Composers
Composer Dan Deacon of VENOM: THE LAST DANCE Discusses His Score And Meeting Francis Ford Coppola
In it’s third weekend at the number one spot at the box office, director Kelly Marcel’s epic conclusion to VENOM has grossed $394.2 million worldwide.
In VENOM: THE LAST DANCE, Tom Hardy returns as Venom, one of Marvel’s greatest and most complex characters, for the final film in the trilogy. Eddie and Venom are on the run. Hunted by both of their worlds and with the net closing in, the duo are forced into a devastating decision that will bring the curtains down on Venom and Eddie’s last dance. Venom: The Last Dance stars Tom Hardy, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Juno Temple, Rhys Ifans, Peggy Lu, Alanna Ubach and Stephen Graham. The film is directed by Kelly Marcel from a screenplay she wrote, based on a story by Hardy and Marcel. The film is produced by Avi Arad, Matt Tolmach, Amy Pascal, Kelly Marcel, Tom Hardy and Hutch Parker.
VENOM: THE LAST DANCE (ORIGINAL MOTION PICTURE SOUNDTRACK) is by composer Dan Deacon. The album features an original score composed by Deacon for the final film in the Sony Pictures Venom trilogy. Combining dynamic, emotional orchestral movements with bold, action-packed electronic sequences, Deacon’s score is the perfect musical accompaniment to the final chapter of the franchise.
In my recent conversation with Deacon, the composer talked about getting into the world of composing, how taking Eddie and Venom on their final journey was a musical dream come true, plus a surprise meeting with director Francis Ford Coppola.
WAMG: Did you have those usual beginnings like most composers… Did you play in the school orchestra or marching band when you were a kid?
Dan Deacon: I played trombone in the school band. And it was fun. I wasn’t particularly good or bad at it. But I really got into music with my dad. He and my mom ran like a small mom and pop business; bought a used computer and had this MIDI program on it called MIDI Songs. And I just fell in love with it. I became completely obsessed with writing music. I started a band. I would write parts for things like the horn section and it was like my absolute obsession. I didn’t like to think about it as anything that I would do other than like a hobby.
I went to college and I was undeclared for two years and I was going to drop out. My friends asked, why would you drop out? You love music, why would you leave the music program? And I said I’m not into music. And it made me think and I got into the composition program and it took off from there. And then I was really into writing Fluxus style chaos music. I was into 20th century minimalism and mostly avant-garde and really loved the more radical performances; like Fluxus pieces.
Not really a thriving market for that, I just thought I would be a poor musician freak. As my studies were focused on quote unquote classical or experimental classical electroacoustic music; I got into writing like fun party music and just as a hobby. I didn’t think anything would come of that. Then a friend said, hey, I’m going to book a tour. Do you want to come on tour? And I thought that would be fun. And completely fell in love with that, made enough money to pay rent on a warehouse place in Baltimore. I thought this could be my job. I could play this like electronic party music. That was it. I was happy to do that. As long as I averaged $70 a show, I could afford to live in this warehouse space. That took off in the underground and I found success there as a recording artist, but I really always wanted to get back into writing for larger ensembles and seemed like the best way to do that, especially if you want to write orchestral music and to try to get into film composing. And I kind of put that out there and I love films and at this point I was doing pretty significant press at the time.
In 2009, I was doing this one interview on NPR about musicians and for my album. And some music has this singular privilege that other art forms don’t really seem to have and the privilege is that it could be this perfected, definitive version of the album where it can record the album to the best of their ability in the cutting-edge state of technology and release it as intended to be interpreted and listened to exactly that way again and again. But then they can perform it live and do it differently and however they want. They can cut parts they want, they can add new parts, they can improvise, they can slow it down if the audience is vibing that way or they can speed it up if the audience is ruckus. But a film is locked, it’s set in stone. And when I was a kid I would watch a movie and I would wish this part would just keep going on forever. Or you go to a play and it’s different every single time. You never know what an Oscar Wilde play was like being staged with Oscar Wilde’s involvement, the same way poetry is read or even classical music… we have no idea what the exact tempo Beethoven was going for. There’s a victory in that, but we know exactly what The Who wanted their albums to sound like. We know exactly what Aphex Twin’s records sound like.
I get an email that I think is a scam from Francis Ford Coppola, and in my mind, it’s like the new Nigerian Prince. I don’t believe it. Two weeks go by and it’s from a different email address and it says, “Dan, it’s Francis.” A couple more emails go back and forth and I think he reaches out to my agent for a meeting and it’s actually a friends contact. So I hit him up and he says I heard you’re on NPR about like a breathing media that music has. I’d love to talk more about it, so I fly out to Napa and we just hang out and be nerds who love the stuff that we like. This is like 2011 or ’12 and we hit it off and a couple of months go by and we’re continuing the conversation and then he offers me to be a co-composer on the film Twist. I’ve never scored a song. And in college, even though I went to school for composition, I didn’t study film composing. I was composing strictly for the stage or strictly for the studio. I don’t know what a cue sheet is. I don’t know what a music editor is. I’m way in over my head and luckily, just a co-composer, so I’m getting cues and I’m chopping them up and making new music out of that; sending over like chronic stuff that’s being set in that is chill. Then I realized this is a different set of muscles. This is a different… The way I think about it is like being a recording artist and being a film composer. Not like siblings, it’s cousins but far removed.
