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PREVIEW, POV BOX: MUSIC EXECUTIVE
FULL INTERVIEW: ANTON MONSTED
The music executive interviewed for this section was one of the top executives in the film industry, the Senior Vice President for Music at Twenty-First Century-Fox named Anton Monsted. Shortly after this interview in the spring of 2018, the Disney Company bought out Fox, and Monsted moved to Capitol Music Group as Executive Vice President of soundtracks and A&R, meaning artists and repertoire. Prior to becoming Senior Vice President of Music at Twentieth Century-Fox in 2013, Monsted was an independently contracted music supervisor who had worked on films like Moulin Rouge (2003). As Monsted points out in this interview, the tasks of the music executive and the music supervisor, terms he uses interchangeably, are closely related nowadays. Anton spoke to me from his office in Los Angeles.
JH: Thank you for taking the time to be interviewed. I’d like to begin by placing your role as a film studio music executive in the context of all the other people involved in making film music, many of whom I have interviewed in this book. In doing so, I’ve learned a lot about the complex—and sometimes tedious—process of what it takes to get polished music ready to go on a film soundtrack. It’s been fascinating!
AM: I think that’s fantastic. I often get asked by friends and family, “Oh, what’s it like on a film set?” And I say, “Well, it can be fun, but it can also be a lot of standing around waiting for things to happen.” That’s because, unlike many other industries, in film production you have a lot of people who are highly specialized in doing one job, like those you’ve been interviewing.
JH: Right.
AM: So often, they are waiting for that crucial one minute where they get to do their job, and then they go back into sit-back-and-wait mode. It often surprises me that, in this day and age, the technique and ethos of filmmaking—not just in music, but overall—is a process riddled with inefficiency. I think it’s a strange luxury that it has continued to run the way it does. Of course, the technologies continue to change and evolve. We don’t shoot our films here at Fox on film very much anymore, for example. And yet, there are many jobs on set and the jobs in the music world that are highly specialized, like that of the music copyist, whom I’m glad you mentioned since that’s a role that often gets overlooked.
JH: Thank you!
AM: We have arrangers, we have supervising music editors, we have Pro Tools operators: there’s a huge list of people who are highly specialized doing one job very, very well. I still marvel at it. I remember my father asked me once how much a film I was working on was costing. I said, “I guess we’re spending about a million dollars a day.” This was mind-boggling to him. He wondered, “Where does all this money go?”
JH: What you do sounds similar to the duties of the musical director of the thirties and forties.
AM: I don’t know about that. I think of the musical director as someone who belongs to a slightly earlier era of filmmaking. Essentially, I’m an in-house music supervisor. I happen to work for a studio, Twentieth Century-Fox. I’m ultimately here to represent the interests of the studio which, eight or nine times out of ten, means we’re completely in alignment with the filmmakers. Very occasionally there are conflicts, but most of the time I’m not so much a musical director as an in-house music supervisor.
JH: So, let’s get into it. What exactly do you do, as a music executive / music supervisor?
AM: Basically, I oversee all aspects of the music that go into a film. That means we are there at day one, and we are there at the very last day when the film is delivered. That puts us in a unique position. We often engage with the filmmaker at the script stage…
JH: When you say filmmaker, who do you mean exactly?
AM: I’m talking about directors. We would engage with the director at the script stage to say, “Are you ready to talk about songs for the film? Do you think that there are going to be songs that characters want to sing along to or to dance with in your film? If so, we want to define what those songs are.”
JH: Now, you defined yourself a few moments ago as “an in-house music supervisor.” But there must be some differences between your job as a music executive at Fox and that of an independently contracted music supervisor. Can you talk about this a bit?
AM: When you’re out on the free market as a music supervisor, swinging from one film to the next, you tend to view the studio as the malevolent corporate overlord. My perspective—now that I have crossed over to the dark side—is that my job on a day-to-day basis is the same as it was when I was independent music supervisor. Those of us working as executives with a major studio see ourselves as music supervisors first and foremost. I think that most music executives at one of the other studios, I think they would all say the same thing. We all see ourselves as music supervisors first and foremost.
JH: I understand.
