Music supervisors Lauren Mikus and Bruce Gilbert.
Without a doubt, the triumph of the past year in the world of cinema is Everything Everywhere All At Once. The film is an unlikely success story, as everything about it goes against what’s expected to do well, and while it is certainly a weird production, it is also an incredibly profound one that has touched the hearts of millions.
Everything Everywhere All At Once has been cleaning up throughout the months-long award season, with all the red carpets, interviews, and acceptance speeches leading up to the Oscars. Along the way, music supervisors Lauren Mikus and Bruce Gilbert accepted not one, but two trophies at the 2023 Guild of Music Supervisor’s Awards, coming out of the evening–held this past Monday, March 6–as among the top winners.
Now, they’ve won their prizes, but they aren’t done with all the excitement. Two of Everything Everywhere All At Once’s 11 Oscar nominations–the most for any title this year–are in the musical categories. Son Lux is up for Best Original Score (a nod which remains very rare for a group to earn) and the tune “This Is a Life” by David Byrne, Ryan Lott (of Son Lux) and Mitski is competing for Best Original Song. Everyone involved will be rooting for them on Sunday (March 12), especially those in the music department.
Mikus and Gilbert played an instrumental role in ensuring that every single music cue in Everything Everywhere All At Once was perfect and correctly sourced, and so while they didn’t compose or write any of it, they’re a integral part of the team that helped make this piece of art come together.
I spoke with both Mikus and Gilbert just hours after they won their Guild of Music Supervisor’s Awards about finding odd Chinese opera for the film, recreating a ‘90s pop songs over and over, and what it feels like to be part of Hollywood’s unexpected winning team.
Hugh McIntyre: How did you come to be involved with this incredible film?
Lauren Mikus: We had worked with The Daniels before. The first thing I did with them was just clearing one song for Swiss Army Man. After that I did Daniel Scheinert’s solo project movie called The Death of Dick Long, which was his first one with A24. When this movie came about, Bruce and I had teamed up and they were like, “Hey, you’re our guys, come be a part of the family.”
McIntyre: This was a years-long process, right?
Bruce Gilbert: It’s such a time warp now with Covid. Everything feels weird, but this feels particularly weird because it started so long ago, and then we had the whole Covid madness. And now, it’s living a brand new awards season life and it’s so overwhelming. I can’t imagine what it’s like for them [directors The Daniels], but it takes a second for us to reset and remember how it all went down.
McIntyre: It must be odd for you to be winning awards and doing interviews. You picked these songs and did all this work years back.
Gilbert: Truly.
Mikus: I think they were one day shy of finishing filming when lockdown happened. I don’t know if they picked that up or if they were able to do without whatever they intended to film. One of the only good memories from the pandemic is that this thing came to fruition that you started way before everything became different. It came out of South By Southwest. I saw it with the audience there and that’s where I started to realize what kind of a huge thing this potentially could be. That was pretty cool.
When you work on movies, as in our jobs, you watch things a lot and you don’t always get to see them with an audience, especially you don’t always get to see them with an audience. But once… All the tears I saw in the auditorium, I knew that this was something really special.
McIntyre: Are you going to happily do every project now that you’re connected with them [The Daniels]? Or do you read the script and decide project by project? What enticed you specifically to this?
Gilbert: It’s a two-part answer. One is, yeah, we normally read scripts and decide based on our workload and relationships and the work itself if it’s something that we can devote the right amount of energy to. We don’t like to be spread too thin. Like Lauren said, we had a previous relationship with them and those are our favorite projects to take on because there’s a shorthand and there’s no learning curve, as far as trying to figure out taste level or process. It’s always our preference to work… To repeat business.
But just creatively speaking, it’s always a pleasure to team up with people with whom we already have a relationship. I would jump at any opportunity to work with The Daniels again. I’m sure Lauren would too. I don’t care what they’re doing. I would be honored to join them.
I feel that’s the case with a lot of directors and producers and showrunners that we work with. If it’s a good fit, then it seems to continue for multiple seasons and subsequent productions, shows, ideas, projects.
We have a few little families that I feel like we’re related to across the film and TV spectrum. It’s always a pleasure to be invited back, obviously. It’s tricky though. When you start new projects, you never know. I mean, it’s always fun for us, that discovery period. But it is a discovery. It does require figuring out where your creative impulses align and where they diverge.
In some cases people come to us and ask us for our total input. And other times it’s more or less collaborative. Some people fancy themselves music nerds. Everyone loves music, obviously, but particularly fanatic about it. They’ll have an idea about what they want, and it’s up to us to sort of help guide them. In those cases, our tastes aren’t always aligned. This was a situation where we’re very much aligned and it’s easy really. Other situations are less easy. Sometimes it leads to unexpected answers and ideas.
McIntyre: When they came to you and you read the script and signed on, what specifically were your suggestions? Did you suggest Son Lux? Was some of it already in process?
Mikus: They had always wanted to work with Son Lux and this was the project that it came together for. They were already involved and we were excited to hear that when we came on board as well, because we knew of their work and could see how it could fit into this massive sonic landscape that it became.
