It’s no surprise I liked Tuner so much at the Toronto International Film Festival — after all, I love heist movies and music. My mom used to teach piano in our living room. I remember listening to the piano tuner plunk on the keys, playing the same note repeatedly until it sounded perfect. It takes skill, precision, and patience, which makes the fantastical plot of Tuner a little more realistic.
Tuner, the feature directorial debut of documentarian Daniel Roher, follows Niki (Leo Woodall), a twenty-something piano tuner with incredibly sensitive hearing. After his mentor, Harry (Dustin Hoffman), forgets the combination to his safe, Niki does what anyone would do: he watches a YouTube video and learns how to crack the safe himself through sound. Soon enough, Niki’s talent gets him noticed by criminals who use his talent to steal from clients, and before he knows it, he’s bankrolling his new relationship with piano student Ruthie (Havana Rose Liu). As Niki further loses himself, he gets into trouble when he steals something too valuable.
Tuner snaps along at a satisfying pace, both because of Greg O’Bryant’s editing and Will Bates’s score. Music is at the heart of the film. Whether it’s Marius de Vries’s original piano pieces that Ruthie and Niki play, the jazz music that Harry loves, or the electronic and poppy score that at one point sounds like an orchestra practicing before a performance. I was lucky enough to talk to Will Bates about his process of scoring films, his joy at finally getting his beloved saxophone into a score, and all the cool pianos he has in his house.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Screen Speck: So, I just wanted to start by asking how you came on to score this film?
Will Bates: I came in towards the end of the process, and I had worked with Black Bear, the producers, on Dumb Money, and also a movie called Immaculate. They introduced me to Daniel, and then we just kind of hit it off, and I got going.
Screen Speck: Nice. I have a weird personal connection — my mom was a piano teacher for the earlier part of my life, and so I remember having a piano tuner come. Do you have any memories or experience with piano tuners? Hopefully not with them robbing you.
Bates: Yeah, I have several pianos, actually. My wife became very into estate sales, and she kind of decked out our house from going to estate sales. And I started to go with her, and I’d always be there and be looking at a piano, and someone from the estate sale would be like, “If you don’t take that, we’re going to take a chainsaw and chop it in half and get it out of here. It’s free.” And so because of that, we actually have seven pianos in our house. We became kind of guardians of these old relics. And yes, I’ve met many piano tuners in my time, and they’re crazy and very eccentric and very talented, and they tend to be amazing musicians, but they keep that to themselves, it seems.
But, yeah, we have a wonderful Siberian piano tuner called Vladimir, who does our pianos, and he’s also my kids’ piano teacher.
Screen Speck: I never got around to learning the piano at home, but I play the violin. My mom was just happy that we did music at some level. I remember at one point I was practicing vibrato, where you just are on one string — I’m sure you know what vibrato is — but doing it very, very slowly, to where my mom had to come in and say, “What are you doing? You’re just playing the same two notes.” And I know that’s a thing with piano tuning is with just a couple of notes. I know that’s not necessarily part of the score — you’re not writing the piano tuning part — but is that anything that you took from as you were thinking about how you’d score this film?
Bates: Yeah, very much so. Daniel wanted the music — obviously, there’s a lot of on-screen, on-camera music — wanted the score to be a counterbalance to that, to be different enough for us to understand that it’s a separate entity, that it’s a comment on the characters themselves, rather than what they’re learning. But you know, having said that, I definitely took the instrument and wanted to have some reference to a piano in the score. One of the seven pianos, my wife turned into a kind of art piece. She took all the hammers off it, and made, like, a tunnel out of it — it was a prop for a movie that she’s working on. And then the rest of the piano, which is just the heart, is living in the other room, in my studio, and I use it sometimes as a kind of percussive tool.
I don’t know whether you remember the safecracking sequences. I have this sort of…I call it the robot piano. It’s like these little controllable mallets that you can send MIDI information to, and you can program them to hit objects. So I have them attached to the piano, and I use the piano as this sort of percussive instrument. So a lot of those cues in the movie are done with this weird percussive thing. So, there’s a piano in the score, but you wouldn’t know that it’s a piano, you know what I mean?
Screen Speck: Yeah, that’s really interesting, because I know… that’s, like, the percussion instrument that you forget is a percussion instrument, and string, yeah.
Bates: Yeah, totally. Officially, the piano is a percussive instrument — it comes in the percussion family.
Screen Speck: And talking about kind of that… I noticed with the score, the balance of the staccato sounds, as you were talking about, but also longer electronic sounds. Was that also something that you focused on to differentiate that from the classical music that the characters were playing?
Bates: Definitely. I think the first thing I suggested to Daniel, which is maybe how I got the gig in the first place, was, there’s obviously a lot of jazz in the source music and in the characters, in Dustin Hoffman’s character. And I was like, “Well, what would it sound like if Bill Evans had access to modular synthesizers?” Bill Evans, the famous jazz piano player. And he was kind of like, “Yes, I want to hear what that sounds like.” So it was definitely a thing. I surround myself with weird, old, dusty electronics in my studio, and that was a huge source of inspiration. There’s also a device that I have. It’s basically an East German, very old 1960s piano tuning oscillator. So I guess you would put it on top of the piano, and it plays tones; there are little switches for different notes that it plays. And I think the idea was that you would put it on the piano, hit the button, and then tune each note to correspond with the oscillators. And I built all the chords using that thing. It has this kind of wonky old vibe to it. So that was the source of a lot of the electronics.
