The second time music supervisor Gabe Hilfer appears on screen with coffee in hand for a two-part Zoom chat about cannibalism thriller Fresh, he’s got news.
He’d just wrapped on Winning Time, HBO’s limited series from Adam McKay on the Showtime era of the L.A. Lakers. It’s a drastically different project than the Daisy Edgar-Jones and Sebastian Stan-led Hulu horror movie he’s about to talk about. Different also from the 130-plus other music credits he’s wracked up since the mid-2000s.
Hilfer’s resume runs the genre gamut, with his hand on projects like Black Swan, Sausage Party, If Beale Street Could Talk, Crazy Rich Asians, Birds of Prey, Don’t Look Up, Entourage, Luke Cage, The Mindy Project, Dickinson, Superstore and Nine Perfect Strangers — to name a few.
That kind of diversity is an advantage on a movie classified as a romance, comedy, thriller and social horror. It’s also possible because Hilfer doesn’t lead with his own music style, which he says was influenced chiefly by underground hip hop and Fiona Apple, which he heard growing up in early ’90s New York City.
Instead, the music supervisor leans into the aesthetic of his directors; he’s a “musical agnostic” who likens himself to a DJ giving “the audience what they’re looking for.” For this set, he’s working with Mimi Cave on her feature debut, which comes after directing short films and music videos for 12 years. Cave considers her own music video experience an unconscious “part of the fabric of what I do,” while Hilfer says he’s “met his match” in the director when it comes to musical vision.
This perfect musical union can be chalked up to their collaboration style, with Cave coming in ready with opinions and a stack of playlists. “Debating music with her was one of the most fun parts of this entire process,” Hilfer recalls.
“I always really was a fangirl of soundtracks and scores,” Cave says. “When I was younger, the first soundtrack I owned was Grease and then High Fidelity. And I remember feeling like these are incredible mood mixtapes that tie into the film, but are also these separate entities with an arc and appeal in and of themselves.”
That understanding — that the music was its own story — helped the duo produce a killer soundtrack featuring artists like the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Duran Duran and Danger Mouse, who help set the tone for a genre-bending tale about a woman (Edgar-Jones’ Noa) who discovers her new love interest (Stan’s Steve) is a cannibal with an entire meat-packing operation.
The narrative is driven by its clever, dark and resonant metaphors about women’s physical objectification and emotional consumption in life and relationships. Hilfer says he took a middle-ground approach to music selection, not drawing too many direct connections between a scenes’ messages or action and a song’s lyrics. “You don’t want to do things too on the nose or too disparate,” he tells The Hollywood Reporter.
Still, many of the movie’s messages bled into the film’s music, especially those lyrics, regardless of the language of a song. “I was paying very close attention to that as we were shooting and editing,” the director says. “There were only two or three songs where we purchased the rights while shooting because we knew we wanted them. The others came in the editing process, where I had more time to sit with it and listen to the lyrics. I wanted there to be a lot of things that you could discover and unravel.”
As for individual track selection, decisions came in as late as the 11th hour, and some were pulled out of the archives by editor Martin Pensa, who Cave says was a “huge part of the music traces in this film.” Others, already part of the movie’s temp score, got the green light to stay.
Beyond finding songs by production deadline that wouldn’t blow the film’s budget, a challenge of curating Fresh’s soundtrack was having the music speak not only to the scene but the identities of characters — oft revealed through their musical taste while in bars, cars, homes and at their work desks.
“At least half the mood music in the movie is diegetic, meaning it comes from a source that you are supposed to believe is really playing,” the Fresh music supervisor explains.
A somewhat unique additional complication to music supervision for a rom-com turned horror-thriller was getting artists’ approval to use their music over scenes of characters eating (prepared) human flesh. “I found myself doing a lot of selling in the music community to explain where this is coming from,” Hilfer says of pitching a film about cannabilism and sexism. “But it is a fascinating take, and I think a lot of people got that.”
