The Soundtracks to Our Screenplays

We’ve gotten a lot of new subscribers lately, mostly from Gargantuan crowdfunding supporters who opted in and the incredible Andy Hull (one of this generation’s best songwriters and composer of one of my favorite soundtracks of all time) recommending us on his Substack.

So with that in mind, I thought we’d take a break from our normal long-form writing about building authentic community around indie film, and talk about something a little different.

I used to play in bands in my late teens and early 20s. Girl-fronted pop-punk bands called Three Alarm Fire and Two Week Notice (good luck finding us on the internet). I loved it so much. And there is still nothing in filmmaking that replaces that feeling of performing live or collectively hitting that final note of a song with your band.

I pivoted to writing screenplays after getting married and having a kid. And, ironically, after 20 years, I am now a touring filmmaker just like I was once a touring musician.

One of the “rules” you’re supposed to follow when starting out writing screenplays is: “don’t put music in your script.” The argument is that it looks amateurish because A-you’ll never get the rights to the songs, and B-that the director may have different ideas for the soundtrack. But my scripts are CHOCK FULL of needle drops.

I’ve got a Motown-infused sci-fi adventure, an action comedy with a girl power soundtrack, and a heist film filled with filthy rap music in my pile of scripts. And it's not just a collection of my favorite songs, each one fits the themes and the characters and uses irony and subtext to help tell the story.

Because to me, it’s not about the songs, it’s about the mood. The big picture. It’s our job as writers to use every tool in our arsenal to paint the picture of the movie in the head of the reader. Nothing sets the tone for a script (and eventual movie) like music.

For every script I write, I create two playlists:

1. The “soundtrack” for that script. Songs that fit the tone. These are usually referenced in the script itself.

2. The “score” for that script. What I write to. I generally have a hard time writing music with lyrics, so I’ll often create a second playlist to write to.

Bonus tips for you writers: a soundtrack is a great way to quickly get back into the “flow” of writing. I can pivot from one script to another (or from day job work to writing) because when I put my soundtrack back on, I’m immediately brought back to that world.

So, I thought I’d share with you guys some of the playlists I’ve created for our films. I’m only including our indie films that are already released or in production.

First up, the soundtrack for our “Breakfast Club meets Carrie” high school horror movie, Before We Were Monsters. All of these songs are referenced in the script, but we are broke micro-budget filmmakers, so none of them will actually be in the film. Instead, we’ll have our composer match the vibe. It’s mostly goth-y, synth-y, with a couple of riot-grrl tracks.

Next up, our “A24 meets Power Rangers” kaiju adventure, Gargantuan. There are actually a few of these I created, but this is the cleanest one that might give you an idea of the tone I was shooting for. This one actually DOES have a song written into the script: one of my favorite tracks, Mincemeat, by one of my favorite bands, Luxury. As a local band with mutual friends, we were hoping to get the rights to it, but ended up having our composer, the brilliant William Wright, create original music instead. You’re going to lose your mind at the cool stuff Wil knocked out for this score (coming soon!).

Fun fact: for both this film and Guacamole Yesterdays, Wil wrote the score BEFORE we shot the movie. I sent him the script, and he wrote the score to the script, so when I was doing rewrites, I actually wrote to his actual score. Such an incredible, creative experience for both him and me. I know other filmmakers have done this (notably the Wachowski sisters) and I highly recommend it.

With our grounded sci-fi love story, Guacamole Yesterdays, you get a few treats since this movie is already out!

Here was my writing playlist. Because it’s about a struggling relationship, I always loved the idea of The Cranberries’ No Need to Argue in there. A lot of that kind of vibe. Mazzy Star. Cat Power. The Cardigans.

Here is the actual soundtrack from the film featuring music from friends (or the ones I could find on Spotify). February Ocean Breeze by Photo Ops became the unofficial theme song for it. I love it so much:

Here is the actual score from the film, once again, Mr. William Wright:

For our post-apocalyptic drama, This World Alone, you get another couple of special treats:

My writing playlist. I couldn’t find it at first, but then I realized it was under the ORIGINAL title for this film, the much more pretentious, In the Hour Before the Dawn. I tried to find a lot of singer-songwriter stuff that was all acoustic instruments, so it’s a lot of Eddie Vedder and Rick Rubin era Johnny Cash.

Here’s the actual score from Wil again! He utilized a lot of nature sounds in here. It’s awesome. Still one of my favorite scores. Featuring a couple of beautiful vocal tracks from actors Sophie Edwards and Lau’rie Roach. And opens on an original song by Steve Grubbs.

BONUS: I have also created a few generic writing playlists over the years. I used to run a screenwriting organization called ScriptBlast, and I collected three volumes of writing playlists for that community. There’s like 18 hours of writing music in here, so it’s great for an average writing day of an hour of writing and 17 hours of procrastinating!

You guys have your own writing playlist? What about a favorite score or soundtrack? Lets trade!

Post a link in the comments.