Kris Bowers On The Evolution Of Music In 'The Wild Robot'
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Chris Bowers is no stranger to using music to build a world. The Oscar-winning composer has worked on films such as Green Book, Origin, and The Color Purple. He's also scored the hit series Bridgerton on Netflix. His latest project is The Wild Robot. The animated feature is directed by Chris Sanders. In it, Roz is a robot marooned on a deserted island, unable to communicate with the animals in the natural world she finds herself in. ♪

As her programming evolves and as she learns to speak to her animal neighbors, the score evolves with her. ♪

The Wild Robot is nominated for four Golden Globes, including Best Original Song and Best Score. Chris Bowers joins us after the break to talk about putting music to film, his inspiration, and his musical evolution. I'm Jen White. You're listening to the 1A Podcast, where we get to the heart of the story. Stay with us. We've got a lot to get into.

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This message comes from WISE, the app for doing things in other currencies. Send, spend, or receive money internationally, and always get the real-time mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees. Download the WISE app today or visit WISE.com. T's and C's apply. Chris, welcome to the program. Yeah, thanks so much, Jen. Thank you for having me. Now, Chris, The Wild Robot is based on the children's book series by Peter Brown, and like we said, it follows Roz, this robot helper who finds herself

stranded in the wilderness. How familiar were you with the story before you worked on the film? I had just gotten the book. So when Natalie Hayden and Mike Knobloch from Universal reached out to me about scoring the film, they shared the book with me before I had my first meeting with Chris. And so I read the book in about a weekend, essentially. And then Chris kind of welcomed me into the world that they were creating based on it. When you read the book, did you start to hear that score right away? Yeah.

You know, what's interesting is I did, I almost feel it before I hear it. I think it's like, you know, kind of this sensorial thing. And for me, I'd just become a dad. My daughter was about six months old when I got the book and started reading it. And so it was definitely landing in quite a different and deep way. But the way I heard it in my head reading it actually changed when I saw it because I was so focused on her being this robot

in the book that I was thinking it would be very technological and very synthetic and very modern in that way. And then when I saw what Chris Sanders and the team at DreamWorks were doing with the visuals and how it would be this hand-painted style and how they found this way to make everything hand-painted but also three-dimensional,

That kind of reminded me not only of having a more organic approach because of that, but the story being about this singular technological being going into this natural environment and it more being about how...

the natural world is impacting her and causing her to become more organic. And so that led me to have more of an organic score. Yeah. We watch Roz put together pieces of information to better understand her new world and communicate with it. She has to learn another language. With each project you're working on, how much of it is about both learning the language of the film, but also creating a language through your score? Yeah.

Yeah, that's a great question. I think every project I say yes to is primarily because I feel like I will have to learn something. I think I'm most excited by the idea that I'll have this challenge working on something that by the end of it will give me a new sense of abilities or a new skill set that I'm able to move forward in my own compositional career with. And so, you know, I think that a big part of the beginning of the process is learning

Learning the film, learning the arc of the characters, learning the themes in the film and really watching it a number of times without even writing a note just so I can really learn what this film is saying and all the nuances of how it's saying it. And then developing a palette and a sound for that film specifically. And then, you know, that's months of work before I even start writing something. Yeah.

When I think back to my childhood, one of my favorite albums was Peter and the Wolf, in which each animal is represented by a different instrument. And I remember just listening to that album for hours. When you're creating a score like this, is there an element of that in your work where you're finding either an instrument or a musical element

that represents specific characters. Yeah, 100%. I think especially with a film like this where there wasn't much dialogue and so there's so many sequences where music is helping to push the narrative forward and deliver on a lot of the emotional ideas we're seeing visually, but we're not hearing anything said about how everyone's feeling. And so I think something Chris and I talked about was how much the music then would need to have focus

have these very clear melodies so that, you know, when we see something come to fruition later in the film and there's no word said about that, there has to be something that the audience is subconsciously latching onto that allows them to connect it to what's been happening throughout the film. And so each of the main characters have a little leitmotif melody. And then on top of that, there's a main theme that kind of embodies this idea of foreshadowing

family or love or maternal love. Well, let's listen to another track from the movie. Here's The Island. You mentioned the approach to the animation in this film and that it's hand-painted but also 3D. And they do such an amazing job of showing the different layers that are part of this natural world.

