“It’s a punky film. People either love it or they hate it,” says Marc Canham, describing Netflix’s I Care A Lot, which he composed the score for. The dark satire that earned Rosamund Pike a Golden Globe is indeed a provocative film, although the actress has been applauded for her committed take on a terrible character. To Canham fell the task of keeping up with the schemes and machinations of Pike’s character, Marla, in her game of conservatorship chess.
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“I’ve always loved music that divides people,” the British composer tells American Songwriter. “Not that I thought the film would be quite as divisive as it’s been, but it’s fascinating to watch it play out.” Canham began working on I Care A Lot early on, having befriended director J Blakeson during their collaboration on 2009’s The Disappearance of Alice Creed. As music geeks who liked sharing songs with each other, they developed a kinship out of pushing boundaries in taste.
Canham was brought into I Care A Lot at the script stage and started to establish a flavor for how the film would sound. “I wrote a good few half dozen cues from the script and it hardly changed over time,” says Canham. “When they began filming, they would listen to the demos I’d made on the way to set. J was the taxi driver, because he likes driving, so he used to go around and pick everyone up, and they’d be listening to my music on repeat to get into the zone.”
Among those early cues Canham created is the music heard when Dianne Wiest’s character is taken to the nursing home. “I called the track ‘Care Home Slumber,’” he jokes. On the soundtrack it’s called ‘Welcome Home,’ but early on that’s how I imagined the scene would look. I wanted a surreal quality to it. The electronica that plays over the top is quite glossy but quite surreal.”
Canham infused the first half of the film with more of this, adding to the sparkly veneer of its story, when Pike’s Marla is checkmating her way through rich elderly fortunes. Canham wanted to take a brittle pointed dig at the American dream. “The thing for me about looking in on the American dream, especially now, with the previous four years you guys have had, is the superficial nature of it; it’s not what it used to be,” he says. “It’s not ‘roll your sleeves up and get stuck in’; it’s about, ‘how much can I rip the other person off to get more money and succeed and buy more crap?’”
The composer wanted a sound that reflected that, something that would intentionally rub viewers up the wrong way. “All the dark sounds that you hear later in the film are bubbling away, but they’re just starting to get underway so that when the real element of the thriller kicks off: bang! And away we go—and all the dark sounds really come out.”
There is a montage scene played out to dance music that came from a direction of Blakeson to make the music be “pumping and pumping,” says Canham. “He wanted people to have fun, it to be fun while they’re watching these horrendous things are happening onscreen. I think that’s what people are reacting to: ‘Why I’m enjoying this? I shouldn’t be.’”
The second half of the film leans into more aggressive, industrial and darker reverb sounds, from shiny to dark electronica. It put Canham, who has worked on a number of TV and film projects, as well as art and live installations, back in his comfort zone of crafting a world where acoustic and ‘invented’ sounds co-exist. He relied on a secret weapon for this—a granular synthesizer. “It’s called a GR1 and there are not many of these made,” he says. “You load up anything you want into it, there’s a place to put a USB stick in and you send that sound into the world of granular synthesis. It takes tiny bits of waveforms and manipulates it. The great thing about it is you create sounds you’ve never head of before.”
In this case, it allowed Canham to take the sounds he’d play on guitar, drum or cello, and distort them, “so you still got a bit of human emotion but there’s a lot of weird sounds going on there too. It usually veers into that thriller category, where you can imagine composers like Colin Stetson [Hereditary], for instance, and the way he mutates organic source recordings.”
It all adds to the film’s manic, galvanizing soundscape, which was immensely fun for Canham. Hopefully, Canham and Blakeson collaborate on something soon to continue the collaborative fun as it seems to create a winning formula—although without the likes of “lioness” Pike, it may not be nearly as enjoyable as I Care A Lot.