I think, I need to learn how to actually do this, but if I really want to do this, I need to learn how to do it and at this point – my recording arts career is still doing well. I’m really enjoying it. But I know it’s going to take me over a decade to get all right at this and I want to start writing new music and different music and music that’s not just centered in my brain, but in a larger story or larger narrative. I also want to collaborate and get involved with other artists. And that to me is what I was missing in my solo project. I always felt like I was alone in the process, even when I would bring in other people. At the end of the day, I always had this ultimate veto power and for better or for worse, sometimes it would be like I would be arrogant about a choice. And looking back, I definitely like it, like getting ready to get back into it in 2016 and I realized I need to start at the same level that I’m as a film composer. I found the Baltimore film scene and I connected with Theo Anthony who is making his feature documentary RAT FILM. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Film
He’s had a couple of successful shorts. He says, I think I’m going to make this weird experimental documentary. Would you want to write some music for it? And I tell him, Yeah, I’d love to. And it starts growing into a feature and I’m totally down to just explore it. We don’t know anything about anything and we figured let’s just make a list of all the songs to put in it. It’s just this fun period of discovery. That’s how I got into music and that’s how I kind of fell into all my hobbies.
Luckily the film was beautiful and it did really well in the festival circuit. That opened me up to a whole new world of people who weren’t familiar with my recording career or were and I could start with that like small scene that I could grow with as it grew and I could learn how to do it without like the pressure of working with someone who’s massive and incredible as Coppola.
I liked that. I liked being able to like work with other filmmakers that were equally discovering their craft and as it grew over, I guess that’s eight years ago, my profile started to grow there and I started doing just larger projects, still mostly nonfiction at this point. But then luckily I got on Kelly Marcel’s radar. I scored her series The Changeling. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Changeling_(TV_series)
We developed a musical language and vocabulary and had that shorthand. I always thought VENOM was going to be an unreachable thing. I’d never done theatrical, it’s a tentpole superhero movie. It just felt like – no way, so when she asked me to write some demos and let’s see how this goes, it wasn’t lost on me that this was la once in a lifetime opportunity.
WAMG: What was great is your recent Instagram post (instagram.com/dandeacon/) and you had all the Venom comic books collage. And your other post where you are at the premiere, you’re just kind of chilling and you’re kind of like laying down in front of the Venom on the red carpet, which I thought was hilarious. Like most composers you don’t start out to be a film composer. You just fall into it. I was reading how you love comic books and how you really loved Venom – how you would save your money all the time and you would go and buy the comic books.
The attention given to film scores and composers, that’s been a recent thing. People have really started taking notice more than just, this is Star Wars or this is Jaws or this is the music of Titanic. They’ve really started to know the composers and their music. You definitely have a “sound” as with your score for HUSTLE, which had that electronic synthesized atmospheric score, like with VENOM. What and who were some of your inspirations as far as film composers?
DD: That’s a great question. Normally it starts with making a playlist with the director and the editor and what they are listening to. We talk about what the character in the film is, what its roles may be, how it will provide another level of storytelling that isn’t being told visually or through dialogue? And something that I really think resonates with me about Venom and how it’s just augmented, and his physical form. And I kept thinking it would be great to work with really blown out, heavily processed acoustic sounds. Like the whole “Knull suite” is really distorted trombone or really distorted cello. Those are some of the earliest sounds we worked with. Some contemporary legends would be like the Junkie XL scores. I love Mica Levi for Under The Skin, cues like that for the more haunting strings. And then we’d listen to a lot of Penderecki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krzysztof_Penderecki and Iannis Xenakis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iannis_Xenakis for like the more haptic sort of strip classic core sounds or György Ligeti https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gy%C3%B6rgy_Ligeti.
We built up a playlist of references building that shorthand of – we want the wild strings here or we want the whispers here – and we want more drums here and that’s sort of like how we built the playlist but asking, what are we telling the audience without telling them and how do we do it without holding their hand? How do we help their brain revisit a previous scene? Just getting into the subtext and how can we do that musically? So that the audience can be transported back to earlier in the story without having to remember to go there. They can focus on what’s in front of them at all times and to me, I think of film scoring as like an ingredient in a cake.
I think that the score is a very important ingredient, but I don’t want anyone to bite into the cake and notice how overwhelming it is. The whole point is that it becomes a cohesive thing that adds seamlessly. I don’t want anyone to come out of the film, whether it’s so bad they noticed it or it doesn’t fit because it’s trying too hard. I would say this worked a lot with Mixolydian modes to find that sound for Knull to really create something that had this center of gravity pulling towards it that was almost atonal.
