#Music Supervisor Maggie Phillips | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

londonspirit · 2 years

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Even if you don’t recognize Maggie Phillips by name, chances are you’ve heard her work. If you’ve watched Moonlight, Legion, The Umbrella Academy, or even Our Flag Means Death, and you remember thinking, damn, that’s a hell of a song choice, you might have Phillips to thank for that truly epic needle drop.

Phillips is a music supervisor. She chooses the extant soundtrack for movies, television, and short films. “I didn’t really search this line of work out,” Phillips said in an interview with io9. “I’ve been doing it for over 15 years… but for a long time I was just helping out friends.”

Some of those friends were Mark and Jay Duplass. She got her start in the indie film scene, and while Phillips said she was always the person who would make mix CDs for her friends or introduce them to new music, picking songs for films back in the early 2000s was more like a favor. A side hustle, I suggest. She laughed at this. “I mean, sure, say side hustle, but the pay was not great.”

She describes it like this; she did about 30 to 40 films, but got paid “close to nothing.” Phillips had gotten attention from major films and studios, but no bites. They said she was too indie and that she didn’t know how to work with a budget. In 2014 she was close to quitting after eight years because she thought that she was “just getting too old to be this broke.”

But then Noah Hawley gave her a call, and asked Phillips to work on season two of Fargo. “The rest,” she said, smiling, “is history.” While I specifically wanted to talk to Phillips in order to sate my obsessive need to gush over Our Flag Means Death at every moment because I am suffering from what the youth have diagnosed to be “gay pirate brain rot,” I found myself doing a deep dive into her work before this interview. Fargo really was a turning point for her, and in the years since the season two finale opened with “War Pigs” by Black Sabbath, Phillips has been attached to some truly wonderful musical moments in film. Remember that scene in episode one, season one of The Umbrella Academy when Five gets into a fight with a dozen baddies in a donut shop?

“That’s one of my favorite placements I’ve ever done,” Phillips said. “It’s so funny–that’s a song I kind of hated in high school. It’s weird, it’s annoying, and it’s super fucking catchy.” Which makes it, ultimately, kind of perfect for Five. It’s offbeat, distanced enough from what’s happening that it’s not obviously glorifying violence, but twee enough to feel young. “We’ve got this character who has so much sophistication and knowledge, but is still just a kid who’s in quite a brutal fight sequence. This song was an opportunity to inject innocence and fun into the moment.”

And it worked, to great effect. Maybe, Phillips says, a little too well. “Everyone loved that sequence so much that Netflix kept asking for that over and over and over again. When you repeat something like that, you’re killing it. You need this kind of moment to be something that you wait for so that when it’s delivered it’s actually gratifying. When you do it every episode, it becomes, you know…” she trailed off. It becomes tired. Exhausted.

This is kind of what it’s like, working with studios. Phillips assured me that working with Netflix was great, but sometimes they can get too obsessed with recreating something wonderful. “When something is successful, they want to keep doing it,” she said, shrugging. “But then you’re tying people’s hands when it comes to creativity. You ask them to check boxes. When something like [Five’s sequence] happens, it’s happening because we kind of made accidental magic.”

One of the reasons that scene worked so well is because it happened at the end of an episode: “We had a little time to get to know him.” She said that if that fight sequence had been his introduction, it would have been slick, but ultimately not as memorable. It’s not just where you use the songs, but when.

Which finally leads me to Our Flag Means Death. Phillips gushed, “I was so anxious about this series, but not just about the music. We got no marketing, and very little lead up.” When she mentions that nobody’s asked her about the music yet, I’m shocked. There’s one scene in episode eight that has been across my twitter dash in .gif form every day for almost a month. “Everyone’s asking about The Dropout,” Phillips admitted. Oh, yeah. The early 2000s indie soundtrack to The Dropout? The 36-track deep soundtrack that everyone from Nylon to Refinery29 has been talking about? Phillips did that too.

But as for Our Flag Means Death? “Nobody’s asked about the music yet. It’s such a weird tone, dramatic and a little understated.” Phillips isn’t wrong. The first episode ends with a track that most people have never heard before, “High on a Rocky Ledge” by Moondog. At least, I’d never heard it before. But I was immediately taken in. “I was thrilled to place Moondog in the first episode,” Phillips said. “We went for a subtlety for a lot of these songs. That’s the thing about David [Jenkins, the director], he’s so collaborative and he really trusted me with the music. He really let me do what I wanted, and he pushed me to go weird.”