Screen Speck: And talking more about the jazz, because I’m sure that a lot of that was put into the script beforehand, but do you have any jazz experience that you were bringing into this?
Bates: Yes. I started life as a jazz musician. I started life as a saxophone player and then gravitated towards techno and lead singer in a band and all sorts of other stuff. But my background, my education, I guess, is in jazz. And when I started this project, I found myself writing a lot of the melodies on the saxophone.
Generally, when I’m working on a job, the sax gets taken out first by the director. I tend to play everything to my wife, Sarah, when I’m going through it. She’s my confidant in this world. And I play through the cues, and she’s like, “Yeah, no, you might want to just steer clear of the saxes. You know what always happens?” I was like, “Yeah, alright, fine.” So, I played everything again on — I have another electronic device; it’s a knockoff of a 1920s instrument called the ondes Martenot, which is like a very precise Theremin. So I replayed everything on that, and I played it to Daniel when he came to the studio, and he was like, “This is great. You found it. Melodies are great. I just can’t quite put my finger on it. I’m just not sure.” And I said, “Okay, I’ll play you the original version. I’ll play you the sax version. And just so you know, I just did this to write,” and I played it for him and his editor, and they were both like, “The hair on my neck is standing up. That’s the thing.” I’m like, “Okay! This is a first.”
The saxes made it in, and it became the sound of Niki, and the melody and the horn at the beginning is a very ethereal, and then we gradually get kind of closer, like I had the mic way over on the other side of the room, and I’m playing over here, it is very distant, and then as you get kind of more familiar with the theme, it becomes more present, I guess. So it became a useful tool, like a useful storytelling device.
Screen Speck: How do you start coming up with a score for a film?
Bates: Every project is different, but there’s always a moment with me behind the piano. Even if it’s not a piano score, I write that way, or with the horn. But I think the first thing for me is I tend to create kind of a soup of sound, like a bed of drones and chords, and my melodies tend to kind of come from that. I’m very inspired by sound. And there’s always a kind of “Eureka” moment, I call it, where I’ve stumbled on a melody or a chord sequence that is a direct response to something that I’m looking at, to a page of the script, to a gesture from a character, and one couldn’t live without the other. So I feel like that’s what, as composers, we’re always searching for, is that kind of “Eureka” thing. And sometimes it happens straight away; sometimes it takes a minute.
Screen Speck: Do you find it is different when you’re scoring a documentary feature rather than a narrative feature? Or is it the feeling that kind of persists?
Bates: I think that first impulse is very similar. I do a lot of work with Alex Gibney; my first docs were for him, and he sort of taught me that it’s still about storytelling. So yeah, the beginning part of the process is always that. It’s always about finding the character’s theme. With a doc, of course, it’s different. Your role as a composer is less in the forefront. It tends to be more music. It tends to be more essential to have it going on and being more in the background. When you get into the nuts and bolts of it, yes, it’s a different discipline, but I think the first step is always the same.
Screen Speck: What was it like to work with a film that had compositions in it already?
Bates: You know, it was treated as a separate animal. And it was very important for me to complement what [Marius’s] work is in the film, but also to contrast. The score functions separately, I think, in this film, from the music that’s being played. And I think it was more important to get under the hood of the character in a more traditional sense. But yeah, like I said, I definitely took elements, instrumentation choices from what Ruthie is learning, and from, obviously, that beautiful piece that Nikki plays at the end.
Screen Speck: Did you have a favorite bit to score or compose? I know we talked a lot about the internals in the safecracking, which was really interesting, just visually and tonally.
Bates: Yeah, those were really fun; there’s a lot of math involved in stuff like that. The movie was locked. The picture was finished when I was working on it, so I had to land certain beats. I think my favorite cue is probably right after Niki gives Ruthie the watch, and you hear the clearest iteration of his theme. And there’s kind of like a trippy moment of the city lights — it gets kind of slightly ethereal. When I was writing, that was the first version of that theme that I stumbled on, and then, you know, made all the others, but that was the kind of important one for me.
Screen Speck: I don’t want to keep — I’m sure you’re doing a ton of other interviews, but I just wanted to ask if there’s something about composing that you’d like more people to know?
Bates: Blimey. I suppose that sometimes it seems like it’s very much in the background, but I think that composers kind of become experts in character. When I went to the premiere and I met Dustin (Hoffman) and I met Leo (Woodall) and, you know, we felt like we stared at these people for so long. It’s the same with editing. You feel you just get to know a face so well, and it’s such a funny experience to then meet the person in real life. I’m like, “You have no idea who I am, but I know everything about that eye movement, that facial movement that you’re making right now,” you know? And that’s an interesting part of it, I think, that we know these performers so well.