So that it becomes a character in the film itself. How did you think about reflecting the voice of the wilderness as a character? Yeah, I was talking to Chris early on about the importance of that and how...

The immediate thought that comes to my mind is ethnic flutes or things that denote a location. And that was a direction I didn't want to go into because it felt like something that I'd heard a lot before. And the more I thought about it, the more that this idea of extending the diegetic sound, the sound that's created...

in the environment into the music felt like an interesting idea. And so what this score does, it really extends those sounds so that there are instruments that are trying to replicate the sound of animals skittering through the forest or these animals crossing

crawling all over Roz or her being hit by tree branches and things like that. And it's all done with this percussion ensemble called Sandbox Percussion. And they're a modern classical percussion ensemble, but they approach percussion more like Foley where they're playing wood planks and metal pipes and an oxygen tank and glass bottles and all of these things. And it was working with them to create this almost ASMR layer that brought

rises above the actual orchestra and the other percussion to be this really tactile sound that embodies the wilderness. I'm trying to imagine your brain right now because what you're describing is happening on so many levels. Are you hearing the score and then putting the instruments and the layers on top until you hear what's in your head or does it work in a different way than that?

Yeah, it's exactly that. I think the first North Star is always feeling. Going back to even what I said when I was reading the book, my process starts with seeing what a scene or an idea makes me feel. And those feelings are involuntary because it pulls on life experience and all these other thoughts that we have. And so I usually go to the piano, because that's my instrument, and try to improvise until I re-trigger those feelings. And

And once I come across an idea that's starting to pick at some of those feelings, I then will start to hear some of those things. And it's almost like the idea of what it is in its fullest iteration is more of a vague feeling than it is clarity in exactly how that's going to work. It's conceptual and logical, but also at the same time this feeling of what it's going to be. And then in pursuing that, it's almost like chasing an idea. It's like I'll start with...

it's very clear that the percussion should be doing this and so I'll start with that and then as I'm doing that I'm like oh you know what actually the basses should do this and I'll jump to the basses and it's like oh you know what the violin should do this and then the woodwind should do this and so it's like as you put one piece down the next piece starts to slowly reveal itself and then pretty soon you kind of have a clear idea whether or not you're getting to that conceptual idea that you had in your mind in the first place.

We got this email from Dan who says, I'm an amateur trombonist and I have many friends who are or have tried to become professional musicians. It seems that cultural preference shifts having reduced career opportunities for classical instrumentalists. What are your thoughts on movie studios using actual instrumental musicians versus synthesized sounds for film scores? Oh, I mean, I think it's everything. I think it's the thing that brings a score to life because there's just this

that you can feel. And I think it's something that never gets old to me whenever I'm working on a film and I have to create a virtual version of it as we're working on it that's all virtual instruments. And that's just because we need to have...

to put into the movie as they're testing the movie. We need to know what it's going to sound like and all that. But no matter how good those sound, there's something about people being in a room together, moving air, hearing somebody breathe before they put wind into an instrument. All of those little textures, I think, are something that we...

notice even on a on a subconscious level that are so crucial and uh there's something about it that we will never um get tired of and will always kind of remind us of our own humanity so i think it's something that is so crucial and so important and something that i'm always excited by whenever a score um wants to have that organic sound to me i feel like that is going to only lift up the movie

Chris, as you said, you have a daughter. And we watch Roz come to terms with what it means to finish parenting this gosling she's raising named Bright Bill. And I'm sure there are plenty of parents who would say, well, actually, that work is never done, in truth. But how did working on this project make you think about the complexity of parenting? Yeah, I mean, I think that it

It was really profound. I mean, you know, when I started, my daughter was really young. And like I said, when I came on, she was only about six months. And so at that point, I was dealing more with, you know, sleep deprivation than anything else. Yeah.

But that part of it, I think, was something that already started to show me my own impatience or things that I needed to work on in that way. But what was really interesting is that as I was working on the main theme for this film and we see that migration sequence where Roz and Bright Bill say goodbye for a moment and they don't know if they're going to see each other again,

I projected myself into the future to think about what it would be like to say goodbye to her at college. And at that point when I was working on it, she was maybe about a year old. And I only wanted to imagine that scenario in a positive, lighthearted, sweet way. And the first version of the music I wrote reflected that. And I didn't realize it until I shared it with Chris. And he was like, this is not really hitting the tone of what's happening in this movie in this moment.