AM: We just happen to have hit the jackpot of being able to work on high-profile films. I think it’s an enormously privileged end of the music supervision world. The job is the same as if we were an independent music supervisor. In defense of independent music supervisors, we hire a lot of them. Probably one in three films that we do here at the studio will hire an independent music supervisor to work directly with the filmmakers. It just becomes a partnership: instead of one supervisor, you’ve got two.
JH: I see. You do what an independent music supervisor does, and then some.
AM: Right. When I said earlier that we oversee all aspects of the film, that includes finding a composer, helping to define and shape what the score for the film will be.
JH: You’ll actually find the composer?
AM: Yes. Now, in a lot of cases, directors have longstanding relationships with a composer that they like. On nearly every project, one of the first conversations the music supervisor will have with the director and with the producers is, “Who’s the right composer for this film? Who’s going to bring the best music to this film?” The music supervisor works as a conduit of communication and as a broker for figuring who the composer is. Often, we will get directors to meet with several composers. A portion of this job is to be a good matchmaker. You’re trying to get creative people to connect, to form a bond that’s going to create something new. Some meetings you go, “Argh, these people aren’t connecting.” In other meetings, they sit down and, five minutes in, you know that you’re witnessing a creative marriage. We will also find songs for the film in collaboration with the director. We will then go license those songs if they already exist. If we’re looking for a special song that doesn’t exit yet, we’ll work with the director on defining what it is that the director wants. Then it’s our job to go out into the world and get that for them.
JH: Can you give me an example of this?
AM: On the films I worked on with Baz Luhrmann, we would dream up fanciful scenarios, like, “Wouldn’t it be great if David Bowie could sing the old Nat King Cole songs?” (The films alluded to here are Romeo + Juliet (1996) and Moulin Rouge! (2003), discussed in T10.) Then it’s my job to go out and try to figure out how that can actually happen, to turn a fanciful idea like that into reality. That’s a lot of phone calls, a lot of getting to know people quickly (laughs) and trying to express the vision of the film. You’re always hoping they’ll get on the bus and take part in the journey. To me, that’s the most exciting part of the job, when you get to work with a director who has big ideas. As the music supervisor, your job is to help them realize those ideas.
JH: Once the composer has been selected, your job is far from done, obviously. What happens next?
AM: On most films, the music executive maintains a presence all the way through the process. We become the conduit for all things musical in the film. If the production needs music during the shoot, I’m the person they call. If we’re starting to talk about the schedule for post-production, and what elements will be ready in time for a preview screening. Anything to do with music, it comes to me. That job, I think, is a very important one. The music supervisor needs to connect the director, the composer, the producers, the studio, and so on. You want to be at the hub of a wheel that has lots of spokes. The deeper we get into the process, the more a music supervisor has to broaden out the number of people they talk to in a day. Certainly, the music editor becomes a crucial partner once you get into post-production. Part of our job as music supervisors is to interpret the notes that we get from the film director, or from a producer, and help shape the music to reflect those notes.
JH: Sounds like a delicate operation…
AM: Yes. Especially since this sometimes involves reducing the amount of music that’s in a film. Often, we’ll watch a film in its early stages and realize we’ve got too much music in there. And that often falls on the shoulders of the music supervisor and music editor to go through and trim it back, to find a happy medium.
JH: How did Greatest Showman (2017) compare to your other projects, like, say, Hidden Figures (2015)?
AM: Hidden Figures was a film that we were super excited to make. We finished it around twelve months before Greatest Showman. Working with the film’s director Ted (Theodore) Melfi, we started out wanting to have an authentic 1960s musical texture. We were already well down the road to find sixties songs so as to represent the music of the time in which the film was taking place, a really enjoyable exercise creatively, when it turned out that Pharrell Williams had a connection to one of the characters portrayed in the film. (Pharrell is best known for the 2013 song “Happy.”) Pharrell had grown up in Virginia. When Pharrell learned that this film was being made, he immediately put his hand up to be involved in some way. On the one hand, you say, “Great, that’s fantastic for this film!” Who’s going to say “no” to Pharrell Williams?
JH: Exactly.
