EnglishConvention - Genndy Tartakovsky musical experience : Discover our Joanne Higginbottom’s interview
By Mulder, Los Angeles, 26 july 2023
During Adult swim festival on the green, Joanne Higginbottom graced the stage, accompanied by fellow composer Tyler Bates and a captivating live orchestra known as The Genndy Tartakovsky Musical Experience. Together, they delivered a mesmerizing concert, showcasing the enchanting music from Adult Swim's beloved shows, Primal and Unicorn: Warriors Eternal.
Q : Hello Joanne, please can you make a short presentation about your background before becoming a composer ?
Joanne Higginbottom : Concerning my background. I was actually born in Wales in the UK and I went to the Royal Welsh College of Music there and studied composition and music technology so I was writing classical scores and working in a recording studio so sort of learning both of those things turned me towards film music and of course a lot of that takes place in America so I started talking to as many people as possible and trying to get opportunities out here and I ended up getting in touch with Tyler Bates who I still work with now and co-compose many projects with and I moved out here 12 years ago and I've been living in Los Angeles since working on some fantastic films and TV shows
Q : What can you tell us about your long collaboration with Tyler Bates ?
Joanne Higginbottom : I've been working with Tyler Bates for 12 years now he honestly feels like a friend and a family member as much as he does a work colleague we get along very well. We've been working together so long now that a lot of things go without saying musically between us we just understand each other musically and of course him being a guitarist and me being a percussionist it works very well because I sort of do a lot of the rhythmical elements of our music and then he'll come in and do at the grunge and add cool effects and add guitar parts and we keep swapping sessions back into and collaborating
Q : What do you remember about your performance at the Genndy Tartakovsky musical experience in San Diego ?
Joanne Higginbottom : what do I remember. It went by so quickly. It was fantastic. it was so lovely to hear the music for unicorn Warriors Eternal which we've been working on for the past year that music is so epic and when we wrote it for the show of course much of it is on the compute. It's not done with live Orchestra so I've been secretly hoping for many months that we can have a live Orchestra play it and when Adult Swim got in touch and wanted to do the show at Comic-Con we absolutely said yes immediately and started working on it was lovely to hear the orchestra playing that music it gave me goosebumps it was wonderful and then of course Tyler and I got on stage and performed the uh a few pieces from Primal and Samurai Jack at the end and that's just fun it's been a couple of years since I've been on stage and it was really fun to rock out with him
Q : What is for you the main difficulties that you have met during the creation Primal and Unicorn: Warriors Eternal score performance ?
Joanne Higginbottom : The biggest difficulties of course there's always Tech difficulties we were running the entire performance from my laptop here and um you know running hdmis and things to making sure that massive screen it looked very good and clear. It was a big thing. The other thing is that I'm very fortunate that we have very good orchestral players because we showed up at 10 A.M that morning and no one had ever met before and the players had never seen that music before so we handed them the score and it's a very difficult score. It wasn't really written to be performed. It was written to hit the cuts in the show. So there's some very odd time signatures and bars so they did an amazing job we had two hours of rehearsal in the morning and then we came back and did the show at night so I guess the biggest difficulty was rehearsing as quickly as possible to make it sound as great as possible
Q : How do you share your work or this with Taylor Bates ?
Joanne Higginbottom : I do drums and percussion and because he is guitar and guitar violon and bass guitar that tends to be how we divide things up when we meet with Genndy Tartakovsky and we watch the show and not understand where it needs music anything particularly melodic. He might start with the guitar and then I'll start a lot of the action tribal things and then I'll receive his session and he'll receive my session and then he does Melodies on mine and I do percussion on his and then I'll sort of produce the score out and add any orchestral elements and synthetic elements at the end
Q : What must be for you a great collaboration between a director and composer ?
Joanne Higginbottom : what is the best collaboration. Honestly I would say this but Genndy is one of the best directors we've ever worked with. Of course, I've worked on a lot of movies and TV shows at this point and one thing that is in the business now which a lot of movies and television shows do is when we receive the show there's temporary music in there and we listen and say okay do you like this and do you want something similar. Do you want something different You know when we receive Genndy shows, it's silent the whole there's no music in the whole show and it's very inspiring because he trusts us and doesn't want to give us any ideas or sway our minds before we start. it's nice to have a completely blank slay and come up with completely original music instead of because sometimes when there's temporary music they cut to the Beats so then we have to match those beats for example from the temporary music so when that's not there we just get to be completely creative and we only get that with gang
Q : What is for you the main duty of a good composer ?
Joanne Higginbottom : the main duty, you know it's interesting. I think funnily enough film music and television music is the only music that's written to not actually be listened to I think. Our job is to I think if you notice the music in a scene in a television show or film then the composers are not actually doing the most amazing job I think our job is to make you feel scared or make you sad or make you in love or emotional and we get to heighten all of those emotions and so really we're having more of a psychological impact than you know going oh that's a great Melody you know John Williams got to do that and that sort of old school filmmaking and it's fantastic but I think these days it's all about creating an atmosphere or influencing the audience and how they feel which is really fun.
