The Studio, an insider Hollywood comedy made for universal appeal, has proven to be one of the biggest successes yet for creators Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg. The series, which stars Rogen as the consistently in-over-his-head studio head Matt Remick, is based in part on real experiences its creators have had while navigating the ups and downs of showbusiness. Across 10 episodes, the show tackles topics like casting, awards season, and prestige filmmaking.
The artistic style behindThe Studiohas also garnered plenty of praise. With ambitiously long camera shots, carefully choreographed sequences, and a relentlessly frenetic pace, the show has drawn comparisons to Academy Award winning films, most notably the2015 Best Picture winnerBirdman.If there was any question as to whether that movie was an inspiration forThe Studio,Rogen and Goldberg’s hiring of multi-Grammy-winningBirdmancomposer and jazz musician Antonio Sanchez for the series provides the answer.
ScreenRantinterviewed Antonio Sanchez about his work onThe Studio(whichScreenRant’s reviewgave 9 out of 10 stars, by the way). Sanchez discussed how he addressed Seth Rogen’s concerns to land the gig, how he’s grown as a composer sinceBirdman, and how he approached writing music for the ever-growing chaos of the series. Plus, the composer shared which gig story from his life would make for the bestThe Studioepisode.
Seth Rogen’s Love For Birdman Got Antonio Sanchez The Studio
Image via Apple TV+
Antonio Sanchez’s music has been a part ofThe Studiolonger than the composer has. Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg had already been placing pieces of Sanchez’s score forBirdmanagainst early cuts ofThe Studioby the time a meeting was arranged between the three creatives.“It was via Zoom, and it was just Evan and Seth, and the first thing [they said] when they saw me was, ‘Birdman is one of our favorite movies ever.’”
Rogen and Goldberg’s love for the Oscar winner byThe Studio’s filmmakers didn’t automatically translate to Sanchez getting the gig, however:“Basically, they asked me if I could do other things. That’s been a little bit of the crux of Birdman–that I’m the drum guy, but if you want something else, people don’t know if I can do it.”
But Sanchez isn’t just a drummer. The composer studied classical music and, sinceBirdman, has branched out from drum and percussion-only scores for projects including the seriesGet Shortyand the filmHarami.That range of ability was key toThe Studio,especially for the show’s fictional films like Ron Howard’sAlphabet City, for which Sanchez had to compose over-the-top dramatic music complete with orchestral melodies.
This requirement aligned perfectly with where Sanchez was in his journey as a film composer.“I’ve learned so much since Birdman,”he shared, adding,“when Birdman came about, I had no idea what I was doing, and I think (director Alejandro González) Iñárritu didn’t really want me to overthink it … He wanted to take advantage of my jazz background so that I could just improvise based on what I was seeing. I think it worked fine, butI really didn’t have a chance to get inside the movie the way I want to get inside things nowadays.”
“When The Studio came about, it was like, ‘I really, really want to get inside what is going on here.’”
And Sanchez did, for the better–at least according to some messages he got from Rogen and Goldberg.“I got a couple of random emails from them saying, ‘Man, you’re making everything better. Everything’s sounding better. Everything’s feeling better,'“Sanchez revealed,“That was a reassuring moment so that I could just do what I do.”
Sanchez Puts “Four Or Five Different Drum Sets On Top Of Each Other”
For all that Sanchez wanted to avoid just coming up with, in his words,“a blanket beat and then people talk over it,”onThe Studio, he did start most of his music cues by improvising along with scenes.“Drums is my first language,”Sanchez said,“I’ll watch the scene, mark [it] in my Pro Tools session–what I think are the very important moments that I need to hit–and then I just start doing passes, improvising, and seeing what feels better.”
Once Sanchez had the bones of an idea, he would go into his recording software to trim, edit, and otherwise clean up the take,“making it really concise where all the stops need to be perfect with the dialogue.”As soon as the basic structure was solid, Sanchez would add, and add, and add.“Once I have a good master take,”he said,“I start doing overdubs. Maybe I’ll do another pass on top of the master take with brushes, another pass with mallets, another pass with rods, [and] another pass with my hands.”
“Sometimes I have four or five different drum sets on top of each other.”
There are numerous other tweaks, additions, and subtractions the composer would execute as well to maximize dramatic impact. Sometimes, that would be not playing at all:“what I don’t play may sometimes carry a much stronger effect if [I] want to accentuate something”. Other times, small additions would make a big difference:“On the parts where I stop, maybe I’ll do a little brush flurry, and then I do another take, and where I did the brush flurry, maybe I do a little mallet run.”Or, he’d add layers of percussion“so it sounds like a monstrous drum set.”
Many of these types of considerations are relatively unique to Sanchez’s work; there are not many film composers whose primary instruments are drums and percussion. To best match the emotion of the series, the composer even changed out drum sounds from scene to scene.“I can pick and choose what goes better with the scene,”Sanchez said,“so that it doesn’t sound just like one drum set all the time [with the] same color [and] same intention.”
“Because I only have that one instrument to play with most of the time, I really want to make it varied.
“It’s All Building To A Fever Pitch”
“The Missing Reel”,The Studio’s fourth episode, was about as un-Birdmanas Sanchez was going to get on the series. As Rogen’s Matt Remick donned a trenchcoat and fedora to track down a missing film reel, the music began to evoke classic detective noir films.“They really wanted this noir instrumentation,”the composer shared,“but they told me they only wanted it from the second half to the end of the episode, so that’s what they did. Once they heard it, they really dug the second half, and they thought the first half sounded too empty.”
