Beale Street Composer Nicholas Britell Shares The Secrets Behind The Film's Oscar-Worthy Score

By Ural Garrett


Following his Oscar-winning turn with 2016’s breakout film Moonlight, director Barry Jenkins managed to deliver best follow-up by means of the cinematic adaptation of James Baldwin’s 1974 novel If Beale Street Could Talk. Starring KiKi Layne, Stephan James, and Regina King (who recently acquired a Golden Globe for best supporting actress), the motion picture has garnered praise for a few obvious reasons: Beale Street’s pretty usage of warm colors, chemistry between both Layne and James, and Brian Tyree Henry’s (Atlanta) heartbreaking scene in which his character, Daniel Carty, specifics his time in back of bars. Serving because the glue between the powerful performances and directing was the breathtaking score from composer Nicholas Britell.


For his second time working with Jenkins — Britell handled Moonlight as well — the New York native composed an orchestral score that completely complemented the feel of 1970s Harlem alongside licensed music from jazz greats including Miles Davis and Nina Simone. It’s also another possibility for Britell to stretch his otherworldly grasp of music history, whether he’s chopping and screwing his own compositions for Moonlight or mixing his score with John Coltrane classics.


“I think over the years for me, I don’t acknowledge distinctions between genres,” Britell mentioned, also citing legends as diverse as Mozart, The Beatles, Quincy Jones, and Dr. Dre. “I think powerful music is just powerful music.”


Speaking with MTV News, Britell spoke the early method of scoring Beale Street noticed him experimenting musically with Jenkins, emoting various feelings of love, and the responsibility in bringing Baldwin’s novel to life.


MTV News: Can you recall the first game plan or conversations that initially took place as soon as discussing your role in bringing the adaptation to life with Barry?


Nicholas Britell: We began really early before he’d shot the movie and began some brainstorming. Barry routinely has these astonishing first instincts for things. One of the exhilarating things in what we do with each other is that we know it’s a beginning point and not the destination. We begin with some feelings and ideas. We actually don’t know where we’re going to wind up.


So with If Beale Street Could Talk, he was feeling this sound of brass and horns. That was the initial thing he mentioned. What’s exhilarating for me is that I get to experiment with ideas. I get to try out trumpets, flugelhorns, French horns, and cornets just to just to be able to see what occurs.


While I began putting the ideas of the music with the motion picture, we would find that the music was missing something. We weren’t exactly sure, nevertheless I think the opening brass idea felt almost also overt in a way and direct. We discovered that we were missing the feelings of strings. That opened a whole new door to us where taking the music I had been writing for brass, beginning to play it with strings, and then combining the two together.


It felt like this feeling of love. That was really what we wanted, ‘cause the movie deals with love and injustice. A lot of the focus is on the very different types of love. We named the tracks from the score based on different ancient Greek types of love. There’s the track “Agape,” which is a divine or pure kind of unconditional love; “Eros,” which is an erotic kind of love; or “Storge,” which is a love parents have for their children. We were really thinking about that idea of love and why that felt. Something that we do is an alchemy of how these abstract sound waves convey specific emotions.


Nicholas Britell (left) and Barry Jenkins (right) at the 19th Annual AFI Awards.


MTV News: Speaking of trying to convey specific emotions, what went into the method of combining your score with the licensed soundtrack?


Britell: Barry loves music and has a spectacular scope of the music that he likes deposited into a movie. There were a number of scenes in particular where that was really powerful for us in the way we mixed the source music in the world of the characters with score. The ideal example is the sequence where Fonny is speaking to Daniel about his previous time in prison. As soon as I first saw the scene, it was Miles Davis’s “Blue in Green” playing on their record player. One of the ways me and Barry work is that he’s so open to trying new things and experimenting. So I thought: What if in the middle of Fonny and Daniel’s conversation, we had the score come in to give the feeling of horror of the injustice that Daniel has experienced?


If I come up with a crazy idea, Barry habitually replies, “Show me.” This is any time If I asked myself: What, exactly, is the sound of injustice? I took the cellos that are playing earlier in the film, any time Tish and Fonny first make love, bended and distorted them before Barry recommended that we just break them. I literally took that sound and made it horrific. As Miles Davis is playing on the record player, you begin to hear a rumbling and grinding sound. Both of us were like, oh my god! It felt so hellish and like everything that was pretty in the world is being harmed or damaged by systemic racism.





We were attempting to create the music of love mirror what was happening to the characters in a way. Once we tried that out and began feeling powerful, it opened this whole other door for us for other sequences of injustice within a film. Every time there’s a moment of injustice in the score, those are elements of joy are damaged into something else.


MTV News: With that mentioned, how much was left on the cutting-room floor whenever you guys were satisfied with the score?


Britell: Once Barry and I are working, you've got to imagine it like a mold of a sculpture, so it was a lot. Really there is lots that gets left by the wayside. On the digital release of the album, we added bonus tracks, which are scored melodies that didn’t make the scored film. In particular, with the brass that served because the inspiration for the string incorporation, was “Harlem Aria.” That composition was the initial track I played for Barry, and in case you hear it, it’s basically chords and melodies that are in other pieces. It’s just that it isn’t in the film. There really are pieces that me and Barry really admired, nevertheless it’s routinely about what is best for the movie and we never forget that.


MTV News: Considering the story takes place in 1970s Harlem, there were unlimited amounts of choices for the licensed music. Where did those decisions come from?


Britell: Our music supervisor is staggering and his name is Gabe Hilfer. Barry worked with Gabe pretty closely on it. I know earlier on that Barry was certainly feeling the Miles Davis “Blue in Green” and I know he wanted the John Coltrane “I Wish I Knew” composition from the Ballads album. As far as others, some of these I believe came over the course of making the film. One difference from Moonlight is that in the Moonlight script, Barry had pieces of music written into the script, like for the “Hello Stranger” track by Barbara Lewis, which plays throughout the diner scene. That was actually in the script. He was like, “This is going to happen.”


With If Beale Street Could Talk, he’s informed me there wasn’t a particular part of music that he was sure could make it in. For us, one of the exhilarating things like I said before was making the score interact with the licensed music. It’s almost as if the screen of the film vanishes — the score is in our world with the audience and the music is in their world. They interact and play together. For me, it really does a job in bringing you more into play. I routinely love whenever that feeling takes place.