Since 2016, the Oscar-winning composer Kris Bowers’ career has gone from strength to strength, and he’s lent his vast array of musical talents to films such as King Richard (2021) and The Color Purple (2023). But with The Wild Robot – an animated tale about Roz (Lupita Nyong’o), a robot stranded on a harsh, uninhabited island who takes it upon herself to raise a baby goose she names Brightbill (Kit Connor) – Bowers was presented with a new challenge. For this movie, he would have to infuse his music into every scene. In a sense, Bowers’ is the biggest voice of the film.
Unsurprisingly, he has risen to the occasion with a soaring, spectacular score. Here, he talks to Amon Warmann about how his relationship with his daughter inspired the glorious main theme, the dangers of AI in film composing and much more.
Amon Warmann: Once you came aboard this project, where did you start?
Kris Bowers: My first thought was wanting to find a way to combine the organic and the synthetic for the sound of Roz on this deserted island. I didn't want to approach the wilderness in the typical, ethnic-flutes way. I wanted to find something different, and I came across Sandbox Percussion, this percussion ensemble who play tuned wood planks, metal pipes, oxygen tanks, log drums and things. So I started with a palette, exploring their sound, and then added the synthetic sound.
AW: In the past, you’ve said that you try to find a scene to emotionally connect to early on and then write something that carries that feeling. What was that scene and feeling here?
KB: The sequence that stood out the most emotionally was the migration, because it felt like it could have this really clear expression of a main theme. When I came on the project my daughter was six months old, and so this idea of needing to say goodbye to her was a very palpable, visceral emotion. But what’s really fascinating is that the first time I approached it, I imagined my six-month-old daughter going to college, and I wrote this piece of music that I felt really proud of. I shared it with [writer-director] Chris Sanders, and he was like, ‘No, this isn't really right.’ He ironically suggested that I imagine sending my daughter off to college, and I told him that’s what I’d done! The more we talked about it, the more he made it clear and reminded me of the complexity of the moment.
When I went home and thought about it deeper, I actually had a moment of pretty profound realisation that I didn’t want to imagine it this early on in parenthood. The first thing I wrote was this very sweet, nostalgic, kind of jaunty piece of music, and when I thought about the idea of saying goodbye under the circumstances that Roz and Brightbill are – where they’re not saying ‘I love you’, and they’re not saying the word ‘goodbye’ – they are in this possibly irreparable position.
I thought about the realities and complexities of parenthood, and the idea that there are going to be so many times that I fail my daughter, that there’ll be so many times where she's immensely disappointed in me. That level of emotion was what unlocked this feeling that led to me discovering the main theme, which was a seed to then go and score the rest of the movie.
AW: Your music is present in every scene of this film. When you were told that, were you purely excited or a little daunted?
KB: It definitely feels daunting. Because for me, my bar for what that needs to be is the greats who did that before. I always go to John Williams. There’s Carl Stalling for animation. There’re also people like Bernard Herrmann and Erich Korngold. When music is wall-to-wall like that, it has to be of a subtle complexity that it never gets tiring. It never wears out its welcome. If you have pieces of music that just repeat over and over again for 30 minutes of the movie, you’re gonna be pretty tired of it. And with this, it feels like it has to be the type of music that you can listen to outside of the context of the film and it’s just as exciting. When I listen to those composers I’ve always idolised – the composers who made me want to become a composer in the first place – they’re masters at subtle variation and evolution, so that you hear this piece of music and it’s constantly evolving. That’s what was daunting.
The Wild Robot (2024)
But also the excitement about this project is because when I saw what the animation was going to look like, I knew that it was going to be incredibly dazzling and captivating. Because there wasn’t much dialogue, the music would also need to have the same level of detail to prevent it from feeling stagnant or boring. The challenge of having music that’s constant means not only hitting all the beats and all the gestures and writing a picture in that really, really concise way, but also having this detail where there are things that you’re probably subconsciously not even hearing.
AW: How present were you in the mixing stage of post-production?
KB: I actually was more present than I’ve ever been before. With Chris Sanders and also the producer Jeff Herman and all the other filmmakers, it was a very familial approach. So [re-recording mixer] Gary Rizzo and [sound designer] Randy Thom and the mixing engineers and also the rest of the team at Skywalker, even before I got there they were already trying to find a way for sound design to be an intimate dance with the music. I remember talking to [re-recording mixer/supervising sound editor] Leff Lefferts about the bedtime sequence. I was very purposeful to have little hits on each of the stars. And he made sure that the sound effects for each of those stars were in the same key as the piece that I wrote. Little details like that, they were already really, really mindful of.