AM: Certainly not this music supervisor! (Laughs.) We were excited by the possibility. What we didn’t know was what his level of involvement was going to be, what he was going to bring to the project. Typically, an artist of that stature might bring one song to the film—
JH: One song, that’s it?
AM: One song, that’s it, usually. But on this film, I think Pharrell felt such a strong personal connection that he was driven to be involved. I’ll never forget being invited to sit with him in the studio, early on in the process before we’d even shot the film. And he played ten or twelve songs that were all works in progress. So, he already had a large body of work that he had written and recorded in that 1960s style. It had echoes of Otis Redding. It really felt like it belonged in the period of the movie, strangely.
JH: Amazing.
AM: Once those songs were shared with Ted, the film director, he worked with his music editor, Richard Ford, and with his picture editor, and they worked as many songs by Pharrell into the film as they could. I forget where we ended up, something like eight or nine Pharrell songs in the film. But Pharrell also took an involvement in co-composing the score with Hans Zimmer and Ben (Benjamin) Wallfisch.
JH: Interesting.
AM: Yeah. That was an amazing collaboration to be a part of. I mean, here were people like Hans Zimmer and Ben Wallfish and Pharrell Williams! These guys really know what they’re doing. It’s a joy for me as a supervisor to be able to work with them. A lot of that work is helping connect the dots on communication. I’m not in the thick of it, giving creative notes on what I think works! They know what they’re doing. And they came up with an incredible sounding score for the film. They worked with all sorts of collaborators. I remember Herbie Hancock coming in and playing piano on one of our sessions, and thinking that was an incredible thing, because it was almost like having another composer come in and join in the fun. You’re working with such incredible musicians.
JH: Just out of curiosity, given that Hans Zimmer has his own recording studio, where was the score recorded? At Zimmer’s Remote Control or at the Fox lot?
AM: We recorded the majority of the score here, on the Newman stage at Twentieth-Century Fox.
JH: I see.
AM: Hans does have a pretty incredible studio set up down in Santa Monica, you’re right, and some of the tracking was done down there, just for convenience. Sometimes composers like the sound of a particular room for a certain size of brass ensemble, for example, so some of the tracking was done down there. But the majority of the score was done here on the Fox lot.
JH: If the music for Greatest Showman took four years to make, how long did Hidden Figures take from start to finish, just for comparison?
AM: Um, it was faster. Probably—I want to say about fourteen months. About fourteen months.
JH: Going back to Greatest Showman, I’ve interviewed the folks working on the Foley for that film (Andy Malcolm and Don White interviewed in Take 10). With respect to your work on the music, at what point would they have been working out the Foley sound? After the music was recorded? Or did you record the music after the rest of the soundtrack was finished? I’m a little confused as to what takes place when.
AM: That’s a good question. (Laughs.) When we get into the work on post-production of a film, especially when we’re putting the final touches on the music, in the last six to eight weeks when all the final decisions get made, we’re in a push-and-pull with the picture editorial team.
JH: I see.
AM: As sound people and music people, what we desperately want is a locked picture to work to. Once we have a locked picture, our job gets five times easier. We’re not chasing a moving target. In the case of Greatest Showman, the picture lock came pretty late in the process. I’m sure the Foley people will say the same thing, but at a certain point you go, “Well, let’s be smart about this and prepare more music than we need, knowing that some of it will end up on the cutting room floor.” That’s better than the alternative.
JH: Not having enough music?
AM: Right.
JH: In other interviews, this business of last-minute changes to films keeps coming up: entire scenes being added or deleted following preview screenings, and the music or sound editors having to rustle something up with very little notice. How often does this happen in your experience?
AM: Good question. Not so much on Hidden Figures, which was one of those films that found its feet very early, and there weren’t these crazy last-minute changes. But, you’re right, this goes for a lot of the films that get made these days. Often, we are working to pictures where we’re not really sure what the final product is going to be. Things are shot against a blue screen, for example, or part of the picture is temped in with a card that’ll say “lions jump through flaming ring.” Pictorially, what we’re working with is often rough until quite late. Sometimes, we don’t even see the final visual effects, the final rendered shot.
JH: That would be the case for animation films, especially, like Ice Age: Collision Course (2016), which you worked on.
