TV composers roundtable: ‘Adolescence,’ ‘Day of the Jackal,’ ‘Interview With the Vampire,’ ‘Your Friends and Neighbors’

For our Meet the Experts: TV Composers roundtable, Gold Derby gathered five acclaimed composers to discuss highlights of their work both this season and throughout their careers. Joining us were Adolescence composers Aaron May and David Ridley, Anne Rice's Interview With the Vampire composer Daniel Hart, The Day of the Jackal composer Volker Bertelmann, and Your Friends and Neighbors composer Dominic Lewis.

Watch the full group panel above. Click each person's name to watch their individual interview.

During their conversation, the composers revealed their favorite film and TV scores.

"I am a big fan of There Will Be Blood by Johnny Greenwood. That was, I would say, the first score where I felt like, 'Oh, an indie musician can do film music,'" says Bertelmann, alluding to his origins as a musician and recording artist who performed under the name Hauschka. "When I heard the use of the strings, what he was getting out of those, I was very impressed by that," he continues. "My favorite score film score is Do The Right Thing by Bill Lee, Spike Lee's father who scored his first four films. It feels extremely American to me, and it's very string heavy. His father was a bass player and it was un unlike anything I'd heard ever before the time. I don't feel like I've heard much like it since then. It's pretty jazzy. Very exciting."

"It's quite hard one, but I think I'm gonna go with the score for Under the Skin, composed by Mica Levi," says May. "It's incredible. I think the reason that I would choose it, is there's such a cohesive world that they create through the duration of the score. But then there's obviously the emotional climactic point of the film where they just smash everything that's been developed in the film.

"It shouldn't work because it's so different, but it just does, and I don't know why, and I feel like Mica Levi does that a lot. They just make decisions which on the face of it don't feel like they should work or you wouldn't think that they would work or you just wouldn't think of doing yourself ever, but they just do in this really special way."

"I'm cliché. E.T. is my favorite," Lewis divulges without a second of hesitation about the iconic John Williams masterpiece. "I mean, just that last 15 minutes, I still cry listening to it. I used to go to to the Royal Academy and I would get on the bus and I'd put it on and like people would just think I'm totally bonkers 'cause I'd be sitting there crying, just listening to the last 15 minutes. It's a masterclass. Obviously no one does it better," he says.

"It's a really, really hard question," says Ridley. "But I think my favorite TV score is Chernobyl by Hildur Guðnadóttir. It did so many things and it was the most impactful series. It was like, I couldn't watch it on consecutive days even. You just had to give yourself a big breath and space, but it was also gripping in the recording of scrapes and bangs on these big old nuclear reacting and giant bits of metal. That was genius."

This article and video are presented by AMC, Netflix, Peacock, and Apple TV+.

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