As composer Dave Porter notes, he’s been working with Vince Gilligan for nearly two decades now, and their creative collaboration together is still teaching him new things. They have created something very different in Pluribus, a show on a musically larger scale than anything they previously tried on Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul. Porter was recently nominated for three Emmys for his work on the show, including Outstanding Music Composition, Outstanding Original Main Title Theme Music, and Outstanding Sound Mixing. Porter kindly sat down with Screen Speck to discuss everything from Gilligan’s love of process, the recurring themes and palettes in the Pluribus score, and the exciting challenge of when to use music to clarify information to the audience.
Screen Speck: I’m curious how early on you get involved with conversations about the show. Do you largely do the work once the show is already shot, or are you working with Vince and the crew earlier to develop an idea of what you want the music to sound like?
Dave Porter: There is a little of both, especially on a new show. For Pluribus, because we’re creating an entirely new universe, not only for our audience, but for ourselves, we had a lot of conversations very early on when they were in the writer’s room, still figuring it out, because I think that there’s a lot that music can contribute when we’re talking about things like tone, and ways that we’re going to approach how a show feels to our audience. And then I disappear for a while, while they go do the hard work, and write the show, and shoot the show, and edit the show, and then I come back around at the very end. And most of my actual hard work happens then in terms of creating the score and recording the score and putting it all together. It’s a blessing as composer to be one of the very last people, so I get to see all the amazing hard work that happens before me, and get inspired by it.
Screen Speck: Yeah, in a way, you’re like the first viewer of what’s probably close to a final cut.
Porter: It’s so true, and actually, I make a point of sitting down and watching it like a fan when I first get it, because a) I enjoy it, and b) because it really helps me get a sense of what the music could do and what it could offer, and to be able to sit there and watch it like a fan first, before I really start thinking about the nuts and bolts of it.
Screen Speck: And that’s so exciting too because music works in a way where I’m almost not conscious of how it’s affecting me emotionally when I’m watching something. And on something like Pluribus, I’m really interested in this because a lot of the story is told in those moments of silence. Like with Zosia’s (Karolina Wydra) intro, there’s not really any music as far as I could tell, but with Manousos’ (Carlos-Manuel Vesga) intro, there’s quite a bit of music. How do you know when to use music to tell the story and when to not?
Porter: Great question. And it’s the result of a lot of conversation and a lot of trial and error, to be honest. We have very elaborate spotting sessions, they’re called. They’re meetings when the edits are ready for music. And that involves myself and our amazing music supervisor, Thomas Golubic, whoever edited the episode, Vince, and the writers and producers. And we talk this stuff through pretty extensively. I’m asking, as a composer, a lot of questions of them — what they were talking about in the writer’s room, what their long-term view is of this moment, and what we’re trying to accomplish, both in that moment, in the micro, but also in the larger sense of the story as a whole. I think it’s a lot of feel. And it’s a lot of trial and error. Sometimes we try things and we end up not using music, sometimes we use music and then decide it’s better without, but it’s always a group decision, and those decisions are very carefully considered.
Screen Speck: Is it that, where you choose not to use music, you’re trying to not prime the audience to feel a certain way, but to go on their own journey with whatever is happening in the scene?
Porter: Yes, for sure. One of the things that music does, intended or not, is that it clarifies, right? It clarifies for the most part. And I work very hard to write music that obfuscates things too. But for the most part, like any creative choice, it sends you in a direction that that was the intention of that creative choice. So there are plenty of times, especially working with Vince Gilligan’s team, that, as you pointed out, that’s not what we want. We want our audience to have its own conclusion. So, whether that means a very spare piece of music, or no music at all, that’s often the right choice for us.
Screen Speck: Were there any instruments that you didn’t use on Better Call Saul or Breaking Bad that you were excited to use for Pluribus? I ask this mostly because I did notice that there are more string instruments in the Pluribus score than I think you had used previously on other Vince Gilligan works.
Porter: Yes, very true, and I’m glad you noticed. The mandate from Vince on down to all of us in all the creative departments on the show was that it needs to be defined and absolutely different from what we’ve been doing [previously]. So, Albuquerque is a holdover, and Rhea Seehorn is a holdover, but it’s a very different Albuquerque, and it’s a very different Rhea Seehorn, and it’s a very different story, right? So, it was really important to us that we do something totally different. Big orchestral music, and choir, and the things that I’m using in Pluribus were never going to be the right choice for Breaking Bad or Better Call Saul. Those shows just have an intimacy and a visceralness about them that, for me, something that grand wasn’t the right choice. But here, for Pluribus, science fiction, a suspension of disbelief we’re trying to impose upon our audience, like any sci-fi show does, and a scale that is absolutely massive and epic, and stakes that are just beyond anything we’ve done before. All of those things together combine to allow us to do something very different, which is use a big orchestra and a choir, in addition to all my other usual bags of tricks.
Screen Speck: You mentioned Albuquerque as a location being a holdover. How does Albuquerque impact your scoring on Pluribus versus how it may have previously?
Porter: Yeah, I think that it’s actually had less of an impact for those reasons. With those earlier shows, Albuquerque was a player, right? It was a character in the story, it was so involved in all the decisions and the reasoning behind what drives our characters and the story itself. Whereas, while we love being in Albuquerque, the suburban neighborhood where Carol (Rhea Seehorn) resides in her little cul-de-sac could be a lot of places in not only the U.S, but around the world, and the story is so global that I think, unlike those other shows, New Mexico plays a smaller role.
