Source: Radio New Zealand
“Hey, man. Jean-Michel Jarre in the New Zealand bush – what do you reckon?” read an out-of-the-blue 2am text Sam Scott received from filmmaker Taika Waititi.
A few months later, the Wellington musician and composer learnt about Hunt For the Wilderpeople, and he and Moniker collaborators Lukasz Buda and Conrad Wedde began working on its soundtrack.
But several months after the trio had scored the whole movie in “a very Jean-Michel Jarre way”, they were told a new direction had been decided on, and they had three weeks to present a new soundtrack from scratch.
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For ‘Makutekahu’, Buda wrote a choral piece to accompany te reo Māoriphrases and Latin translations of haikus written by Ricky Baker (Julian Dennison) with spacey ’70s synthesisers in the background.
Unable to find a choir on short notice, he and Scott recorded it with three singers and layered over themselves singing in different voices to sound like a group of different people.
In the end, the choir sound from XPAND- the “rudimentary instrument plug-in” that comes with Pro Tools that ended up on the film, Scott says.
After editing the track till 3am, they brought it into Peter Jackson’s Park Road Post music studio at eight am the next day – “doing more edits while people are having the morning coffee, just trying to get it done so that none of the grumpy old men with Oscars shout at you”.
‘The Ricky Baker Birthday Song’ was a “magical cosmic thing” that came about after the producers couldn’t get the rights to ‘Happy Birthday’, Buda says.
Luke Buda
Bruce Mackay / @darkerartsnz
“The cast wrote that song right there on the spot, the chords are so strange and wonderful. It’s great. It’s a really weird bit of songwriting.
“Rima Te Wiata really delivered it perfectly, and it is one of the most memorable songs from the film.”
‘Ocean Blue’ – a track which has done very well on streaming – was recorded by Buda in the toilet of the Moniker studio while Scott and Wedde worked on another piece.
Scott had originally written the song “very Bob Dylan-y”, but says Buda declared it too folky, although he liked the lyric ”Out alone in the middle of the ocean blue’.
“[Buda] took the acoustic guitar, and went and sat on a chair in the middle of the field that was next to our studio at the time, and you played for about an hour, and then you came back in with these major seven chords and this kind of chorus bit. It was like zero relation to what I’d done.”
Amongst really great “needle drops” from Leonard Cohen and Nina Simone, Hunt for the Wilderpeople is some of the best score music Moniker has ever composed, Scott says.
Because the soundtrack has so many synthesiser sounds, it also “feels really good” on the new vinyl pressing .
“It is always quite a relief when you get anything you’ve put out a long time ago on vinyl, because it just makes it feel way more proper.”
Composing a film soundtrack usually involves sending compilations of “cues” (short pieces of music) to producers who then send back “notes” (requested changes), which can be pages and pages long, Scott says.
Working on music in this way has really made him appreciate jamming with Phoenix Foundation.
“You realise, I don’t have to listen to what anyone tells me, apart from maybe Luke and the other dudes, you know. I can just make some music, and it can be any tempo and any mood. It can just be what I feel like today.”
– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand
