Amanda Brown has been composing award-winning music for stage and screen since 2000, but has actively participated in the Australian and global music scene since the late 1980s - most notably as a multi-instrumentalist in popular Australian indie band The Go-Betweens as well as performing as a session musician with the likes of R.E.M, The Vines, Silverchair, and Toni Collette. It’s an impressive CV! It's this CV along with her extensive experience composing music for feature films and television series including The Secrets She Keeps, Grace Beside Me, Kairos, and Babyteeth, for which she won Best Original Score at the 2020 Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Arts Awards, that made Brown an obvious choice for creating One Night's beautiful score.
Subtle and complimentary, Brown’s score successfully guides the audience into deep emotional spaces without being prescriptive, and sprinkles of recurring character themes are also placed thoughtfully throughout. With the use of atmospheric piano, synths, and samples, the soundtrack offers a beautiful simplicity alongside the cleverly constructed sound design.
We caught up with Amanda via email for a lovely chat about how she got involved with One Night, her approach to making music for visual pieces, and what other artists she’s been drawing inspiration from.
Helena Emmanuel: When you were approached to compose the music for One Night, what information did you have going into the job?
Amanda Brown: I was attending a conference in Rome late last year when I was sent the One Night episode summaries by producer Ally Henville. Later I received the full scripts and not long afterwards I met with writer Emily Ballou, set up director Catherine Millar and producers Ian Collie, Rob Gibson and Simon Maxwell back in Sydney. That meeting was really a pitch session/audition situation where I discussed the possible approach I might take in relation to composing the score. I had worked with Catherine before on a series called The Secrets She Keeps but it was my first time meeting everyone else.
Alfie Whitby: How early in the composition process do you know which direction musically you’re heading?
Amanda: Catherine Millar really led with the creative idea of making the score reflect the unique location of the series. She wanted to incorporate the natural sounds of the area into the score, so the music was less about manipulating emotion and more about a sense of place.
The location for the series is a coastal strip between Sydney and regional centre Wollongong, with pounding surf on one side and a dramatic escarpment on the other side of the main road heading south. The vegetation is coastal rainforest and is abundant in raucous Australian bird life. There’s also a train line that divides coast and the mountains. I made a trip with sound recordist Nigel Christensen, and we captured all those sounds, with the idea that I would manipulate them and somehow incorporate them into the music. It was an interesting creative challenge that really appealed to me.
HE: How closely did you work with the visuals of One Night while scoring, if at all? Were you working with just the picture-locked edit or did you get to see some scenes earlier?
Amanda: Commencement on One Night was quite tight, and I worked closely with the picture lock. Normally I like to write some preliminary sketches inspired by the script if time allows. I also like to assemble playlists, akin to an aural mood board to familiarise myself and other crew with the musical approach for the show or film. I share these with directors, showrunners and editors and sometimes the playlists are passed on to the actors. I’ve heard they can be helpful with establishing character, backstory etc.
HE: Were there specific moments in One Night that were the most fun to score? Most difficult?
Amanda: Music in One Night mostly tended to be thematically related to the flashback sequences, so that when the score was combined with the sound design it became quite a dense, hyperreal audio tapestry. I’ve just seen David Fincher’s film The Killer where they used a similar idea to great effect. Every composer loves working with beautiful imagery and not much dialogue to compete with, so those sequences were fun to score. I used time-stretched bird recordings and train sounds as textural elements and these were combined with character motifs played on piano and strings for the main three characters.
AW: I’m also a multi-instrumentalist and I’ve only dipped my toe into creating music for film and television. It’s something I’d like to explore more but I feel very out of my depth, particularly around how to approach it musically and technically. What’s your typical process when composing for a drama like One Night? For example, you’ve got the brief, you’re ready to get started - how does everything come together?
Amanda: Initially research and preparation are key to finding the sound of a film or series and every project is different. What palette of instruments might work with the story being told? Do certain musicians need to be sourced? Then it’s an ongoing dialogue with the showrunner and or director about what’s working and what isn’t. Gradually the sound of the show reveals itself as you work through the narrative. I like to take a chronological approach, not only because it’s necessary from a post-production perspective but it also allows the music to develop and unfold with the story, creating peaks and troughs and moments of beauty, introspection and so on. In Australia music budgets tend to be low so composers are often also music engineers and score producers as well.
AW: We’re currently listening to your album Eight Guitars as we put together these questions. It’s a great record! Is the personal storytelling aspect of song writing something that you try to bring over into your film and TV composition work or are they two very different beasts?
Amanda: Lovely to hear you liked listening to Eight Guitars. Some of those songs are from film or theatre projects so there is some correlation but really the process is quite different, screen music being written to specific commission and schedule and an album of songs being an art for art’s sake type of endeavour.
Being a woman of a certain age there is a cloak of invisibility when you’re making an album of songs. For example, you’ll never be played on the radio and there is liberation in that. I was free to make the album I wanted to make and hire my favourite musicians. But it was also very bespoke in terms of the amount of vinyl I pressed and the shows I played to promote it. Age discrimination is something you don’t find as much in the screen music world because ultimately, you’re one of many and visibility resides with the actors, directors and showrunners.
HE: Lisa Matthews mentioned that you turned her onto Agnes Obel, and that her music - specifically “Parliament of Owls” - became almost synonymous with the show for her. Are there any other artists you drew inspiration from when scoring One Night?
Amanda: I listened to Matthew Herbert’s music from The Wonder initially for its other-worldly combination of instruments, and to Hildur Guðnadóttir’s score from Chernobyl to hear how she incorporated field recordings into her music. This is not a new concept, it’s something that has been around since the musique concrète experiments in Europe in the 1930’s but it hasn’t been used so often in film music.
AW: Is there a genre of music you haven’t worked as much with that you’d like to?
Amanda: I’ve never composed music for a sci-fi, war or horror film although I’ve done music for documentaries that have elements of all these. Truth is often far stranger than fiction!
You can find more information about Amanda and her upcoming projects on her official website.
Words: Alfie Whitby
Interview: Helena Emmanuel & Alfie Whitby (with questions submitted by the RTR team)
You can watch One Night on Paramount+ UK & Ireland and Paramount+ Australia now.
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