By Tomasz Ludward
Jeff Russo is one of the most prolific composers working in American television, the man behind Fargo, For All Mankind, Ripley, Star Trek: Discovery, Legion, and dozens more. We spoke twice over two days at the Kraków Film Music Festival, where Russo was also preparing for an orchestral concert of his work.
You’ve said before that for you, the real moment of gratification in film music comes when you can present it live and tonight is one of those nights. Is that still true?
My whole background is from being a performer. I was in a rock band through all of the nineties. You write songs, you make records, and then you go out and play for people. Getting that immediate feedback, that immediate reaction, is a really important part of the artistic sensibility. Music is a conversation. And a lot of that conversation happens when you’re playing it in front of someone and you see what it does to them. With film and television, you get a different kind of reaction, it’s a whole different ideal. So yes, playing this music live with orchestras is genuinely gratifying.
Most film composers are famously anonymous. You came from a world with a very public face. Was that transition strange?
I think I simply got used to having a public face. Not that I particularly enjoyed it or didn’t – it was just part of being an artist in a band that made pop rock music. You get used to interacting with fans, with journalists, with people. So when I sit down with someone to talk about music now, it feels very natural. It’s not something I had to learn again.
You work simultaneously with Apple, Netflix, FX, Peacock. Does Apple think differently about film music than Netflix?
Generally, all the streamers let the filmmakers make the decisions. They have opinions, and they’re happy to support what the filmmakers want. If the filmmaker wants a big orchestral score, they’ll try to make that happen. I’m not sure any of them have a rigid philosophy about what film music should sound like for any given project. Cape Fear, though, that was a different story.
Tell me about that.
I was hired by Nick Antosca, who I’d worked with before. I pitched him my vision for the show, and he came back and said he was hearing it differently: he didn’t want high strings, didn’t want it rooted in organic material, he wanted something synthetic, modern, closer to Weapons [editor’s note: directed by Zach Cregger, released in 2025]. Now, I remembered something from the nineties: when Nirvana came out, every record company started pressuring bands to sound like Nirvana or Pearl Jam. And what did you get? Milk toast. A mediocre version of something that was incredible. So I understood the brief, but I also held onto my own idea, because one of the most important things for a narrative composer is to have a vision and thread it through, even when you’re finding common ground with the filmmaker.
What did Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese make of it?
I did a first pass and Nick was happy. Apple was happy. Spielberg and Scorsese were not. All of a sudden there was this back and forth between two of the greatest filmmakers who have ever lived, and I’ll say that again, two of the greatest filmmakers ever, and the studio, and Apple. Apple wanted it to feel modern. Spielberg and Scorsese gave me one note. Two words: no sense. It has to sound like an orchestra. So I was caught between these two forces, and ultimately it wasn’t a hard argument to make to Nick: in a dispute between one body and two of the greatest filmmakers ever, they’re going to win. Let’s listen to the people who have made some of the greatest films ever made.
And Herrmann’s themes, how did you navigate that legacy?
I knew I had to tip my hat to Herrmann and to Elmer Bernstein, who rearranged Herrmann’s material for the 1991 Scorsese film. Those themes are iconic. I needed to write original music but thread their themes throughout, and I had some experience with that, having worked on projects with other very iconic composers attached early on: mainly Alien with Jerry Goldsmith, and Star Trek, and James Horner. What I deliberately didn’t want to do was recreate the 1962 score, those very dense harmonies, or the 1991 score, which honestly sounds quite dated now. We needed something that fit for today. And in the end, everybody was happy. Apple came along, perhaps a little begrudgingly, but they did.
Cape Fear gives you ten episodes where Herrmann had two hours. And Max Cady, for much of the story, doesn’t technically do anything illegal. How do you score a threat that hasn’t materialized yet?
Part of what I really love about scoring for pictures is that instead of writing what characters are doing, I write what I think they’re feeling. And Cape Fear was right in line with that. You don’t see anything specific happening, nothing illegal, nothing overtly wrong, but you know what’s going on underneath it. I’m writing to that: the tension, the horror, the terror of not knowing. You see something happen and you don’t know: is it because of this? Is it because of that person? You don’t really know. But you do know. And part of knowing is feeling the music underneath.
Ripley strips away another tool entirely, colour. Steve Zaillian shot it in black and white. Did that change how you approached the score?
What happened with Ripley was very interesting. As I was sketching out my original ideas, Steve called and said, this is all beautiful, but I want to remind you that we’re telling the story of a psychopathic serial killer. That was the note. So thematically we still needed Italian music, Venetian music – things rooted in 1960s Italy, while also scoring a thriller about someone who kills people. Without colour, I don’t think anything was taken away. If anything, the absence enhanced the visual – almost every shot is something you’d want to hang on a wall as a photograph. It didn’t diminish the emotion. It pointed in the direction of muted vibrancy, and channelling that vibrancy into grounded fear.
Both Ripley and Cape Fear are dark psychological territories. Is there ever any hope in what you write, or is that simply not a conversation you have with these characters?
With Ripley, hope was never part of the conversation, it was really about tracking the movements of the best grifter in the world. Cape Fear crosses over with Ripley in one important way: both lead characters are psychopaths. With Cape Fear, the questions run deeper – was he turned into a psychopath by what happened to him, or did it happen because he already was one? You never really get the answer, because the answer isn’t relevant to the story. The story is: what is this person doing now? It’s the same with Ripley. You never understand why Tom Ripley is the way he is. He just is. So I try to tell the story from that perspective – tracking the feeling, not the explanation.
Legion is perhaps your most extreme project in terms of the collapse between scored music and diegetic sound. Was that disorientation deliberate from the start?
Noah uses songs a lot to help tell his stories. In Legion, there were certainly moments scored by songs used as they were, the Rolling Stones, and others. But there were also songs we created ourselves, in the sound of the show, where Noah would sing and I would do the track. We did that because we could – and because it served the show. The most important element of Legion narratively is the unreliable narrator: you never knew whether what he was seeing was real or not. And as a viewer, you were experiencing that uncertainty alongside him. I tried to inject that into the score. A lot of it came through in the covers, you’d start to hear a song, think you recognized it, and then hear it transformed, so you didn’t know whether it felt real or not. Disorienting. Which was precisely the point.
You and Noah clearly give each other a lot of room. Is that kind of creative latitude becoming rarer, are budgets and schedules making that harder to sustain?
I wouldn’t say schedules are dramatically different. Budgets are getting a little more constrained, ensembles are getting smaller – those things are real. But I’m still trying to hold on to the creative aspect. That’s what matters to me: being able to tell a story musically in a way that benefits the show or the film. And I’m fortunate that I work with filmmakers who give me the time I think it takes to fully realize a score. With Alien: Earth, Noah sent me the first script nearly five years ago. I started writing the early themes then, and the music really developed, we did an entire season of Fargo in between. That kind of time to let music gestate, to let it grow into what it can be, is still happening. And then of course there are projects where you have five weeks and three hours of music. James Dunaurig mentioned last night that he had exactly that situation. My orchestrator told me everyone in town was working on just that one project for five weeks, all the music prep, all the orchestrators. That’s a different world. Both exist. I’m just very glad to mostly live in the first one.
