video game. There were a lot of inspirations in terms of video games for this film, but one of the big ones was the Grand Theft Auto series by Rockstar Games. While you are playing a game you are literally listening song after song after song there. So Shawn definitely wanted that feeling when we were inside Free City, which is the name of a virtual city inside the film.

That leaves me as the composer of the underscore and the instrumental music. I tried to really get into the characters and into the arc of the main character played by Ryan Reynolds and his journey from from being a bank teller, who gets held up, beaten up every day, 12 times and his naive optimism. That’s really the second universe musically speaking.

Musical description of The Guy’s character is the 3rd universe. In the plot he is a background persona in his video game doesn’t know anything better than what he is consigned to live through every day. So he wakes up every day, he’s happy to go to the bank, get shot up by robbers possessing like a childlike innocence to it. Later he starts to awaken to this idea that there might be something more out there, he falls in love, starts to realize that he may be meant for something bigger than what he’s doing. That’s really the juiciest part of the score for me, where the music can really get emotional, and the orchestra really takes over.

Then there’s a fourth universe too, which is the real world, the offices of this video game company that makes this game and some outrageous characters inhabit it there as well. Here, the music becomes much more contemporary, you start to hear guitars, drums. There’s a faster paced fanaticism, almost a chaotic nature to that world, and the music reflects that as well.

- What was the most challenging for creating such a diverse soundtrack?

- The main challenge was to bridge these four worlds together and to make it a cohesive whole. This was a really interesting task for me!

- Thank you, Christophe!

Free Guy gets to the movies in the US on the 13th of August, 2021.

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Free Guy. Christophe Beck Interview