Check out the latest episode of Slate’s podcast, Working, featuring Isaac Butler’s interview with music supervisors Bruce Gilbert and Lauren Mikus, whose most recent projects include the Hulu series Only Murders in the Building and the smash hit multidimensional action movie Everything Everywhere All at Once.
Bruce discussed their collaboration process, and said that the duo “have a lot of the same instincts, but of course we’ll come up with stuff that the other person hadn’t imagined. And so that combo is really strong for us.”
When discussing his process on how to root the cues to the specific characters in Only Murders in the Building, Bruce said that “ It wasn’t really explicit from the start. In the pilot, we’ve used a Dua Lipa song for Selena, and then there’s a Broadway piece over Martin’s stuff.” He went on to say “if we’re not dealing with a character specific thing, I think it’s always better to be a little counterintuitive about it. And so some of the songs, at least in like recent episodes, speak more to the predicament or the mystery or the story at large.”
Bruce and Lauren also discussed the usage of “(Absolutely) Story of A Girl” by Nine Days in Everything Everywhere All at Once, where the song is cleverly adapted to the various universes in the film. Lauren said “John Hampson who wrote the song was just immediately down and is just a film fan and was so excited about it. We had one big Zoom with everybody and we were all spitballing funny lyric ideas about how we could change it for those specific universes.”
She elaborated that The Daniels and them had “beautiful kismet moments” where everyone really connected in the first meeting. The process felt “like a fun party” where they really knew they had “something good from all the creativity fusing together.”
Click here to listen to the full interview