The Oscar-winning composer and award-winning award-winning finneas is no stranger to music writing for the film. The composer and songwriter won the Oscars – with his sister Superstar Billie Eilish – for “No Time to Die” from the James Bond film of the same name, and “Why was I done?” “Barbie” in 2024. He won grammys and has a solo career as well as multiplatinum music with Eilish. He is an author-songwriter of all trades, but when it comes to writing music for the limited series of Appletv +, “Notice of non-responsibility”, the creator and director of the Alfonso Cuarón series wanted something different from him.
Despite Finneas’ long CV, he had never marked television, but Cuarón was a fan. Although the musician is on board during the shooting, it is only by post-production that work really started. “He sent me a bunch of music he loved as references, and it was mainly stringed quartets,” explains Finneas. “I said to myself immediately:” Oh my God, I don’t know how to write music for a string quartet “, so I had to learn.”
The seven-part series features Cate Blanchett, Kevin Kline, Sacha Baron Cohen and Kodi Smiti-McPhee. The show follows the cheered journalist Catherine Ravenscroft (Blanchett), who built her reputation revealing the misdeeds and transgressions of others. When she receives a novel from an unknown author, she is horrified to realize that she is now the main character in a story that exposes her darkest secrets.
Finneas began to write music and brought the composer David Campbell “to note and write what I wrote, then to orchestrate it in parts – because I don’t know how to write scores”. It was Campbell who recommended the Attacca quartet, and as Cuarón was passionate about string quartet, he already knew the prestigious group of musicians.
By approaching the score, Finneas notes that most of Cuarón’s films, like “Roma” and “Y Tu Mama Tambien”, “Don’t One has a score”, so the approach “less is more” seemed appropriate. “There are major assembly sequences, such as water rescue, where we knew that we needed the momentum of music, and there are times when music is a bit of a character’s interior monologue,” he said.
Episode 7 reveals Catherine’s secret. Jonathan, the young man she had met on vacation and saved her son from drowning, would later return to his room and attack him. Cuarón gave Finneas a piece of music for the scene. He said: “I thought it was super obsessive, and it was just the good horrible thing to play” under the realization that the story that had unfolded and destroyed Catherine’s life was false. With this awareness, all the fantastic music that had previous had to move with the story.
Regarding the instruments, he gave Catherine a cello theme which could be heard at the start of episode 1. He also created a family suite. The son of Catherine, Nicholas (sm-mcphee) “listens mainly to rap, filth and forest”, and it is a little in disagreement with the rest, “you therefore hear that with the cello, married to synths with which you hear with [husband] Robert (Sacha Baron Cohen). »»
Elsewhere, he created different themes, including a love theme for Steven (Kevin Kline) and his late wife Nancy (Lesley Manville) who appears in flashbacks.
As for his television experience, Finneas says that he did not work in a linear manner. “I worked on clues of episode 6 then 2”, and would jump, “what was satisfactory.”
He adds: “If I had to do more television, I hope I could start again, because, you know, it’s attractive to do it that way.”