Because Sanchez had recorded the first half of the episode to a metronome,“I was able to start stacking all the other instrumentation, which included horns, strings, woodwinds, basses, keyboards, harp, and stuff like that.”Despite the back-and-forth, “The Missing Reel” wound up becoming one of Sanchez’s favorites:“It was like carte blanche to do a completely different thing.”
But it wasThe Studioepisode 10–the finale–that proved the toughest to get right, even though Sanchez’s skillset was perfectly tailored to what it required.“It’s all building to a fever pitch,”Sanchez shared, adding,“they really wanted the tension to just keep building and building and building and building. And, of course,drums is the perfect instrument to create tension.I can do that all day long, but they also wanted some other sounds in there.”
According to the composer, Evan Goldberg specifically requested horns,“so then I made that one really horn heavy.”But that addition had the power to detract from the sheer power of Sanchez’s drumming, so the composer worked to“figure out how to amp up the tension with each scene that was going by.”
He found a novel solution in quite literallymaking the music rise unrelentingly in tempo and pitch throughout the episode, something that is not commonly done in a world of metronomes and computer software that aligns music to a visual grid.“I decided it would be cool to, with each scene,”Sanchez explained,“modulate one step up with all the instrumentation, and then [go] maybe three or four clicks faster.”
“You’re listening, basically, to variations of the same thing, but it’s just getting faster and higher.”
“The third scene just gets faster and higher and faster and higher,”Sanchez continued,“so by the halfway [point] of the episode, it’s just craziness all over the place. That was a bit challenging, but that was a lot of fun to do as well.”
Sanchez Explains Matching The Feeling That “Something Terrible Is Going To Happen”
Drums and percussion instruments are not generally the first things that come to mind when someone thinks of evocative, emotional music. But as a career drummer, Sanchez“absolutely”worked to match the inner emotions (often, turmoil) of characters like Matt and the meme-worthy Sal Sapterstein.“I really want to get the color of the scene,”the composer said.
Although there were plenty of moments where the composer would play a jazz waltz with brushes in the background, saying“it’s just propelling the scene forward,”other moments had Sanchez acutely matching deeper feelings.“For scenes where [Matt] is very tense, or he’s having those confrontations with Bryan Cranston’s character, which is always impending doom–something terrible is going to happen every time Bryan Cranston comes on in any scene–I started scoring those with deep mallets, like war drums.”
“It seems like they’re going to go to war or something.”
Antonio Sanchez Shares His Own The Studio-Esque Story
“‘This Is The End Of My Career’”
“Will Smith was there, Quincy Jones was there, andI was supposed to play with this amazing quintet–with Herbie Hancock, Marcus Miller, Kenny Garrett, and Ambrose Akinmusire.It was going to be the last thing that day, and I was absolutely thrilled that I was going to be able to do this, but it was a very convoluted day in terms of scheduling. There were two or three drummers that were playing, [and] we were playing with, I don’t know, 15 different bands throughout the day. And there were speeches–there was just a lot of coordinating.”
“There were ushers that would come get you and tell you, ‘Okay, you’re going to be on one tune after this, so come to the side of the stage and wait there.’ Everything had been going according to plan the whole day, but I think I misunderstood something about the end of the day, andwhen I was supposed to be ready on the side of the stage, I went to my dressing room, which was in another building,thinking I had all this time to hang out and chill for a little bit before coming back.”
“All of a sudden, I hear somebody yelling my name, but it was like an angry animal. I was like, ‘That sounds like my name, but could it be?’ I opened the door to the dressing room, and I heard my name resonating through the hallways, but with such agony and anger and angst.And then it dawned on me. I was like, ‘Oh my God, I think I missed it.’”
“I ran downstairs, went through all these hallways with a bunch of people–I’m like, ‘excuse me, excuse me, excuse me’–I get to the end of that hallway, I open the door, and there’s a courtyard full of people, and I have to make my way through the courtyard. [I do that,] I open the stage door to the theater, and there are a million people there–all these musicians that want to see Herbie Hancock play.”
“I get to the side of the stage, and they’re already playing. And my drum set is all the way on the other side of the stage.”
“I’m thinking, ‘Okay, if I make a run for it, all the cameras are going to see me, but if I go behind the stage, I’m going to lose another half a minute.’ So, I just sprinted through the musicians and got to the drum set. I had my music and my stick bag, so I put my music on the stand,I start trying to open my stick bag, and the zipper gets stuck.I cannot tell you how flustered [I was], but I saw the butt of one of my sticks coming out, so I fished one out, then fished another one out.”
“Then, I look at my music, and of course I put it upside down.I turn around my music, and I’m thinking, ‘Oh my God, I think the bridge is coming. Is this the bridge?’ And boom, I come in, and thankfully it was the bridge, but I was so miserable.I was playing with my heroes, and here I am just thinking, ‘This is the end of my career.’That had never happened in my life, and it happens to me that day. I went back to my dressing room, and I remember texting my wife, ‘My career is over.’”
“Of course, I wanted to go and apologize to Herbie. I finally caught him by himself, and I went up to him, like, ‘Herbie, I’m so mortified. This has never happened to me. You’re one of my heroes, and you need to know I meant no disrespect.’ And he said, ‘Man, it was so beautiful, because when you didn’t come in, it was all airy and moving around, and then when you came in, it was focused. It was great.’I was like, ‘Oh, okay. You’re welcome, Herbie.’”
“That’s why Herbie’s Herbie–because you can give him the crappiest lemon and he’ll make the greatest lemonade. But that’s what nightmares are made of for musicians.”