In terms of like the song choices, like Bruce was saying, it’s fun and easy in this way. It’s sort of like a party when you’re talking about music with these guys. Some were sort of scripted, but they had some loose ideas, and then we pitched things around. Knocked some ideas around together.
Choosing to make these different versions of that “Story of a Girl” song by the band Nine Days was because they had realized that they had semi-accidentally summarized the lyrics as Waymond says to Evelyn in one of the scenes to explain the multiverses. So we were like, “Well, let’s have that Easter egg in there lyrically and then bring this song back in all these different ways in the film just to have a little bit of a wink and a nod.”
I think that’s The Daniels’ approach to some of the source music, which is to enhance a point or make a joke or be like a little bit of an Easter egg for the audience to enjoy. It’s more of a fun conversation to get to land on some of the things that we end up doing that end up sticking in the film.
McIntyre: That cue came up and I yelled. I grew up on that song, I love that song. It was a hit, but it was still a pull from out of nowhere. That was my next question–”Where on earth did that come from?”
Mikus: I know that they’re fans of that era of rock. In Scheinert’s other film we did a lot of Nickelback and stuff like that to fit the characters. It worked well to have that early 2000s soundtrack. So there’s already an affinity towards that. That’s how it came up and got dropped into the script.
We got really lucky because the original writer and leader of that band, this guy John Hampson… You could think of this song and it could have been someone who wasn’t into the idea of different versions being made or would be cost prohibitive, but he was so down, he just was like, “Yeah, I’ll record new versions for you.”
We hired him to do it. We were on like a Zoom call with him and The Daniels. They’re coming up with the lyrics together, on the spot. It flowed pretty naturally, which is a testament to the environment that those guys create for any of their collaborators. They want you to shine and to come together in an inspired way. They seem to bring that out of everyone.
Gilbert: We talked to Ryan [Lott, of Son Lux] last night at the show [Guild of Music Supervisor’s Awards]. He and the band worked tirelessly on what amounts to like, I don’t know how many minutes of music, actually. It’s a lot. Even he was sort of intimating that he was just so honored to be along for the ride, and it’s like, “No, you worked your ass off.” I mean, everyone works hard and it’s a miracle that anything’s ever watchable, I think.
There’s so many bad movies and there’s so many bad shows and we work so intimately with producers and directors, and frankly we don’t always know if something is good. We might be really proud of a moment or work really hard to nail a spot or get the right thing, but we’re too close to it for too long.
To see one of the first… I guess it’s one of the first films that people were seeing in the theater after Covid, and to have that response, you’re just like, “Oh, it is great.” Even if you saw the campaign for it, you’re like, “What is this about?” You don’t really know. And then to be able to sit in the theater and witness it and watch the most absurd stuff, followed by sobbing…it’s not an easy thing to accomplish.
I bring it up because even Ryan, who worked so hard with the band to feel like he’s just happy to be a part of it, sort of speaks to the environment that Lauren was talking about. They built an entire world, but inside that process of building that world, everyone feels so lucky to be a part of it. We can’t wait to see what happens on Sunday, but surely they’re going to get some love.
McIntyre: It’s an interesting moment for music supervisors because we’re having this conversation now, but it seems like the right film, the right show, with that perfect genius placement of a song, they become hits. It becomes something everyone wants to talk about. Do you ever go into something like this thinking, “We need a song for this moment, but can we find one that’s going to not just work for the project, but also create that moment that people want to talk about?”
Gilbert: Personally, I don’t. If we’re able to make magic out of a moment with a song that’s well placed and works on multiple levels and is either a newer song or a song from yesteryear that everyone loves or didn’t know they love, or it’s more obscure and they love it now, I think it’s added value–icing on the cake. If it happens, it’s so great. It’s always a surprise. I’m frankly surprised at some of the selections I’ve seen in shows where people went crazy for something. But I feel as supervisors, we’re so connected to music.
Like Kate Bush for example. We die for Kate Bush. That’s an artist that Lauren and I listen to regularly. We tried to… A bunch of times in certain things… But to see what happened with Stranger Things, I was surprised by the response, but then I realized, “Oh, there’s more than a generation of people that have no relationship to that music.”
So we don’t really think about it when we’re working, because when we’re working, we’re mostly just racking our brains for what works, but also within the framework of our aesthetic, whatever that might be.
I used to have free-floating anxiety that I didn’t have the right song for the right spot. And at some point I had to relax and realize that I only know what I know, but I have this impulse where I’m like, no, it’s out there. I haven’t found it yet. We haven’t found it yet. It’s out there. But then I sort of have to switch my… It’s like, “No, it’s not out there. It’s in here. It’s only within.”
Sometimes we’ll go down crazy rabbit holes and find something. Working as partners, it’s amazing because Lauren will send me a playlist and I’ll send her one and we’ll go back and forth and we’ll happen upon songs that I’ve never heard before, finding it in the wild.
