The Newman family is a dynasty in the world of film music, and the score to “Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story” is an illustration of the latest chapter in the Newman saga. The score to the nine-episode Netflix series is a collaboration between Thomas Newman, a veteran composer with 15 Oscar nominations, and his daughter, Julia, a third-generation composer in a family that also includes her grandfather Alfred (45 Oscar noms!), her great-uncles Lionel and Emil (11 and one, respectively) and her cousins Randy (22 Oscar nods and a spot in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame), David, Joey and Maria.
It’s quite a legacy, and Julia knows it. “I never thought about being the continuation of a dynasty,” said the composer, who graduated from CalArts in fine arts before studying music at USC. “I had a lot of reverence for what my dad did, but I think it intimidated me. I grew up around orchestras, but I didn’t even understand how you could get from the point of having an idea to having an entire orchestra cooperate and then to have that work with a picture.”
Her father recognizes the pressure of continuing in the family business. “I did that in my generation, too, with my uncle Lionel and my dad,” Thomas said. “It was daunting but interesting, and it kind of washed over you with this epic scale.”
“But the notion of how I could be meaningful in my contribution remained to be seen. It made me feel small as opposed to big and part of a legacy.” He laughed. “It terrified me, this idea of writing music to image.”
But Thomas has been doing it successfully for decades on films like “The Shawshank Redemption,” “American Beauty” and “WALL-E,” while Julia has transitioned from shorts and indie films to a pair of Ryan Murphy limited series, “Feud: Capote vs. the Swans” and “Monsters.” For the first of those, Thomas wrote the main title theme and Julia composed the music for the individual episodes; for the second, they were asked from the start to work on the music together, perhaps a tricky task considering the series deals with children killing their parents.
“The question was ‘How are we going to do this together?’” Thomas said. “I had never collaborated with another composer in film, so it was a big adventure for both of us to figure out how we would do it.”
They didn’t have any hard-and-fast rules for the collaboration. “We collected ideas separately, and we developed those ideas together and we developed them separately,” Julia said. “I think to start with a big old pot of ideas is really helpful. A blank page is intimidating, but by trying a lot of different things, I think we began to refine our sense of style and refine a sense of how comedy functions in the context of a story about such a brutal murder.”
Initially, they used a lot of drone textures — and when they finished scoring the first episode, the producers began using their existing music instead of outside temp music when they assembled rough cuts.
Working on the second episode, the one that earned the Newmans their Emmy nomination, Julia wrote what she called a “very complicated piano piece.” Uncertain about how to present it, she added an introduction that consisted of a simple and spooky keyboard passage layered with her voice intoning the word hum. When she sent the two-part piece to her father, she said he quickly responded, “Cut this. These are two separate ideas.”
Thomas immediately embraced the hum motif. “My assistant had accidentally put Julia’s music up at the beginning of the second episode,” he said. “I thought, ‘Whoa, this is involving.’ It plays into a deep emotional hunger, some kind of subtextual thing of what could have potentially motivated these characters to do such things.”
Julia cut in: “One of the most exciting things, at least for me early in this process, was that the idea excited you, Dad. I got a call at 7 a.m.: ‘Hey, do you wanna hop on Zoom?’”
Her father, she said, “had taken that piece and begun to structure it. For me, this points to why working with my dad on this show was so exciting — because it’s one thing to have an interesting idea; it’s another thing to recognize that that idea is interesting. And then it’s a totally other thing to make that idea have legs.”
The two worked more quickly than Thomas was accustomed to in order to finish all nine episodes, using their music to reflect the darkness of the Menendez world but also capture some style and sexiness that might leave the audience unsettled.
“The ambiguity has a compelling storytelling aspect,” Thomas said. “If it contradicts itself and tilts from one thing to another, it makes you want to know what is going to happen next.”
Julia added, “When you’re doing it, you’re forced to make snap decisions and figure out how to survive on a moment-to-moment basis. And in some ways, I think you and I both find that process easier than trying to come up with this big idea of what it means to be a film composer. It’s a series of small moments of survival—and hopefully, music that we delighted in making comes out on the other side of it.”
This story first appeared in the Down to the Wire: Drama issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more from the issue here.