And when I reflected on it, I played the scene in my mind that I had written that music for between my daughter and I, and it was completely pleasant and happy. And the more I thought about what's really happening for Roz and Brightbill, the more I realized that I didn't want to think about Facebook.

failing her. I didn't want to think about trying as hard as I possibly can and still falling short of what she needs from me. I didn't want to think about the complexities in that way or conflict. And that moment, which is really early in my process, writing actually caused me to

almost start to accept some of those aspects, you know, being a dad to an infant, I'm able to fool myself into thinking that I can be this perfect parent because there's, you know, very little conflict that's happening and it's very one-sided. And so to start to imagine and remember, even in my relationship with my own parents, who I love very much,

but just to remember that there are going to be things that she has to accept about me and forgive me for and, and so on and so forth. And that's going to be really challenging. And so remembering that was something that not only was helpful as, as a parent, but, but definitely very crucial for me to write the music that needed to treat these themes with grounded, uh,

music in a way that the film does. Well, we'll head to a quick break here. Still to come, last year, Chris Bowers won an Academy Award for The Last Repair Shop, a documentary he co-directed. Back with more in a moment. This message comes from Strawberry.me. Making personal coaching accessible to everyone. Feeling like life's gotten messy? Or maybe you're just not moving forward like you hoped. A

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And use code POD20 for 20% off your first product. That's business.landsend.com slash POD20. Code POD20. Now back to our conversation with Chris Bowers, award-winning composer of The Wild Robot. The Last Repair Shop is a short documentary film following the artisans and craftspeople repairing instruments at no cost for students in the Los Angeles Unified School District. When we see a broken thing...

We think, oh, with a little something here, a little something there, we can fix the part that's broken and make things whole again. It's difficult work. But no matter what, you do whatever it takes because fixing stuff is one of the best things that humans do. That's why this is not just a musical instrument repair shop. When an instrument breaks, there's a student without an instrument. Not in our city.

The Last Repair Shop also follows the students whose lives are changed by music. Chris, you were an L.A. public school student. Your first instrument was a saxophone. How old were you when you got it? Well, so my first instrument was actually a piano. I started piano when I was four, but then my first L.A. USD instrument, well, actually, no, I even played the pianos at school, but when I was in middle school, I played saxophone for a couple of years. Do you remember when you first got a sound out of it, like a good sound? Yeah.

I mean, I don't know if I ever really got a good sound. I mean, the funny thing about me playing saxophone, the reason why I stopped, like I wanted to go to middle school as a saxophonist. I didn't even want my teacher to know I played piano because I wanted to try something new. And then I remember I was just messing around one day after class playing piano and my teacher came over and he was like, don't bring the saxophone anymore. You're a piano player. What?

You say, okay, fine, fine. But what did it mean to have access to musical instruments as you were coming up?

Yeah, it really meant everything for me because, you know, from the time I was in elementary school through middle school especially and even in high school, I relied on those spaces to find myself in a lot of ways. I remember spending, you know, recess or lunch or any break that I had in those music rooms, like in the auditorium at my elementary school and in the band room in my middle school. And it was...

a safe space for me, not only just in terms of like, I mean, my middle school, there were like fights every day in that kind of environment. But it also was something where there were a lot of emotions I was dealing with, you know, in middle school that most kids are dealing with that I didn't know how to process. I didn't feel like I had a space to process it as a young black boy in a school where, you know, you had to kind of present as a certain way. It was my space to be unaffected

unabashedly emotional playing piano. And it also became a communication device for me in middle school because I felt a little bit like an outsider in my own community in that school. But at the same time, I found connection with a lot of my peers online

through music where all of a sudden they're like, oh, Chris is cool 'cause he can play that like Tupac song. If you tell him a Tupac song, he can play it on piano or, you know, for the winter concerts, I could play, you know, Boyz II Men songs, or I could play like, you know, Mariah Carey song behind a girl that wanted to sing. So like my connection to a lot of my friends at that time was through music because that was the way that I could relate to them even more than in a cultural way, even though it was, you know, my own culture.

So what I'm hearing you say is that it created a type of language for you to connect with the fellow students and your friends. But what doors did music open for you to have conversations with yourself about the things you were dealing with?