AM: Yes. It’s an interesting thing, because often you’re working to a picture in a fairly rudimentary state until very late in the process. And when the final picture comes in, you often get a shock and realize, “Oh, OK, music will have to give way to sound effects here, we’ve got an elephant running across the screen at this point.” When for two years, all we’d been thinking about was, “Can we get the right music for this scene.” Music will be more or less buried by the thundering footsteps of the elephant.”
JH: What’s the exact state of the music in the final soundtrack mixdown? Is it a single file? A series of files?
AM: This is where the music editor really has their moment in the sun. When we get to the final mix, the (supervising or head) music editor becomes like the master librarian of all the music that’s in the film. Not only are they the master librarian, they will come to the music split out into a reasonable number of tracks—and by reasonable, I mean anywhere between twelve and forty-eight tracks. They will have the music mixed, but we bring the music in stems. Those stems are individual tracks that carry the mix information. If you play them all together, it sounds perfect.
JH: But, thanks to these stems, you could break down the film music if need be.
AM: Absolutely. And very often, you need to. This particularly happens with percussion. Often, in the final film mix, certain percussion elements will really fight the dialogue. You realize you have to make a choice at that point. We can either mute certain percussion elements, or we can lower the volume, or we can apply equalization to it in order to create sonic space for dialogue or sound effects. There’s a film I’m working on at the moment with a five-minute car chase, where I have a frantic, energetic score for the car chase. But I’ve now heard the sound effects, and the effects and music together are going to clash terribly. We know there’s going to be hard decisions to make at the final mix stage.
JH: Do these conflicts have to do with range, where some of the percussion, say, happens to be in a similar pitch range as the dialogue?
AM: Correct, correct. When we get to the mix, that’s where the music editor shines. The music editor is usually in on the filmmaking process from the very beginning of post-production right to through until delivery. For Greatest Showman, Jen Monnar, who is our supervising music editor, she came on at the beginning of rehearsal. That’s because, you need that music editor to have been on the journey of every piece of music that’s come anywhere near the film. Because, at any point, the director might turn to them and say, “Do you remember in rehearsals over a year ago, when Hugh Jackman sang it in a really high falsetto voice?” And the music editor will be expected to be able to produce that recording on the spot, if need be.
JH: Wow.
AM: The music editor will come in with an absolute mountain of music that’s meticulously filed, so that they can recall anything from the past eighteen months of work, and put it into the final film mix, if asked to do so by the film director.
JH: In conclusion, Anton, how would you say that your side of the film industry has changed since you started as a music supervisor in the 1990s?
AM: In some ways, the job has remained the same. But the compilation soundtracks in the 1990s have changed things considerably. We’re in a different era now.
JH: What do you mean?
AM: Well, physical record sales have really tapered off—that’s no secret—over the last fifteen, sixteen years (i.e., since the early aughts). Many of the record labels are talking about getting rid of CDs as a format and moving to digital format only. The iTunes store is going to switch over to a streaming only service in the near future. What all of this means is, we are no longer in the era of the album. Or at least, we’re not in the era of the album for the time being. This has changed the dynamic of how you approach soundtracks. For years, in the nineties and even beyond, you could count on a pretty healthy soundtrack album with a major label, which you could use to offset the cost of your music budget.
JH: I see.
AM: That’s a little harder to come by these days. I don’t know if it’s a good thing or bad thing. It’s just a change. The record business has been through an enormous summersault in the last fifteen years or so. The major labels are doing pretty well now. The economics of streaming and Spotify are really starting to pay off for the labels. But the idea that you could put out a soundtrack and confidently sell a million copies, that belongs to a different time. That has an economic consequence to how we do our work.
JH: Does this mean that, for a given film score, now you would focus on one single song rather than a group of songs as you would in the past?
AM: Yes, it does. Often nowadays, at the major studios, you’ll have a song that is tied in with a film, a song that may only appear in the end titles. But that song will also be used heavily in marketing materials, like trailers. And that’s a clever way to broaden the cultural footprint of a film prior to its release. But, yes, we are living in a different age. We’ll see what the future holds. I’m curious.
JH: Thank you very much, Anton, for this interview!
AM: Not at all, John. Happy to do it.