Nickel Boys brings the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about two friends surviving a Florida reform school together to the screen. Director RaMell Ross hired Scott Alario and Alex Somers to create the music, and the composers found inspiration on location in New Orleans that Ross encouraged them to explore.
“Some of [the sounds] were a broken fan that was in a bathroom,” Alario said during a conversation and performance at Deadline’s Sound & Screen Film music showcase event on Friday. “Alex heard it and was like, ‘You have to go in there and record that fan. It sounds so interesting.’ I said, ‘Yes, You’re right, I will do that’ and we did it. We weren’t sure it would make it into the film but It’s in there.”
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Alario met Ross when they were students at Rhode Island School of Design. Alario and Somers have been collaborators for 20 years and composed for Ross’ documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening. Ross encouraged the composers to explore whatever sounds they wanted, even if they did not match the images on screen. For example, Alario recorded frogs — and there are no frogs in the film, but to Somers that wasn’t the point.
“We didn’t really care about reality,” Somers said. “It was just our inner reality. It doesn’t have to make sense. It just feels right. It evokes a kind of spark somehow and we just got to do it. It makes sense to us but doesn’t have to reflect reality.”
The story of Nickel Boys makes sense in a stark, tragic way. The boys endure abuse at the reform school and Ross does not shy away from depicting it. The score worked hand in hand to convey the boys’ experiences.
“A lot of it’s shot in first-person perspective so you’re in there,” Alario said. “A lot of the sounds we included in the score were echoing that feeling of being in your head and experiencing the world, being overwhelmed by an incredibly traumatic experience.”
Check out the panel video above.