Yeah, you know, I think I remember vividly having moments of like profound sadness or anger and those being emotions that I never felt like I could express verbally. Like, you know, by the time I was in elementary school, middle school, I think I'd already been conditioned to not be a very...

outwardly aggressive person and and um but you know like any human any of those feelings of anger or frustration are inside um and then with sadness i think you know a lot of my uh parents mentality is is you know not really believing in sadness a lot of ways and just kind of looking beyond like they've dealt with so many tragic things in their lives and i think they developed this a

a coping mechanism where they can, you know, compartmentalize in a way where it almost doesn't exist. You know, and I think that for me, that was very challenging to ignore those feelings. And I remember having some of those feelings

and deciding to play piano from that headspace. It was like a conscious decision in one night. Specifically, I remember being upset with my parents and not being able to tell them how upset I was. Then I played piano. I was like, I'm going to play piano from this angry headspace. And then 30 minutes later, I was like, oh, I'm not so angry anymore. But even more so what I found so fascinating is that I was very clear with how I felt as I was expressing it through the piano. But it was this secret communication that was happening between me and this instrument where I felt like,

I was saying everything I needed to say, but nobody was, people could hear it, but they didn't know what I was saying. It was like a secret language. And so that was the thing for me that made me feel like I kind of need this thing. I need to have this outlet to be able to express these things. And that's what led to my parents not needing to tell me to practice anymore at, you know, 11 years old or however old I was.

Your daughter is still pretty young, a toddler, if I'm doing the math correctly. Yeah, she's almost, she'll be three in February. So are you finding yourself using music as a way to communicate with her, even in these early years? Yeah, 100%. I mean, it's been really beautiful. I mean, she's starting to really fall in love with it. She loves music.

singing all the time and she loves playing the piano anytime. I can't really practice anymore because anytime I sit down to practice, she like literally runs over to play the piano with me. And, but she's even had a moment like that where it was really sweet where, you know, she had a couple of moments of being very upset about something and we always try to help her

help her channel that you know it's like we can't can't hit us you can't hit the dog but you can hit a pillow or you can like squeeze these things or you can you know do that kind of stuff and one of those times where she was really frustrated I was like do you want to go hit the piano like you can bang on the piano that's okay and I

I did it a couple of times and there was a moment not too long after I started doing that where she started crying and sobbing about something. And she was like, Dad, I want to go play piano. Can I go play piano? And so I think that, yes, no matter what, I think she's going to be musical. I don't know if I think I'm hesitant to push her into it just because of my own relationship with it. But it's definitely something I'd love for her to do to have that as an outlet at the very least.

What was that moment like for you, though? Because you were giving your daughter a language to express how she feels in a way that you weren't able to as a child. Yeah, I think it's... I mean, it's really emotional when she said that. I think I was taking it back and really surprised because it wasn't like I had been doing it for days and days. And, you know, she's still so young to even think about that as an option. And, you know, it's just kind of like...

progression you know like I think about my parents put me in music because in a lot of ways I think they felt like their options were incredibly limited but what they were able to do and the idea of being an artist was was you know laughable when they were growing up when it came to like their expectations from their parents and their expectations from the world and just how to survive and so for them they decided to give me all these opportunities to become an artist and then not necessarily no

knowing how to convey the idea of it being this vehicle to express emotion, but they inadvertently gave me that tool. And so now for me to kind of pass the baton in this relay race of life to be able to tell my daughter a more specific way that she can interact with it, it's just a beautiful progression that I wouldn't have without my parents. And hopefully Coda will benefit from that. The last repair shop, which you directed alongside Ben Proudfoot,

The film won an Oscar for Best Documentary Short Film. And you interviewed these craftspeople who work at the repair shop. You spoke to students. Considering what was happening in your life at that stage when you were a young person and you were given that saxophone and you learned about the last repair shop, what was it like to revisit that chapter of your life through this project? Yeah, you know, I think I was reminded about the...

level of weight that life has as a young person. I think that when I interviewed the students, especially, and the cross people were so aware of this, which is really why they're so beautifully dedicated to their jobs. They're aware of what these instruments mean for each of these students. And when I interviewed the students, I remember going into it

kind of not sure about how they would be able to articulate the importance of music in their lives. I assumed that they hadn't really dealt with enough in their life to be able to say why music is helpful. Because a lot of these things, in terms of my own emotional expression through it, are things I realized as I got older and realized when I...

went to therapy and like all these things and realized that, oh, I actually had a lot of this processing before, but, you know, it might just be a different generation in terms of people being able to express it, but...

