‘The Residence’ Composer Mark Mothersbaugh On Using Both The “Scholarly Right-Brain” & “Crazy Left-Brain” Sides Of Creativity

For composer Mark Mothersbaugh, the script for The Residence provided an interesting opportunity. Not only did it involve an interesting tale of a bird-watching detective, but the story beats had a jazz-like structure to the score that allowed Mothersbaugh to flex both the “scholarly” and “crazy” sides of his job.

The Residence follows detective Cordelia Cupp, played by Uzo Aduba, as she investigates the death of a member of the White House staff during an executive dinner. The pacing of the plot and constant cuts between the night of the murder and the questioning after the fact gave Motherbaugh the interesting challenge of balancing the elements within the score.

DEADLINE: What was it about the script that really captured your interest?

MARK MOTHERSBAUGH: Well, I love the idea of a bird-watcher detective, I have to tell you. In the early ’80s, I lived with Laraine Newman, who was a comedian, actress on Saturday Night Live on the original series, and once we were just talking and I asked, “If you were going to be in a movie, what would you want to do?” And she said, “I want to be a bird-watcher, that’s a detective.” She said that in the early ’80s, and then this script showed up 40 years later… I thought that was really cool. I hope she’s laughing when she watches the show because she might remember that she said that.

But the woman that’s the main character, Cordelia Cupp, she’s genius at it. She’s so good. Once I saw the footage, I was totally hooked. She’s no nonsense, but kind of eccentric and out there and it’s well acted and I’m glad I got to do the music for it.

DEADLINE: What were your initial thoughts on the score when you met with showrunner Paul Davies?

MOTHERSBAUGH: Well, I talked with Paul Davies and he pretty much was the brain, the center of everything. He created the scripts and he was director-showrunner and he had played around with putting jazz bebop and jazz quintet music in there. I love that genre to work in because jazz players are just so interesting. They’re like a combination of the scholarly right-brain orchestral players that I use in movies and also the kind of crazy left-brain creative guys that I use when I’m doing rock and roll or electronic. Jazz players have it both, and they’re so fun to work with. We put together a band that was small enough that it could fit in my studio, and I recorded a band every week. I just pretty much wrote music, and then they showed up and played. And I have guys that work here with me that were like a team and we put this music together. There was so much of it, and it was different than working on a feature where you got a large orchestra and you have to leave. I write it in here on synths and then on recording libraries and it’s all done in a computer, and then you have to orchestrate it and then take it out and go into a big room somewhere with the orchestra. This was nice to have it all in my place where I’d come to work and everybody would be inside and it’d be musicians just talking to each other.

DEADLINE: You can really feel that jazz-like energy in the score, matching the sometimes frantic nature of the story.

MOTHERSBAUGH: Yeah, it’s like the script always has a lot to do with helping you determine that, but to me, it’s mostly visuals that I work with. We all look at the visuals and that drives us. And there were some strong characters, so they really needed themes that would carry from episode to episode and develop so that by the time we got to the final episode, it would be everything blooms all at once.

DEADLINE: Were there any episodes that were particularly challenging to score?

MOTHERSBAUGH: I think the first episode was the most precious to Paul. It was very important for him that the first episode pointed everything in the right direction. And I mean, my mind doesn’t work like his, I imagine what it must be like to have a brain that could take this whole eight-episode series and have it in your mind and you’re balancing all these elements and then you shoot ‘em and then you see what it looks like when they’re on screen and then you’re like, this needs to be elevated, this needs to be tamped down, this needs to be swapped out… He’s thinking about all that kind of stuff, and I’m just taking my cues from him on what he needed help with. We worked the most on episode one, changing things in and out, and it got easier by the end.