Web: imdb.com/name/nm11125087
Most recent: I Love Boosters
One of Cheryl Wang’s most significant moments as a music supervisor, she says, was when she cleared Eagles’ “Hotel California” for a project. “To me, as a nonnative English speaker, that song was kind of like one of the three English songs you could find everywhere in China, so to get approvals for that felt like a big moment for me.”
Born and raised in a small town in China where a career in music or entertainment didn’t strike her as realistic, Wang’s path to music supervision wasn’t planned. But when she went to college in Shanghai, and then graduate school at Columbia in New York, that world was opened up to her as she started working in post-production jobs. Now, she has credits on Splitsville, X, Armageddon Time, and, most recently, she secured the rights to Prince’s “Adore” for rapper Boots Riley’s new adventure comedy I Love Boosters.
Landing the Prince track for the film was fate. “I’m a long-time fan of Riley; I used to follow him on Twitter back in the day and remember him saying he was trying to use that same song on [his television series] I’m a Virgo, and I remembered that,” Wang says. “When I go the call to join the Boosters project, I was secretly hoping we’d get to have a Prince track in it. Fortunately, when we reached out to the Prince estate, they were so collaborative, so we were lucky.”
Securing the rights to music isn’t always as straightforward, and it’s the hurdles and obstacles of the job that exercise creativity, Wang says. “It’s not just finding the right tracks. Especially in the indie film world, you have to work within all kinds of limitations, including budget. And you have to be super organized, know all the nuances of clearance, and be ready to handle a large volume of emails and calls. I think a good music supervisor is being adaptable when you can’t secure a song, and communicative, because ideas change every minute, and your job is to fulfill a filmmaker’s vision.”
Other upcoming films Wang collaborated on include independent romantic drama Ephemera, shot in Shanghai and created by Wang’s film school friend, director Shan Jiang; The Get Out starring Russell Crowe; and Runner with Owen Wilson.
