Steven Price sounds like he has his head in his hands. In 2014 he won an Oscar for his Gravity score – a masterclass in intensity that does your blood pressure no favours – but perfecting it nearly broke him. “There’s a scene where Sandra Bullock’s character is giving up, and makes contact with this Inuit chap,” he says on the phone from his home in Surrey.
“It took forever just to get the tone right. I did so many versions that I took the numbers off the scores at the recording sessions as I was so embarrassed it had got to version two-hundred-and-something.”
The struggle paid off, of course. The Oscar was a much-deserved accolade for Price, who had scored his first feature, 2011’s Attack the Block, just two years before he started working on Gravity.
He’d always wanted to work with film music, having grown up obsessed with Alan Silvestri’s scores for the Back to the Future trilogy, but hadn’t a clue how to make it happen. After he left school he thought he would produce records for bands, and worked in studios as a tea boy.
A couple of years later, around the time he realised rock production wasn’t for him, he ran into composer Trevor Jones (Labyrinth, The Last of the Mohicans), who asked the then 21-year-old to work for him at Abbey Road.
“I just started playing,” remembers Price of a revelatory first week. “I moved a note from one beat to the next and saw the impact it had on the way this character’s eyes were moving – a totally different emotional effect.”
Price spent his 20s orchestrating, arranging and programming music for composers, occasionally contributing his own bits of composition. He became a music editor and, after working on Edgar Wright’s Scott Pilgrim Vs the World, Wright recommended him as a composer to Joe Cornish, who was getting Attack the Block off the ground, and he was in. He has since worked with a cadre of A-listers: Alfonso Cuarón (on Gravity and next year’s Roma), Wright (on The World’s End and this summer’s Baby Driver) and David Ayer (Fury and Suicide Squad). Each time, though, is completely different.
“You have to spend time with people to get to know their language. I’ve had notes before saying ‘too light’ or ‘too dark’ and it turns out it’s literally one instrument that’s part of a texture, triggering a memory of some record they had 20 years ago. I’ve had directors who loathe the harp more than you can possibly imagine. Then someone who thinks we should do the whole score on a harp.”
Paramount in any case though, is for the music to “make better cinema, to hopefully tell some of the story that perhaps isn’t obvious on the screen”, he says.
“It’s the biggest thing you end up constantly noting and changing, all the way through. You’re very aware of it these days, because we’ve seen and heard these things so often that it can become a cliche, pushing the same buttons that have been pushed to a massive emotional effect too often. But every now and then pushing those buttons is part of what makes the experience.”
Recently he’s been working with Sonos. Because of his job, he’s always listening out for things that non-industry people might not notice, and his feedback gives them invaluable tips for improving their home cinema sound.
“The 5.1 Sonos system in my house is part of my life, so if I’m watching a film and something occurs to me about the sound, I let them know,” he says. “When I’ve finished a film and I know the low end sounds a certain way in the cinema, but not on the system, I can say so. Just little things that help them continually tweak.”
Listening to his music at home is important too – once a score has been composed and recorded, there’s the album to consider. The film mix comes first, but having the soundtrack dazzle out of context is a worthwhile endeavour. “I remixed everything on the Gravity score, because they’re very different experiences,” he says.
“The film mix is very immersive, things are whizzing around you all the time, because we were trying to place the audience up in space. But when you put that through two speakers it didn’t feel right, so we took all the multitracks and made it an album experience. It honours the film, but stands alone as well.”
Even then, the work can test your mettle. But changing things up at the 11th hour is always worth the toil, especially when it finally falls into place. “When that happens, you don’t touch it,” he laughs. “You run away as quickly as possible.”