Mikus: When I was younger, I watched end credits to find music. It’s not the goal, but I do like thinking about that sometimes when doing this job, because it’s how I learned about the job and had it in the back of my mind as something I might end up doing. Now, everyone can get the information and actually find the song without having to… You have to be a real nerd to sit there and look at the end credits and pause it and write things down. But, it is cool to know that if somebody likes something that you’ve put in a thing, they’re probably going to listen to it. They’ll Shazam it, and that it is cool to know.It’s something we’re thinking about when we’re making the choices. The choices are always, first serve, obviously the collaboration, the story, and then art.
Gilbert: I think it’s a little presumptuous for a music supervisor to claim the… I think it has more to do with the show than the song because there’s probably some great selections and shows that no one’s ever going to see.
I worked on Weeds for like the last six seasons of that series and we had no money for music and so I had to dig for songs that nobody knew. I sort of romanticized having no budget. I mean, these days we don’t really want to work on shows without money because it’s really hard and we want to be able to think freely and have the budget to accommodate our biggest ideas. But back then it was restricted and it forced me to find these little gems and these hidden treasures. The show was so well received that some of those songs did blow up. But it’s because they were on Weeds. It’s because people loved that show.
I have gifts from record labels, like platinum records where it’s like, “This is all because of your placement on the show.” And it’s like, “Well, I sure as shit wasn’t trying to blow that song up when I placed it.” I just thought it was cool and it worked and I didn’t have money.
We still sort of think that way. We find the right song for the right moment and if that kind of magic happens, then we’re sort of lucky to be a part of it.
McIntyre: What was the biggest challenge with this project? Not only is there a lot of music, but there are a lot of different types. There are original songs and an original score and not only a pop hit from the past, but several versions of it. There’s a lot going on here.
Mikus: I wouldn’t exactly describe it as being extremely challenging. It was just…you have to be on your toes.
When they were filming, we had to find a legitimate Chinese opera song for Evelyn to sing on stage. That was complicated because publishing rights for the authentic songs we wanted to use can be difficult. So it’s finding a version that we could actually clear. We wanted to make sure we weren’t using some random, non-authentic songs.
When you’re working with people that have such big ideas, like these guys, it’s about figuring out how to get them done. But that’s part of the fun and the genius of them. The music budget wasn’t huge. Once we got started getting into it was sort of like, okay, we might have to replace this Looney Tunes theme with something else that we find that’s cartoony so we can afford to do this Nine Days idea. So it’s more like, are we going pull this off? Let’s go figure it out as quickly as possible. Because if not, we are going to have to come up with something else that will serve the same purpose.
During the post [production] process, these little marathons would pop up here and again. I don’t want to say it wasn’t hard, but working with them never feels incredibly challenging, because it’s just fun and you can really see the benefit of making it happen. It feels like a good adventure.
Gilbert: It’s interesting though, like you said, that it does seem from afar like it would be difficult because there’s Chinese opera, ’90s pop, this epic score. Again, this is a testament to the work that they did and what’s on screen. It all lives together in a way that doesn’t feel terribly eclectic. It feels like it’s of one thing. I think that’s the film holding everything up. That movie’s just… It’s so buoyant. Even though it gets deep and heavy at times when it’s flying, it’s just flying and the music feels like it’s up there in the upper register, the whole thing.
McIntyre: This film is doing well everywhere it goes–you know this firsthand. What has it been like being a part of one of these titles that sweeps at every show? It’s nominated at the Oscars for Best Original Score and Best Original Song for two things that are seemingly different but work together.
Gilbert: For a while I felt like I was watching it from a distance. And we were just honored to be a part of it. And then last night to have a more personal stake in it and to experience all the love around it and in a room full of our peers. Then it started to get surreal and I started to have the tiniest idea what these guys must be going through.
Mikus: I’m just really happy for those guys. I’ve known them and their producer Jonathan for a decade and they really feel like part of our LA story. You work on projects together and of course everyone just wants to work, not necessarily trying to be a part of something that blows up like this, but when it does happen, you’re just happy for everyone that was involved and it’s very cool to be a part of that in any way and see the hard work pay off. It’s nice to be a part of something that has affected people so deeply.
Gilbert: Truly.
Mikus: I still cry when I watch the movie, at the end. Everyone that’s told me about how it has made them have some sort of emotional release. In terms of awards, [it] means so many people really needed something like this and then it affected them in this great way and I think that’s what’s coming out now on the other side, especially after the pandemic and lockdown and all those scary, bad years. It’s almost like this was the perfect movie for a nice cathartic release. These ceremonies make me think about how everyone got to be a part of it, even as just an audience member, and to celebrate in that same way.
Gilbert: The ripple effects are crazy. The fact that we collected awards on this film last night, I mean… It’s just astounding.
Ryan [Lott] was saying last night that the direction he got for that closing song was that they wanted the audience to receive a hug at the end by the credits, because they needed it. It’s so effective and it’s just the wackiest, most stoner dildo fighting ride. It’s so crazy and then to end up there, you’re just like, “These dudes are deep.”
That’s really what it is. It’s just this wild spectrum from the zaniest multiverse freak out that’s absolutely universal and so grounded.
Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/hughmcintyre/2023/03/09/everything-everywhere-all-at-once-music-supervisors-share-how-the-music-in-the-unlikely-hit-came-together/