I think the other reason why they were excited to have me there is that I’m not the type of person who’s like, ‘Oh, just turn the music up.’ Because I’m aware of how music is functioning in the context of the rest of the film, and also fascinated by the mixing process, being a filmmaker. I wanted to be there to help us make sure that the right parts of the music were audible and forward. It became much more collaborative.
The Wild Robot (2024)
AW: One of the standout scenes in the film is where Roz names Brightbill. She starts off calling him ‘0001’, before being encouraged to be creative and to make it as personal and unique as possible. When it comes to film composing, what’s the balance between the techy, electronic side of things and unabashed creativity?
KB: For me, it always starts from a place where I can be as creative as possible, without any restrictions. That’s why I always start with either piano or, in this instance, with percussion because I was thinking about this unique percussion ensemble that we were going to work with. So I’m just coming up with these little grooves and then trying to match with the picture. But with this film in particular – and something I’ve been doing more and more of – I have been trying to have the technology almost be subservient to the creative process and not have it dictate it.
In the past, it’s been pretty easy technologically to set up a click track, and then, especially with animation, make sure the click track is hitting all the points. But I wanted this to really feel as organic as possible. A lot of it started with improvisation, with me just accompanying the picture and playing along, and then building a malleable click track. When you look back at the great film scores that make you feel all those feelings, there’s so much push and pull because it’s actually someone conducting. That’s the type of dance that I love to try to replicate. So in the beginning of my process, I’m trying to find a way to build a foundation for myself that has that push and pull, and then trying to create the technology around that.
The Wild Robot (2024)
AW: What are your thoughts on AI in film composing? It seems like more and more people are trying it out…
KB: Ultimately, I have a lot of fear around it. It's a very slippery slope to allowing something to take over parts of the creative process that are uniquely human, and that we need to keep human. I think that there are aspects of it that might be interesting, but it’s going to take a very long time to be able to create something that has the type of interesting resonance that great music has.
But I also think that so much of art is about context. So much of art is actually the fact that somebody was brave enough to dig into the deep parts of their own emotion, their psyche, their history, and create something from that place. There’s something that can be felt around that, something that can never be replaced. The artists that have so much pride in art are far away from using it, but I am fearful of how the people who don’t pay attention to craftsmanship and artistry – and think that they can’t really hear the difference between an orchestral score written by John Williams and orchestral score written by AI – are the ones who have the power to make decisions. AI is cheaper and easier to use – and they can’t hear that difference – so they would do that. But I have a lot of hope. There’re so many incredible artists. The more we talk about the artistry and what’s behind that, the more we have an appreciation for that.
The Wild Robot (2024)
AW: One of the big themes in The Wild Robot is belonging, and what it means when you find it. Composing is largely a solitary job, but there is a community of sorts. When did you first feel like you belonged to it?
KB: That’s a beautiful question. There are two big moments for me that stand out. In 2015, I did the Sundance Composers Lab. I had done three documentaries before that, but I didn’t know any other film composers, really. I remember going to that lab, riding up in the van with all the other film composers to Skywalker Ranch, and they were much more a part of the industry than I was. Some of them were assisting people, some of them went to the USC film-scoring programme. I remember feeling like an imposter for the first time in that space in a very visceral way, where I was like, ‘Oh man, I don’t belong here. They're going to find me out. This is going to be embarrassing.’
But that experience was so beautiful over those two weeks. We all became great friends. We still text each other and talk almost 10 years later, and there was so much support for what people were trying, and also the embracing of the fact that we were all coming from different places, and curiosity and fascination around that. All of the mentors who came in were so encouraging of what I was doing, making me feel like I belonged. I didn’t know whether to trust my instincts. To have somebody like [Chicken Run composer] Harry Gregson-Williams say ‘that thing you’re doing is really great’ made me feel so brave and emboldened to continue to try to do this. That experience is actually what made me want to move to LA, to actually pursue film scoring in a real way.
The second part of it is when I moved to LA, there were a few composers who were so free with information. [Black Panther composer] Ludwig Göransson is one that stands out to me. We had a mutual friend who connected us, and he was the first person to tell me what my contract should look like with my first TV show, how I should deal with the budgets, how I should put my team together. And I remember talking to [Fargo composer] Jeff Russo. He gave me my first Google Sheet to make a cue sheet. [Empire composer] Fil Eisler was another one. Those three guys – I probably bothered them so much with questions about how to do this, and they embraced me in a way that made me feel like I belonged.
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