The Afterparty Composer Reveals Which Genre Films Inspired The Show’s Music
The Afterparty composer, Daniel Pemberton, revealed the different genres that inspired the show's musical scores. Pemberton previously worked with creator and director, Christopher Miller, on the highly acclaimed Spider-Man: Into the Universe and was eager to take on the complex challenges posed by the show's ambitious form of storytelling. The first season consists of eight episodes chronicling the same story, but told in eight different ways by eight different people.
The AppleTV+ series takes place during a high school reunion after-party, hours after a murder has occurred. Detectives arrive on the scene (played by Tiffany Hadish and John Early) to discover who, out of the eleven guests present, committed the act. Each guest tells their story and their particular viewpoint is delivered through a contrasting narrative trope: romantic comedy, action, psychological thriller, musical, animation, or art house cinema.
Variety reported the different genre films that inspired Daniel Pemberton's numerous scores which all catered to the episode's narrative style. The article stated that to ensure authenticity, he would try to place himself in the headspace of certain composers who commonly worked in the specific genre he was capturing, in the hopes that the music he created would reflect their inspiration. Pemberton also pointed out the extra challenge of making sure the scores were recognizably conventional in order to seamlessly blend into that episode's particular world. Read his full quote below:
"The strangest thing about this project is I’m almost going to be invisible, I have to make scores that feel so conventional, you don’t even think about them, because they feel 100 percent of that world. Sometimes I love scores being really noticeable, but with this one I really wanted to just feel like you’re in the different film genre worlds. And that’s a big challenge because my gut instinct is to try and make things unusual and sort of push against the boundaries of convention. Whereas with this I had to make them feel something you could recognize, if I tried to be too challenging, you wouldn’t feel a comfort in the fact you’re back in this world of genre.”
Sam Richardson's character, Aniq, relays events in a quintessential rom-com manner and Pemberton drew inspiration from Richard Curtis films, such as Notting Hill. Brett (Ike Barinholtz) on the other hand, communicates his tale in typical action movie fashion and the composer pulled from the musical artistry of John Wick to craft the character's heavy rock score. For Chelsea's (Ilana Glazer) episode, the scores from Bernard Herrmann's collaborations with Hitchcock influenced her psychological thriller narrative, and the music found in David lynch's repertoire of films served as motivation behind Indigo's (Genevieve Angelson) short testimony, told a la experimental art house cinema.
An immense amount of detail went into this series and Pemberton's scoring is no exception. The composer delivered on what he set out to do, allowing audiences to feel completely immersed in every episode's specific genre style. With a second season officially confirmed, hopefully Daniel Pemberton will be back to effectively serenade The Afterparty's character stories once more.
Source: Variety