I asked about Jenkins, and Phillips had a hard time nailing down exactly what made working with him so special. “He knew what he wanted to do and exactly how he wanted to do it,” she started, smiling a little. “And it wasn’t that he didn’t care about what other people thought, but he had this kind of fearlessness. He had no fear at all.”

When you’re making a workplace comedy-turned historical romance show about a boatful of queer pirates set in Caribbean in the 1700s, I feel like you have to have that kind of balls-to-the-wall attitude with your work. When you have a premise like this, you have to make sure everything works, that every part of the show is tightly stitched at every seam. Character arcs, casting, stories, jokes, and swashbuckling, all have to exist alongside emotional catharsis. And, of course, the music.

“When I’m watching a show I like to stay within that specific emotional tension,” said Phillips. “I like to be with those characters. I don’t like to be pulled around and yanked out of a scene.” Some shows do it differently, trying to surprise or shock you. Like a reminder that you’re actually watching a show, rather than listening to the internal soundtrack of the character. “David wanted these songs to be special… We wanted the songs to be the heart of the show, to underscore the emotions in any particular scene and speak for the characters more than the score would.”

This was especially important in the beginning, she said. Phillips and Jenkins attempted to capture the inner emotions of these pirates who were having trouble expressing themselves. It’s easy to see where she succeeded. Take the context of that Moondog song. While the Gentleman Pirate Stede Bonnet (Rhys Darby) has just survived an invasion from the British Navy, he’s laden with guilt and sadness. He should be celebrating, but right now, all he feels is sadness, like he’s still searching for something. And as he’s staring into the sunset, tears dripping down his face, we hear the melancholy lyrics to “High on a Rocky Ledge.” It’s fucking brilliant.

There’s another moment, as Blackbeard’s (Taika Waititi) flag is raised in episode four, where we get this magnificent requiem–Verdi’s “Dies Irae,” one of my personal favorite picks in the show. This song was supposed to be a placeholder, Phillips explained. She did a lot of work before Mark Mothersbaugh, the composer, was brought in. “But it was so perfect, having a requiem at this moment, at the end of this episode, that we just left it.” She mentioned that they didn’t want to make a pattern of ending on songs. “David wanted every track to be special. We didn’t want to have a pattern, so we pulled back… The score followed the narrative, the fantasy, the fun, the action. But, again, the tracks were always supposed to underscore the emotions of the characters.”

And “The Chain”? I ask, trying to gauge Phillips’ reaction. What about that one? “Oh, that was scripted!” She answered immediately. “From the start, Fleetwood Mac’s ‘The Chain’ in episode eight and Cat Stevens’ ‘Miles From Nowhere’ in the finale were written in.” Both of these songs, she said, David Jenkins had in from the beginning. She didn’t even try to change them. Both are perfect, so I’m not surprised. The moment in episode eight when Fleetwood Mac comes on is perfectly timed to the action within the show, engaging a diegetic fantasy where English soldiers beat out the drum line and the ship’s bard plucks out the classic guitar melody before getting thrown to the ground. “The way they filmed that was incredible,” Phillips said. “And pure David.”

The show is short–consisting of only 10, 30-minute episodes. Which means there’s not a lot of music. Phillips thinks that’s part of the charm. “It means each song we used had to be perfect, to add to the presence and importance in each episode… These songs just worked.” She mentioned that she listens to songs over and over again against picture, laying songs over the film to try to get everything just so. When I asked if she has a playlist of missing songs, she laughed.

“Oh yeah, There are so many songs I listen to for each spot. For this show, I probably have a playlist of about 300 songs.” I literally gasped. I wanted to hear them all, immediately. “I was so inspired by this show, and we could only put in very few. Every spot you hear in the show I probably went through 100 songs to get to that spot. I watch every scene at least 100 times, testing different songs. The moment at the end of the pilot in Our Flag Means Death? I’ve probably watched 50 to 100 times, just to get it perfect.”