That includes Radiohead, whose “Exit Music (For a Film)” is featured in the movie through a Vitamin String Quartet cover. Hilfer says he warned the team they should be cautious about the band’s response “to use their music over the eating people thing.”
“And I got to be honest with you, they were cool,” he says of Radiohead’s written approval. “They were very like, ‘Oh, this sounds awesome.’”
Hilfer says the film’s tonal dichotomy — comedy over horror, romance over thriller — was something he and Cave thought about for the entire movie as they were auditioning songs.
“For the scarier parts, we were cognizant of it,” he recalls. “What music can do is make things feel ironic or funny when they’re not supposed to by lightening the mood when there’s some dark shit happening.”
Cave says to address this, she turned more to the film’s score to nail the darker parts of Fresh‘s sound. “The score is balancing out the needle drops. It’s pretty dark and pretty intentionally less melodic and more ambient. We have so many songs in the movie that are recognizable or something you want to bump your head to. That is the way in which I balanced the violence and the laughter in terms of the action.”
The film’s soundtrack is a catchy, tricky feat, and one that Hilfer and Cave both agreed to break down. Here, the duo explains four of Fresh’s most pivotal narrative and musical moments with THR.
“You’re Not Good Enough” by Blood Orange, “Endless Summer Nights” by Richard Marx and “Le Jardin” by La Femme
In the first of two parallel scenes, Steve asks Noa to dance at her apartment before Steve takes a picture of Noa and proposes a trip. In the second, Noa asks Steve to dance with her after their cannibalism dinner, with both characters kissing and moving in sync as Steve’s bedroom fate is teased.
Hilfer: With Blood Orange, it’s before the title credits, so it’s a totally different movie. We’re setting it up, and it’s like this legit romance. We see a little bit into Noa’s life and how tough it is to date. We wanted to situate this into the sexiest, most legitimate song. Noa has the coolest taste in music of anyone I know, so we were trying to set that up. Blood Orange also opens the movie at the beginning — she’s listening to a different Blood Orange song — and it’s kind of a tie-in to that. We love the tone. We love the vibe. And it helps sell the authenticity of their burgeoning love affair.
At the end, it’s almost about the way she’s fooled him. We take it back to that place where the audience has to be rooting for her to get out of this situation. And she’s figured out a way to manipulate it. So we sell it with music that is so fast and then “Le Jardin” is so honest. As if she is back in love with him, it’s going to be all good. That music embodies and runs parallel to the idea that Steve is fooled as well. Then, you know, she bites his dick off.
Cave: A lot of communication happens between bodies, and my hope is that viewers would find that parallel in both of those scenes. For the first scene, I wanted to capture that feeling of being vulnerable with someone new. I actually feel that the dance scene does that more than when they hook up. You’re just getting to know someone, and your guard is down, and you feel awkward, and then you laugh — and there’s just this moment of connection where you’re like, “OK, this person didn’t run out the door. I feel safe.” I wanted to do a callback for the second scene, and I think “Endless Summer Nights” was a song that I loved. It came from Sebastian. He was obsessed with it. So we started rehearsing with that song, and I knew it was very much in Steve’s realm.
The Blood Orange song is Noa’s taste in music. You’re at her place. It’s a lot more contemporary and feels very relatable. When you’re in his space and have “Endless Summer Nights,” you’re in Steve’s fucked-up world where you don’t know what year it is. The lyrics also always make me shiver a little bit because it feels like you’re remembering a really beautiful love or thinking about someone you had. It has that breakup feel, but you can also dance to it. The track shifts into the La Femme song, and my editor threw that in and mixed the songs together. I was like, “Holy shit. This is awesome.” The beginning of that La Femme song has the same beat as “Endless Summer Nights,” so all of a sudden, you’re like, wait a minute, what’s happening? When they turn towards the camera and sort of break the fourth wall a little bit and become presentational, doing this together, you’re like, “Well, fuck, are they a team now? Are they going to eat everybody?”