the thing that definitely hasn't changed ever is the fact that each of these young people were dealing with something pretty heavy. Like you had people that had ill parents that ended up passing away. You had people that were immigrants coming to this country that didn't speak English and had to figure out how to find their way. You had people that were fleeing whatever country they were from. And these elementary school, middle school, high school age students talking about these experiences that...

any human, no matter what age they are, would have a difficult time navigating and they had to navigate at such a young age. And then for them to be able to talk about what music meant to them. And then even, you know, them talking about how much they were dealing with mental health issues and anxiety and depression and how that's so much more prevalent today. And so it just reminded me that, one, that's why we have this mental health kind

kind of epidemic with young people and how much we need to give them whatever tools that we can give them to be able to navigate this world so that they're not looking at the options that are less than ideal. But for me, it just reminded me that, you know, when you're that age, no matter what you're dealing with, the world can be very challenging. Yeah.

A $15 million investment was given to the repair operation by the Los Angeles Unified School District Education Foundation to support the staff to maintain that project. How are you reflecting on the documentary, the impact it's had on this program, especially considering the fact that you've got young people for whom music is a lifeline?

Yeah, I mean, I want to be clear that we announced a $15 million campaign that we've embarked upon and are raising currently. And I think for us, you know, the film was a way to create a beacon so that people can pay attention to this relationship.

repair shop and then winning an Oscar in a lot of ways just continues the conversation. And for us, you know, we wanted to make sure that these individuals, both the students and the craftspeople knew that we weren't just there to make this movie and win some awards and move on. Like for us, we're continuing to stay dedicated to them. So we've raised

almost half a million dollars so far just from like, you know, in-kind donations. You can go to thelastrepairshop.com to donate. And then now we've just begun. We didn't realize that there's usually when you're raising this amount of money, a pretty significant quiet period where you're...

raising all the money before you actually announce it. And so at this point, we're now going through all the due diligence and have made the proper deck and all that kind of stuff. And I finally engaged with some pretty big donors that are agreeing to give, you know, in the seven figure amount of donations. And so we're pretty confident that we're going to raise that money by next August. And that's our timeline right now.

We got this email from Alyssa who says, my son is an aspiring composer for animation, currently in college. What are your tips to making it in this lesser known business? Yeah, I think that one big thing I would say is to be obsessed about craft and obsessed about whatever, you know, you're

you are into as a musician because I think that you know something I had to realize over time is um I was always nervous about not having uh my own sound or you know being obsessed with this idea of of having my own sound and what I realized is that every uh

piece of music or genre of music that deeply impacts me impacts me in a completely different way than it does any other musician and if I just become deeply obsessed with learning everything I can about the things that move me that as I learn and grow and develop over time that will just amalgamate into whatever my own sound is and so I think just

you know, trying to really take note of what you are uniquely into and getting deep into that. And the other thing that's not actually musical is actually just going back to that mental health thing. I think that for me,

a big part of this industry is dealing with failure or rejection or, you know, dealing with someone reacting to your music in a certain way and learning how to communicate with them through that. And it's hard to separate when you're an artist, it's hard to separate your art from your identity and trying to figure out not only ways to remind yourself of being human outside of your art form, but also just to recognize how your brain works in those moments. Like it's been

Something where I've paid a lot more attention to in the last 10 years where when I have a moment of difficulty, just kind of sitting back in a mindfulness meditative way, just reflecting on what's coming up for me internally. How am I talking to myself? Like, why am I talking to myself that way? And how do I navigate this so that it doesn't become the thing that's keeping me from progressing? What's upcoming that you're most excited about?

You know, really just focusing on celebrating this film, raising the money for The Last Repair Shop. We're talking about maybe making a feature film based on that. And then I have a couple of scoring projects that are a ways away, but that's pretty much it right now. Well, when those projects come to fruition, you're welcome back to come speak with us about it again. I appreciate that. Thank you. That's Chris Bowers. He's a musician and composer behind the new film, The Wild Robot.

Today's producer was Arfi Getty. This program comes to you from WAMU, part of American University in Washington, distributed by NPR. I'm Jen White. Thanks for listening. And we'll talk again tomorrow. This is 1A. This message comes from NPR sponsor, SADVA. Founder and CEO Ron Rudson shares the story of how he got started creating SADVA.

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