But, she admitted, not every song that ends up in the final cut is what she would have wanted. “Sometimes,” she admitted, “you’re just not going to beat a spot that [the director] has picked out.” For Our Flag Means Death, this was Lou Reed’s “Perfect Day” in episode nine, when Blackbeard rows off into the sunset, alone, and Bonnet barges in on his wife’s widow support group. It’s an incredibly ironic song, a real tug on the heartstrings as we watch these two men, who are supposed to be together, goddammit, choose separate paths.

“I tried countless times to get ‘Perfect Day’ out of there,” Phillips said, still sounding a bit disappointed. “I love the song, but our personal edict during this series had been to be careful to use stuff people haven’t heard. We had this unique soundtrack up until that point, and frankly, that’s a song that has been placed a lot…” She trailed off and then shrugged. “It worked beautifully. I won’t argue with that, but I tried to beat it for like a month. I have 10 playlists for that spot.”

Here’s where I have to admit something. I’m a journalist and I wanted a scoop. So I asked what songs were on those playlists. The big, 300-song playlist. Phillips almost immediately offered to send me the whole thing… But only if I kept it a secret. I’ll admit I hesitated. “These are my back pocket playlist songs. If they’re revealed, I don’t know what other shows they’re going to end up in,” Phillips explained, too gracious by far. “These are my magic. And if I let them out… Then I’m robbing the audience! What if these songs are perfect for season two?”

She’s quick to admit that she only knows as much as the rest of us. While she’s unsure about the fate of Our Flag Means Death, she’s excited by the possibility that it could return. “It’s left so open-ended! I mean look, Stede is coming back for Blackbeard! He went through that elaborate fuckery to fake his death to finally get the freedom to come back. There has to be a season two.” But, it’s a television show. We’ll never really know whether or not it’s going to be renewed until it is. “However,” Phillips said, “if there’s no season two, come back to me and I’ll share the missing songs playlist with you.”

Both of us laughed. I told her I didn’t want that. I wanted season two. And three and four, even. We kept talking, but I realized afterwards that despite asking, I actually didn’t want to hear those songs. I wanted to wait for them, just like any other fan. And when they come on, in another episode, in the next season, when the needle finally drops, I want to feel that magic too.

#our flag means death #ofmd #musical supervisor #maggie phillips #(the umbrella academy)#i have soooo much love for her and her choices #and for david for being david and being fucking magical and bloody genius #I can't wait to see what she comes up with for S2 #for the music alone I NEED S2 NOW!!!!#music

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londonspirit · 6 months

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It's hard to wrap our heads around the fact that Max's Our Flag Means Death has already reached its Season 2 finale — serving as proof that life for pirates can be just as tumultuous and unpredictable on land as it is on the open sea. Although Stede (Rhys Darby) and Ed (Taika Waititi) saw themselves reuniting in epically romantic fashion on a beach (before having to jump in and help Zheng [Ruibo Qian] swordfight a bunch of foes, that is), their plan to reassemble the crew of the Revenge and take back control of the Republic of Pirates didn't come without some losses. Namely, Ed's first mate and loyal right-hand man — and newly-dubbed unicorn of the crew, Izzy Hands (Con O'Neill) — fell to a gunshot wound, but didn't slip away without some important parting words that Ed himself needed to hear.

Now, the future of the crew is looking divided once more — but on a somewhat happier note this time around, as Stede and Ed are settling down in that innkeeper life while watching the Revenge sail off into the sunset under the command of Frenchie (Joel Fry), and all set to the tune of Nina Simone's swelling and ultimately hopeful cover of "The Times They Are a-Changin'." It's unclear where the show will go next, but ahead of the finale, Collider had the chance to sit down with Our Flag Means Death music supervisor Maggie Phillips to break down some of the best needle drops, from O'Neill's cover of "La vie en rose" to making Kate Bush the unexpected artist of Season 2 to collaborating with show creator David Jenkins and so much more.

COLLIDER: Before getting into some specific episode moments, I wanted to ask you about the teaser trailer for Season 2. Something that a lot of people were talking about was that Prince song that gets used ["The Beautiful Ones"]. Did you all get to decide what song that was in the trailer?