WAMG: You’re following Ludwig Göransson’s score from VENOM and Marco Beltrami’s score from LET THERE BE CARNAGE. Did you and Kelly talk about incorporating any of their themes or, as this is the third movie and tying everything up, we’re going down a new path.
DD: It was pretty much the new path. With each film being a different director and different composer; it’s like a fresh palette. Kind of like when the comics change writers and for the illustrators. It takes on a new look and a new feel and a new edge. You’re still working with the same story and there’s still the same back material and canon that you’re working with. Well, it’s got a different look, a different feel, a different vibe.And I never was like, oh, I gotta fill these shoes. It was like, I need to score this film with this director, with this script and this team. It was amazing to follow those two absolute legends, but always felt like its own chapter.
WAMG: I love now that the credits of movies are including a list, the names of the vocals, they’re including the names of the orchestra members. And now that’s a relatively new thing, which I think is just great. They’re finally giving credit to the members of the Symphony, the members of the orchestra. What was your one go-to instrument?
DD: One go-to instrument. I guess it was cello and trombone. We focused a lot on those early on and again, like really distorting them and blowing them out. And I did like the demo process more, working with a cellist and trombone player out here. Um, then I think, you know, if it counts as an instrument, I would say these plugins are cool, particularly the pitch shifter and their distortion. I really use those as more of these timbral modifiers with 100% saturation, 100% completely take sound and bring it to a new place. And again, right now, when Eddie goes from Eddie to Venom, it’s just like a complete gigantic augmentation where the human form is there, but it’s clearly this alien symbiote that’s all encompassing.
WAMG: Scores have just become their own character. You can’t watch JAWS without hearing John Williams score and not think of a shark. You’ve composed the artist installment at the National Aquarium in Baltimore, which is going to debut on the 21st of November and has already sold out. You’re trying to engage guests with musicians and soundscapes and these interactions. Can you tell me about this project?
DD: It’s a two-hour piece that is basically six 20-minute loops. This loop is feeding off of the last one. The theme is feedback. drawing the parallels between electrical and acoustic feedback and natural feedback like within ecosystems. So it’s used for about 50 musicians that are spread out all throughout the entirety of the aquarium and they’ll be playing based upon what they hear from the musicians around them, what’s being broadcast through the House PA system as well as radio broadcasts which are going to be piping in different players throughout the museum.
And then the audience is going to have a sound-based element as well, which is– I think it’s going to work. There’s one or two ways we’re going to do it. One way is very, very elegant and smooth, but the most complicated for us. And the other is funky and insane, but will be very easy for us to make any sense.
But the main thing that we need to consider is animal welfare, because it is still their home – and that’s a major aspect of the piece is making sure that we never break a particular decibel threshold, because if we do, then the eco-cooking goes out of balance, it crumbles, and that’s part of the design as a piece, to making sure that if we do go over that threshold, that falls apart. So there’s a real role the audience plays because all the sound that they make will also contribute to that. I’m very excited to see how it goes. It’s definitely like an experiment, but I think it’s going to be a lot of fun. I like working with big groups and I love something that has a real risk of not working.
It’s really focusing on the fragility of an ecosystem, the fragility of quickly feedback to swell into some chaos, to the point where you need to rip the power out of the speaker. So playing with that and making sure that we’re always on the cusp of homeostasis.
https://aqua.org/visit/special-events/2024-11-21-voyages-chapter-6?for=2024-11-21
WAMG: What do you have coming up?
DD: I can’t get into specifics, but I’m working on two films now. I think that’s about as vague as I can get. With a great team and some people I’ve worked with before and some people that are new to me, but that’s. I’m very, very excited about it. That’ll be coming out next year.
And working on, I’ve got a ballet with New York City Ballet that’s premiering with Justin Peck In January.
WAMG: What is that called?
it’s currently still untitled. We had a working title, but I just was on the New York City Ballet website today and I just saw it said, New Ballet. Justin might be playing with the titles.
WAMG: Dan, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us and congratulations on the success of the film. And I really enjoyed your score.
DD: Thank you. I really appreciate it.
VENOM: THE LAST DANCE (ORIGINAL MOTION PICTURE SOUNDTRACK) https://venom.lnk.to/thelastdance
TRACKLISTING –
Knull’s Order
Area 51 to 55
Venom and Eddie At The River
Hanging Out at the Waterfall
Newsflash
Lab Battle
Remember Me
Sky Dive
Desert Walk
Frequent Flyers
Strickland Reprimands Paine
Sneaking Around
What Are You Doing Here
Request Permission
Say When
Phoning Home
Ramping Up
Strickland and Paine
General Bosco Banana Man
Explaining The Backstory
Crashing the Party
Following the Osprey
Safer Underground
Poking Around
Blasting Out
It’s Not Safe Here
Last Try
It’s a Showdown
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