The process of finding the right song for the right scene in a movie can involve no shortage of trial and error. And Sofia Coppola‘s new film Priscilla, which eschews score in favor of dozens of individual needle drops, required a lot. As Laurent Brancowitz, of the band Phoenix, tells Consequence, “Sometimes you have ideas that work that are perfect on paper, but when you put [the song] on the footage, nothing happens. That’s one great thing about doing this job — it’s very hard to predict, but when the magic happens, it’s very obvious.”
Brancowitz and Thomas Mars (Phoenix lead singer and Coppola’s husband since 2011) worked alongside veteran music supervisor Randall Poster to create the soundtrack for the A24 biographical drama about a young girl named Priscilla (Cailee Spaeny), who at the age of 14 met an up-and-coming rock star named Elvis Presley (Jacob Elordi). Based on Priscilla Presley‘s memoir, Coppola’s film takes an intimate look at their complicated romance, drawing on a mix of period-appropriate and not-so-period-appropriate tracks as accompaniment.
“For most films, before your composer really works to the cut footage, editorial puts, say, scores from other movies to show you the tone,” Poster says. “With this film, there really was never a [temp score]. We started to put in the music, and that became the score of the movie.” 51 songs in total were used for the soundtrack, according to Poster.
Poster recently marked working on his 200th movie as a music supervisor (post-200, he’s no longer counting), with recent credits including Killers of the Flower Moon and Asteroid City. While he and Coppola have known each other for “a little while” and he previously collaborated with her brother Roman, this was the first time he was asked to work on one of her films from the beginning.
With no official composer involved, the music of Priscilla became a collaboration between Poster and Phoenix; for the film’s credits, the band is listed alongside Poster with the credit “music supervision by.” Says Mars, “We talked about the credits for such a long time. Nothing seemed to fit. At some point we wanted, I think, ‘music direction by Phoenix,’ but the DGA won’t allow anything that has the word directing. I can tell you that it’s the movie we worked on the most, by far, of all of Sofia’s movies, even though there’s very little score.”
Instead, Phoenix’s contributions included both creating their own songs as well as working with Poster and editor Sarah Flack to incorporate existing tracks as if they were pieces of original score. “I think we were, like, conducting — that was why we chose [music direction by],” Mars adds.