MAGGIE PHILLIPS: We did. That was a song that David [Jenkins] asked me about. I don't know if he asked me about Prince or that song in particular, but that's the first song that David and I were like, “This is the song for the show,” before trailers were even thought about. We tried to get it into Season 1, and there just wasn't a spot for it. I'm a huge Prince fan and have been since high school. For Halloween, when I was 17, I dressed up as a B-side Prince song. It was a song called “Scarlet Pussy.” It was a red cat. [Laughs]

Prince has been kind of off-limits for my whole career. Prior to his death, he was very picky and very expensive, and it was just something I was never really able to place. Then, when David brought it up, it was like two-and-a-half years ago, his estate was still being settled in court, and I was like, “I don't know if we can use it,” and then we were trying to use it, and it didn't work out. Long story short, we tried again to place it in Season 2, and there just wasn't a spot for it. So then, when we were doing the trailers, I don't normally get consulted for those, but David asked me to watch it and asked my opinion. Since then, Prince's estate had been settled, and I had heard that, actually, his estate wanted to place his music. It was perfect, and I'm glad that the first time I placed a Prince song was for Our Flag Means Death. That was a song we're very happy about.

Have there been any big instances where a song doesn't fit somewhere in the season, you can't find a place for it, or where you've tried to get your first choice for this show specifically, and it hasn't been able to happen for whatever reason?

PHILLIPS: No, none that come to mind. I don't think we've had any denials. The big moments in Season 1 we cleared before they even started shooting. Cat Stevens and the Fleetwood Mac were costly, and that meant cutting corners elsewhere, but we got everything we wanted. We weren't shooting for the stars that much. At this point, in Season 2, it's been easier to get yeses, I will say that. Kate Bush in Episode 3, her manager was very specific. Kate wanted to be a part of it, and she was very excited about the use and stuff. The show is so popular, with enough of an audience that people want to be a part of it, which is very exciting.

When I talked to David before the season, he said that he always picks a song and that's the song that's all-encompassing of the whole season. For this season, he said Kate Bush, "This Woman's Work." Obviously, we get it in a very pivotal moment in Episode 3. I wanted to ask you about the conversations around that song and when it was going to be used.

PHILLIPS: It recontextualizes the song and the lyrics to make it work with that scene. That song was written for a movie, She's Having a Baby, with a totally different subject and lyrical subject in mind. The funny story about that song is I advised against it when he told me he wanted to use it. There were two reasons: the more egotistical reason was I had placed it in The Handmaid’s Tale previously, and I hadn't actually pitched that song. I had pitched “Running Up That Hill” for that episode, but the showrunner decided to use “This Woman's Work,” and I was like, “That's a bold choice. Some people are going to love it, some people are going to hate it.”

More importantly, it was right after the Stranger Things Kate Bush phenomenon, and I was like, “Dude, we are going to look like we are copycats, that we didn't have an original idea, and I'm worried about the backlash there.” David knows what he wants, and he was like, “This is our show. It's an original, and this is the right song for this moment.” Taika wanted to use the song and was very attached to the song, too. So it was a Taika/David collaboration, that song.

I remember talking to my team and saying that this could be potentially embarrassing, this song in this spot, but then, I watched it. I read the script. I'm not privy to the conversations about how they're gonna shoot it and what part of the song they're gonna use, but they had obviously figured that all out — because I watched it and really was emotionally charged. I remember getting chills, and I emailed David right away, and I was like, “You were so right. That song is gorgeous there.” I feel like it changes the song. It becomes a new creative moment. That's what's so cool about this job. It's rare, but sometimes you'll put a song to picture, and the song will change, and the picture will change, and it's sort of that movie magic, and I feel like they did it there. So I just was along for the ride and got to eat my words

Speaking of a music moment that gave me chills, Episode 2, that Timber Timbre song, “Run for Me,” bookends the episode and is used in very different contexts with very different parts of the song. At the beginning, it's Blackbeard wallowing and depressed, and at the end, it's this very sinister, dark place. What was the process behind choosing that song and also choosing to use it in two very different places?

PHILLIPS: That was all David. I wish I could claim that that was me. I read it in the script. I'm a fan of Timber Timbre; I put them in stuff years ago. I’ve followed their career since they started, so I knew the song immediately and read the script with that song in mind. No, [that was] just the genius of David Jenkins.

How often are you getting scripts from [David] where the song choice is already in there?

