1917 (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

After working with director Sam Mendes on American Beauty (1999), American composer Thomas Newman scores the 2019 World War I film 1917. After working on the score for Tolkien (2019), which featured themes of war and violence, 14-time Academy Award nominee found challenges given the film’s unique style of being one long continuous and uninterrupted shot.

On top of this challenge, Mendes posed another one on top of it, saying he “…didn’t want gloom on gloom. Essentially, if these guys are trudging through mud with their guns pointed, how do you get to different kinds of psychological landscapes?”

Even though the film was released on Christmas Day, 2019, Newman starting tossing ideas around for the film’s sound as early as the fall of 2018. In early May 2019, Newman saw footage from the film for the first time, which gave him an early picture of what his score would be cut with.

I wrote many ideas to those images, as I often have with Sam. It was a question of emotional content versus dramatic content. In the end, the music needed to involve the location, the night flares and the contrast of light and darkness. And the question you have to answer is, ‘Is it supposed to be scary, is it supposed to be intense, or is it supposed to be dystopically beautiful?’ Mendes always wanted dystopically beautiful, so the question became, ‘What does that sound like?’

-via The Wrap

The score ended up being nominated for Achievement in Music Written for Motion Pictures (Original Score) Award at the 2020 Academy Awards, USA, and Best Original Score at the 2020 Golden Globes, USA.