Saxophonist and composer Colin Stetson unpacks the monumental process of creating an original film score, from embracing periods of deep immersion to learning how to exercise restraint and resist cliché.

Film scoring remains one of cinema’s least visible arts, yet it shapes almost every beat onscreen, steering stories emotionally and narratively while controlling pacing, tension and atmosphere. Few contemporary composers embody the power of the score to transform a film’s psychological landscape more vividly than Colin Stetson, the Canadian-American musician who is part of a wave of artists pushing film music into stranger, more experimental territory.

Take his work for Hereditary – which Crack ranked fourth in our new list of the greatest scores of the 21st century – where he approached the music as its own character, like an invisible presence haunting the film itself.

“I was trying to establish something that didn’t use familiar conventions,” he said at the time. “So it would create tension and mounting dread, but would do it in ways that felt of a different world.” 

The resulting score captures Stetson’s instinct for pushing instruments beyond their expected function: sounds that resemble droning synths are in fact contrabass clarinets played using extended techniques, and sections of suspense-building B-flat clarinet could be easily mistaken for tremolo strings. Elsewhere, Stetson experimented with unconventional methods to record and manipulate his own vocals, until what remained felt non-human, or of a different world, to the point that you would never guess it was his voice at all. 

Across Hereditary, The Menu, the new Duffer Brothers Netflix series Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen and more, Stetson’s work exemplifies what makes film music such fertile ground for creativity: whether responding to a fleeting narrative cue or shaping a broader conceptual theme, scoring invites intense perfectionism, sonic exploration and emotional intuition. Here, he breaks down his process in nine steps.

Get inside the script

This is the first stage for me. I usually read it a few times and not only try to listen to what it sounds like in my head, but also to figure out the structure of the narrative – its shape and pacing, what it’s showing and what it’s hiding. Most of the score can be written in that initial deep dive into the bones of the story.

Every detail counts

I once spent several days on just over ten seconds of score because of how much every take of every instrument was so completely sewn into the picture, and each twist and turn of the scene. A lot of scenes will have me playing dozens of tracks on multiple instruments. Hundreds for some. So in the end, I’ll have watched those scenes many hundreds of times.  

Feel it first

One of the most integral aspects of the job is to be the emotional and experiential stand-in for the audience. You have to allow yourself to be an antenna of sorts and to honestly react and feel what the film and the music are doing as you write and create. And when it moves you in the ways that you know it needs to, then it’s done.

Resist cliché

One way to avoid thinking up clichés is to avoid consuming them. Watch what you eat, musically and narratively.

The score is its own character

Sometimes very literally. The score for Hereditary was very much that way for me. Other times, not in the same way and perhaps more just a musical expression of each frame of film as it unfolds.

Everything can be music

All sounds are musical if they are functioning as such. Music is simply sound that is intentionally organised to elicit a response from or affect some change in a listener. 

Respect silence

Silence is the score as well, in its absence. Where to play and where to lay out is as important as anything else in the process.

Timing the release

Working on The Menu, I learned a lot about the throughlines of functionality between horror and comedy, and how sometimes the same music can function seamlessly in both contexts. Landing a joke and jumping a scare are both all about setup and timing.

Surrender to the story

If you are closed off to feeling a full spectrum of feels, then I think it may not be the job for you. Not that I think it takes a certain kind of person, but I do think that you have to be open to the feeling and experience of the upsetting thing. Bonus if you relish and rejoice in the process of diving deep into deep and affecting stories.