PHILLIPS: It's rare, because typically he asks me before he writes a script. Typically, he’ll email me while he's in the writers’ room. In fact, I'm sure he did about this one because it was so intricately woven into the script, and he's not going to write it without knowing that we can clear it and can afford it. Since I know Timber Timbre, I've used their stuff before, I was like, “Go for it. It'll be affordable and easy to clear.” In that regard, he might have asked me for some [other] stuff, and I'm like, “Stay clear.” Those might be the only denials we've gotten, from me, but there aren't many these days. There used to be a lot more that were hands-off. These days, people want to be seen.

I also love the use of “Strawberry Letter 23” during the raid on the wedding in the first episode. It's juxtaposed against the violence and the terror of the moment.

PHILLIPS: It's such a sweet love song. The lyrics are so innocent and sweet, but it's like the way that Shuggie Otis — it's swagger and cocky and just whimsical and has that strong melody and the instrumentation. That was on one of my playlists for Season 1, and then [David] wrote it in. All the big moments in Season 1 and Season 2 that are on cameras like that, those don't come in post. Those are when he's writing the scripts, so there was never any other song that was attempted for that spot; that was always going to be that song.

With that in mind, what's the song at the end of that episode, where Ed and Stede are both looking at the same moon and having their respective conversations?

PHILLIPS: It’s "Pygmy Love Song" by Francis Bebey. It’s supposed to capture the pain but inherent beauty of true love. It’s romantic but tragic at the same time, like Stede and Ed’s love story —at this point in the story.

I also wanted to about Con [O’Neill] singing “La Vie en rose” in Episode 6. I feel like that's a moment that fans are going to be really excited about. I personally did not know he could sing!

PHILLIPS: I don't know if he knew he could sing either. That was a very involved clearance. It took a long time to clear. Anything that's international, and this was through the French office, takes a long time. Americans are very quick, for better or for worse, and the French office is not. We started clearing that, and it took us months. We were getting to the point where we were like, “Are we gonna be able to use this?”

Then Con was anxious about singing in the first place because it's not something he does normally, and then was anxious about singing in French. So we had to change the clearance because originally scripted, we wanted it to be in French, and going back to English, that actually was a whole other boring clearance story. To get it approved in English was harder, but we got it. Then, while we were waiting for approval, the actor had taught himself phonetically how to do the French version, and we recorded both options, and the French was so effective that that's what we stuck with for most of it.

I love that moment. [Con]'s such a good actor. Oh my god. That episode is just really powerful, and that song works really well Sometimes when you're not a trained singer, but you're an actor, you're acting the singing as opposed to singing it for the aural experience, so it becomes more emotional in a way. You're not worried too much about pitch and getting it right, and so it's more about the character who's singing it. Especially when you're singing it not for a soundtrack but in a scene. They're not singing it for the performance, they're singing it for the cathartic release, and it is going to be more emotional. That's why I think it's so powerful, the way he does it. Yeah, I love that scene.

Do you have a personal favorite song choice from Season 1?

PHILLIPS: My favorite, because I love the way it works, and it's also just for me a personal triumph, [was] to get Moondog in at the end of the pilot. It was such an odd choice. I always like it when I get in stuff that people don't know. I love the Beach Boys — it's a song that many people don't know, “Our Prayer,” in Season 1, Episode 4, where they meet. I love the “Seabird” song by the Alessi Brothers, I think it's the end of Episode 5 in Season 1.

Kate Bush has become one of my favorite moments [in Season 2], as a moment singular to just the show and the story themselves. It was also the visual of Stede coming down as a mermaid. It's just so absurd, yet it’s so beautiful and so powerful at the same time. I don't know how they do it, but they do it. I could watch that Fleetwood Mac scene over and over and over again in the end, the shot pulling back of them laying on the ground, and Stede goes, “You've come back,” and Ed is like, “I never left,” and then the wink. I love that moment so much. This show is just hands down one of my all-time favorite shows I've ever gotten to work on.

Everyone I've talked to about working on this show is having an absolute blast.

PHILLIPS: I also think — I'm always talking highly of David, but he deserves it — it comes from the top down. That dude is super creative and very collaborative and also just kind, and that's rare when you're a showrunner/creator. He makes it such a pleasurable, fun experience with a lot of hard work, which is hard to do — to make people work really hard and challenge themselves, but then they want to do it because it's fun and rewarding, not because someone's cracking the whip.

#our flag means death season 2 #ofmd s2 #ofmd s2 spoilers #spoiler #our flag means death #ofmd #maggie phillips #music #collider article #interview

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