Screen Speck: I want to ask a specific question about the Carol and Helen theme in the score. This theme is very specifically about that relationship, Carol’s grief, and obviously how this informs the story in big ways. I was curious if there was a reason why that Carol and Helen theme plays at the moment at the end of Episode 2, where Zosia gets on Air Force One, and she looks back at Carol.
Porter: Yeah, great, great catch. First of all, we use themes very carefully, in all of our Vince Gilligan shows, and not very often. And the reason for that is some of the reasons we talked about earlier, that themes even more than the music itself, when repeated, tell something to our audience, and we don’t always want to do that, but sometimes we do. And one of the really important foundational storylines of Pluribus is the relationship between Carol and Helen (Miriam Shor), and obviously Helen’s passing and the way in which Carol deals with that or doesn’t deal with it. And the grief that follows, and how that impacts all of the choices she makes moving ahead. And certainly, there’s a few moments like that and we want to drive that home to our audience. And the moment that you referenced is really interesting, because it’s transforming that theme a little bit into a larger sense of Carol’s loneliness and her loss, which of course she’s trying to fill with Zosia.
Screen Speck: On a similar note, you’ve spoken in previous interviews about the hope motif for Carol when she’s working on solving situations and saving herself, especially when she’s working at the whiteboard. I know the Carol and Helen motif is obviously a big one as well, but are there any other themes or motifs that you use repetitively that represent a feeling or situation?
Porter: Yeah, more often than themes, I tend to use just palettes for folks, because I don’t want to get too specific, but we certainly do that, and I think you pointed out some great examples, and another that I would think of off the bat would be music for Manousos. Manousos has a palette all his own. It’s very laden in low brass and French horns. It’s got a rich, kind of noble obstinence, but proud vibe about it that we hope is indicative of his character. And, even going back to the beginning of Breaking Bad, we love process. Vince loves to tell the story of these little details [in] the way people do things that they’re expert at.
Screen Speck: You’re character-building.
Porter: Character building, yeah, without dialogue, and I love those moments because it’s a way to help our audience get inside our characters’ heads. And there’s not a lot of dialogue, obviously, in Pluribus, and especially with Manousos, who doesn’t want to talk to anyone. That is one of my favorite storylines to follow musically this season.
Screen Speck: So speaking of character palettes, I thought that Zosia was musically interesting because she’s part of the Hive, but she’s also the Hive member most familiar to the audience, so the audience is primed to feel a little bit more warmth toward her as a character, just because we see her the most. As far as I can tell, I didn’t perceive any instruments or palettes specifically associated with her outside of the Hive. I was curious what the intentionality behind that was, and if you might expect that to change moving forward.
Porter: Yes and yes! We specifically want [with] Zosia, most of the time for us [to be] unsure of what’s going on and where she sits, right? And as you mentioned earlier, her whole introduction, which is an entire act, has no score at all, and no dialogue at all. Talk about a process moment, there’s one for Zosia, for sure. So yes, there has been very little score for Zosia, and we’re not painting her in any particular light, except for when we’re seeing her through Carol’s prism, her glasses, and what we think Carol was trying to hope that Zosia is for her. Or, on the flip side, when Carol’s in one of her more active moments and is trying to get info out of Zosia, it’s how Carol is trying to play Zosia. So, Zosia, so far, has not had any music for herself. She’s more of a mirror for those of us looking at her, and trying to figure her out, or figure stuff out from her. And whether that will change in the future, your guess is as good as mine. I wouldn’t be surprised, but you never know.
Screen Speck: You brought up the chanting and the human voices in the score earlier in one of your responses. Could you talk me through the choices you made with using those human voices in the score to increase the tension and hit the emotional beats of the story?
Porter: Yeah, the use of voice was something we talked about really early on. One of the other points that we want to drive home that is so unique about Pluribus is that the bad guys here are not a big zombie monster, right? They’re anything but. They are a reflection of humanity, and all of that is good and all that is terrible about it. And there is nothing more human than human voice, right? So I very carefully chose this palette of vocals. I call it my 1970s New York City vocal style. It’s got a very New York minimalist sensibility to it, a little Steve Reich and Philip Glass and composers that I studied and adore. Where the orchestra brings the size and the girth and the power, the vocals actually bring an intimacy and a humanity to it all. The chorus is designed at times to represent the Others, but then at other times, it’s not. When it’s used in group, it’s usually that, but sometimes I’m using solo vocals to illustrate Carol on her own against that tide. We also decided not to use any obvious words, right? It’s just syllables and diction and beautiful nonsense, as I call it.
Screen Speck: Looking ahead to Season 2, I know you obviously do not know anything, but I was curious if there are any ways that you anticipate the music might change in Season 2, or might evolve into the next season?
Porter: [laughs] And I’m not being coy, I truly know nothing. So I don’t know where it’s going to go. What I do know from working for almost 20 years with Vince Gilligan and this amazing team of people is that I will be surprised. And it will take me places I don’t expect to go, and it will challenge me creatively in ways that I didn’t expect, and it will make me a better composer. And all of those things have been consistently true for all of these years, and I’m absolutely certain that that will be the case moving forward, and I’m as excited as everybody else to see where this road takes us.
This interview was edited and condensed for brevity and clarity.
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