By Matt Minton
mminton@variety.com
Before composer Antonio Sanchez officially came on board to score “The Studio,” the new Hollywood satire show from Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, the episodes were already using his “Birdman” score as temp music.
So when Sanchez sat down with Rogen and Goldberg, it only took about 15 minutes of chatting before they were sold on working together. “The one thing that ‘Birdman’ brought is the impression that maybe I’m a little bit of a one-trick pony because it was a four-time Oscar winning movie. So people think of me and they just think drums,” Sanchez tells Variety.
Related Stories
Working on “The Studio,” then, became the perfect opportunity for Sanchez to show off more of his range.
Popular on Variety
Sanchez got started right away on the music for Continental Studio’s films, expanding his soundscape to horns, strings and percussion across all ten episodes. As someone who was brought up as a jazz musician, his first instinct is always to improvise, which is especially important for a show like “The Studio” that features “wall-to-wall music” in nearly every scene.
“I can channel things very easily. When you’re improvising, you’re composing in the moment,” Sanchez explains. “And then with those full takes, I start editing and cleaning up and doubling things, tripling things. The first pass was improvised, but then what I do after that is very planned. It’s a really healthy combination of improvisation and composition.”
For any given episode, he begins doing a pass with just drums and listening in for when “somebody says something that really needs to be accentuated.” And since Sanchez never hires outside musicians, he plays all the instruments himself.
Then, when Sanchez moves the sounds over to the computer, he focuses on how the music flows with the quick-witted dialogue. He recalls doing another pass with mallets and how playing them “on my toms created a lot of reverb, which made it sound scary when Bryan Cranston is chastising Seth’s character.”
While Sanchez noticed that Rogen and Goldberg were connecting well with the drum sounds, specific episodes, like Episode 4, when Matt (Rogen) and Sal (Ike Barinholtz) race to find a missing reel of film, pushed him more. The episode originally featured temp music from composers like Jerry Goldsmith, taking inspiration from classic film noir scores.
While Sanchez originally scored the first half of that episode exclusively with drums, after Rogen and Goldberg heard the more intricate second half, they asked him to go back and rework it. “Since I had already recorded the drums, I just started adding instrumentation to that with basses, horns, strings and many layers of percussion,” Sanchez says.
Sanchez was also tasked with bringing moments from the films within the actual world of the show to life, including the triumphant Continental Films studio theme, which was inspired by 20th Century Studios. There’s also the Ron Howard movie that Matt can’t bring himself to give honest notes on in Episode 3.
“I had to do full-blown 10-second bits for each time they would show the movie. The styles were completely different,” Sanchez says. “So those things were challenging and very time-consuming, because all of a sudden I have to do 10 seconds of a Ron Howard action sequence.”
For a show as chaotic as “The Studio,” Sanchez found himself in the midst of a balancing act himself — he was already on tour when signing onto the project. Unlike other composers who can successfully multitask, Sanchez isn’t able to focus on other projects when he’s going around the world.
“So then, when I come home, the work has piled up. I’ve been gone for three weeks — that’s three weeks I was not able to do anything on the show,” Sanchez says. “Luckily, the whole team and the production was very understanding of my touring obligations because this series came out of nowhere for me. The deal was maybe done in a couple of weeks. Then, when I came home, I was doing 14 to 15-hour days, just trying to work with the deadlines. So it was a little stressful but [ultimately] fantastic.”
A Variety and iHeartRadio Podcast
The Business of Entertainment