Composer
Website: dandeacon.com
Most recent: Task
Dan Deacon says scoring a film is like baking a cake—and the score is the egg. It holds the cake together, but you don’t want to taste it. This mentality has shaped his “nothing is precious” approach to scoring and helped him in his most recent work on the HBO series Task, for which he created a layered soundscape of electronic textures, piano, and experimental vocals to heighten the crime drama’s emotion and tension.
As someone who had established himself in the indie electronic music scene by the late 2000s, film scoring wasn’t necessarily something on Deacon’s radar, but that changed through a surreal experience: legendary filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola contacted him after hearing Deacon discussing film and music in an NPR interview, established a rapport, eventually invited him to work on a film, and Deacon never looked back.
Deacon says learning to write for film was trial by fire, and he’s learned a lot about working through doubt, including through projects such as Kelly Marcel’s Venom: The Last Dance. “It was a huge film with a tight window, and I’d never done a studio film before. It was like taking mushrooms, finding out they’re twice as strong as you thought, and then someone tells you some really intense news—every day,” he says. “The pressure is real, but that’s the fun part, and you have to lean into it and trust your ability to get it done.”
His background as independent artist has shaped his composing style, which has a sonic density not usually associated with film composing, as well as his drive to pursue creative unknowns. “I think what drew me to film scoring was in part wanting to make more types of music than my albums allowed me,” he says. “Every musician that does this has to have the drive to do something they’ve never done before.”
Deacon also says aspiring film composers should seek out film festivals wherever they happen to live, and specifically seek out makers of short films.