“Obsession” by Animotion
Steve dances around his secluded forest home, where he kids the women he’s kidnapped. At one point, he dances with a human leg and continues to move about to the music as he prepares bags of human meat to sell.
Hilfer: We needed to figure that out way ahead of time because we knew [Steve] was going to sing along to it. He’s dancing to it. We went through a bunch of different songs; there were a lot of cooks in the kitchen. We had the writer, we had Mimi, we had the producers — lots of people had different opinions on how that should work. Ultimately, “Obsession” was my favorite. I feel like this song is underplayed. It was an ’80s smash — such a groove and a fun song that you put it on anywhere. Sebastian Stan was super into it. They shot up in Canada, so I was not on set for it as it was in the heart of COVID. So I was doing it remotely, but Mimi would send me videos of him rehearsing singing the song. It was so great.
Cave: It took me a while to figure out how I was going to shoot Fresh, but I always knew how I was going to shoot that scene. I envisioned it being daylight and that beautiful feeling of when the sun is coming through the windows, and you’re in the kitchen cooking. There’s something really magical about that light, and to pair that with what he’s doing in that scene — I knew we’d just have a super strange feeling. So we pared it down to two or three songs, the others were in the same vein, but I felt like they were a little overused in film. Also, with “Obsession,” the lyrics felt very specific to me and had a cheekiness to it, where he’s saying, “Who do you want me to be, to make you sleep with me?” I think it just had that perfect lyric component to it, and I needed that for that scene to work.
But when we shot it, we shot it MLS because he’s not talking, and we got to play the music really loudly. We would go between the different songs, and it was pretty clear right away that “Obsession” was it. It was always my number one, but it was also clear in the way that it made Sebastian move that it was going to be the one that stuck in the film.
“Heads Will Roll” by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs
After Mollie and Noa successfully kill Steve and decapitate Ann, the two collapse under a tree, laughing together before the end credits roll.
Hilfer: “Heads Will Roll” is a banger. Obviously, the lyrics are such a perfect fit. The tone of that song is great, the energy is great. There’s a real ferocity. The fact that the band is fronted by Karen O — a female vocalist — speaks as if the song is coming from the perspective of Noa. All of the things just coalesced, and we had to have that song. It’s at the end of the movie where it has that buildup. It doesn’t come in immediately, and by doing that, you’re able to ramp up and hit the audience with an injection of adrenaline after all that’s gone down. You’re counting the body count on your hand. You’re figuring out who’s missing what body part. You don’t know which way is up.
Cave: In terms of “Heads Will Roll,” I think sometimes you try something, and it just hits the right way. It did feel a little bit like, “OK, well, this is a bold choice,” but also the movie needed that in the ending. lt was a difficult thing to figure out the last moments. How do you wrap this up? What just happened? There’s all this chaos. I think the song has that power to it that we needed, in the end, to allow you to feel their vindication and feel also this sense of “Fuck, we’re alive.”
But I’ve loved that song for years. I’ve been a fan [of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs] since I was in college. Karen Oh sort of changed my life. And one fun story about that is I put that song in, and I did my director’s cut screening with [producer] Kevin Messick, [producer] Adam McKay and Lauryn Kahn, who’s the writer, but also a producer on the film. After the movie, [Lauryn] pulled her sleeve up and showed me a tattoo on her arm. It was the acronym for dance till you’re dead. She and I had never spoken about the song. So it was just like, holy shit.
Khan: It’s a weird full-circle moment. I have this tattoo that is DTYD from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and I got it years ago because that song meant so much. What the lyric meant to me was to keep going until you get there. Don’t stop. I loved that because it was just the embodiment of the hustle. So the fact that this movie came out exactly as I had dreamed it to be and that this song is in the trailer and this song is at the end puts the biggest smile on my face every time I think of it.
The interview was edited for length and clarity.
Source: HollyWood
