Nicholas Britell

“I am going to start with a personal project. I’m going to start with The Underground Railroad. Every single state on the journey of this film, we traded in the score like it was almost a different planet at times. It was like working on multiple movies. But one of the more profound experiences I’ve ever had, and shout out to Barry Jenkins, Colson Whitehead. Yeah, very special experience.”

“One of my all-time favorites, Citizen Kane. Masterpiece. Interesting footnote on this is that this was actually Bernard Herrmann’s first film score. Bernard Herrmann, one of the greatest of all time, and one of the things that I love about this, in particular in Herrmann’s work, is you first hear his angular, chromatic sound of how he moves. There’s a kind of brooding nature to his music in this. He also wrote the opera excerpt that is in the movie.”

“This might be my favorite movie of all time, The Double Life of Véronique by Kieślowski. I saw this… I was probably, like, 13 or 14, and I remember watching the movie and just saying to myself, 'I didn’t know that was possible. I didn’t know you could make a movie like that.' And the score is one of my favorite scores of all time. It’s by the Polish composer Zbigniew Preisner, and just a total masterpiece.”

“Tokyo Olympiad. This is another one of those movies, actually, that the first time I saw it, I remember just sort of… It was like a revelation to me. Not just the film itself. It seems like it has its own almost philosophy of filmmaking. There’s something so grand and beautifully composed about the filmmaking, but it also has a beautiful philosophy of humanity and life in it. A very optimistic take and a very special moment in time, I feel, the 1964 Summer Games in Tokyo.”

“I’m gonna grab one more here just because this is too many, but I’m taking Malcolm X. Incredible film. Not only on a film level, and also Terence Blanchard’s score, the opening with the flag and incredible trumpet overture. All-timer. Amazing.”

“La Jetée. What I love about La Jetée is it’s got so many different elements that are in and of themselves very unconventional for a film. So it’s half an hour long, approximately. It’s a short film. Still photography, voice-over narration, science fiction, time-travel elements. It’s hard to put into words what it is, but it makes you really think about the possibilities of filmmaking and how the forms of filmmaking are up to us. La Jetée, very, very impactful for me.”