A Look Behind The Curtain of the Score for ‘Reminiscence’

In preparation for the release of the movie Reminiscence, I along with a few of my cohorts got a chance to talk with the filmmaker and the Reminiscence music team about the score for the film as well as the lead single ‘Save My Love’ by Lonr featuring Amber Mark. The lead single is out now. 

Starring Hugh Jackman, Rebecca Ferguson, and Thandiwe Newton, Reminiscence is a story about Nick Bannister, played by Jackman who is “a private investigator of the mind, navigating the darkly alluring world of the past by helping his clients access lost memories. Living on the fringes of the sunken Miami coast, his life is forever changed when he takes on a new client, Mae, played by Ferguson. A simple matter of lost and found becomes a dangerous obsession. As Bannister fights to find the truth about Mae’s disappearance, he uncovers a violent conspiracy, and must ultimately answer the question: how far would you go to hold on to the ones you love?”

On the panel, the Reminiscence filmmaker Lisa Joy was joined by Grammy-nominated music producer Jeff “Gitty” Gitelman, ‘Save My Love’ artist Lonr, and composer Ramin Djawadi who created the film’s score. When asked about the strategy in compiling the score for Reminiscence, Ramin Djawadi mentioned starting with different sounds that best encapsulate each character’s aesthetic. “We start the movie with the guitar for certain characters then move on to the strings and the piano,” Djawadi further explained. Additionally, Djawadi mentioned the concept of a light motif or the idea of attaching an idea or theme to a character or scene, which then helps in the understanding of what tone is required within the music. 

When asked about the importance of a good score in the elevation of the quality of a movie, Lisa Joy started by discussing the relationship between music and film. “You can’t have a great film without a great score, there were silent films before they had dialogue because they had great music… some of the best scenes I’ve been a part of have been wordless because music is a universal language,” said Joy as she broke down the at times overlooked relationship between the mediums.

The most interesting insight came from Joy who discussed the relationship between music and her film directly, mentioning how she found an obsession with cassette tapes at the beginning of the brainstorming for the score. Joy compared the aging of the tapes to how memory can age, stating how both memory and cassette tapes start fresh before they start to become distorted and eroded. This of course ties back into the plot of Reminiscence that is built around the fragility of memory.

With the lead single, ‘Save My Love’ by Lonr featuring Amber Mark out now, fans have a taste of what to expect from the Reminiscence score. The Sci-Fi, Action, Romantic Thriller, as Lisa Joy refers to it, is set to be released in theaters and on HBO Max on August 20th along with the accompanying score that will be released on DSPs the same day.