Q : What must be for you the purpose of a great score and how do you found a powerful inspiration to create this music ?
Joanne Higginbottom : to be honest because I'm from a classical music background I still listen to a lot of classical music. I love Bartok and Stravinsky and Karlheinz Stockhausen and lots of. As weird as possible so I still listen to a lot of that because there's so many amazing harmonies and rhythmical things in classical music that that can work very well in film but also the other thing is creating. I love getting on synthesizers and creating very weird sounds and I sort of usually before we start a project. We'll do some experimenting for a couple of days and just create you know we could record chains or spoons or for the Punisher when we were working on that Marvel TV show I went to Home Depot and bought buckets and boxes and all of the percussion in that show was all stuff from Home Depot and chains and pipes and so I think that's always inspiring and it makes it really fun instead of just grabbing the traditional instruments too
Q : As a big fan of John Wick, can you tell us about your work on the 4 films in this cinematic saga ?
Joanne Higginbottom : thankfully I've been here since the beginning with John Wick and I was even in the very first meeting with Joel and Tyler and Chad and Dave when they came in and I met Keanu the very first time he came in and he was in very nice, very cool. In fact one of the coolest celebrities I've ever met honestly. In fact I think, can you see I have a poster behind me of John Wick and he's actually signed it for me but Joel Richard is an amazing composer who works with Tyler on John Wick and of course his writing always impresses me and I love working with him. I've done some additional music writing for that I mean there is those movies are very long and there's so much music in those movies because there's so much fighting and so much chasing and there's always songs or scores with it so I've picked up a couple of pieces of music here and there to help them out near the end but those movies they tend to cut them they keep cutting and cutting until the very end of the project so we're constantly changing the music even when it's approved to okay now they've cut two seconds out of that scene now they've cut four seconds out of the scene so we're always moving and it's a difficult job but the films are really fun
Q : What can you tell us about your long collaboration with Marvel Studios ?
Joanne Higginbottom : so I think we started now these are of course these are jobs that Taylor Bates is the composer of but because I work very closely with him I've had the opportunity to work on them with him and we started off with the Punisher the TV show and that was great that was actually turned out to be a very grungy score and like I said we used all the crazy percussion from Home Depot so that was a lot of my job on that one and of course then we got Guardians of the galaxy and Guardians the Galaxy 2 with James Gunn and they were wonderful to work on and actually inspired a little bit of Unicorn Warriors Eternal because that type of writing is very thematic and very melodic so you're using a lot of trumpets and French horns and it was good to practice with guardians before unicorn came for me.
Q : Will you be interested to work with european directors ?
Joanne Higginbottom : I'm honestly anyone who has amazing creativity and is respectful to the process and I do think that European filmmaking is still classier than American filmmaking I think um American filmmaking is very like made for popcorn you know we think Hollywood that's kind of what yeah that's what we're making and I do think um I've done a couple of things in the UK because I'm from there and I think the pa the pacing and the editing is slower and the film and television is able to breathe a little more in America we're very quick with our cuts and honestly the slower the cut the more options musically we have to fill those gaps with themes and music so of course and I would I would adore working with European filmmakers
Q : Can you talk at all about your recent projects ?
Joanne Higginbottom : my most recent project. Actually I am composing a movie right now with Genndy Tartakovsky again. it's called Fixed. It's an animated movie. it's R-rated and it's about a dog and his last uh week or two before he gets fixed before it does that make sense so it's it's very funny and actually. I'm glad I got up early to talk to you this morning because I have to get up even earlier tomorrow because we are recording in Scotland the Scottish national Orchestra are actually playing our score tomorrow so because of the time difference I'll be tuning in on video like I am with you they're eight hours ahead and they start at 2PM so we have a 6 a.m start tomorrow to record strings and hopefully that movie will be out early next year in cinemas in my left kitchen.
Q : Do you have any advice for aspiring composers, like anything you wish you knew when you were starting out ?
Joanne Higginbottom : I think a lot of people now go to school for film composition and I do think that you learn some very useful techniques and things from school but when it comes to the reality of working in the business you having you know your certificate your degree isn't doesn't really help you get your jobs what directors are looking for and other composers who are hiring assistants and producers and production companies they want credits so one thing I didn't I realized this in my last year of college and I knew I needed more credits to my name so I started reaching out to all the universities in England that did film and animation and like directing like places that created film and said if anyone needs music for their for their short if anyone needs music for their anything music video anything I will write music for it and that helped me so much when I came to America when they asked what I did I could say this short film this short film this short I had 13 under my belt when I arrived here and those are what got me my jobs that not sadly not my degree certificate even though I learned so many amazing things at the college so I would recommend reaching out to as many film schools as possible and learning how to actually do the job and score.
SDCC 2023 : Genndy Tartakovsky Musical Experience (clip)
Joanne Higginbottom was born and raised in Wales. She found herself immersed in the heart of the film industry thanks to a chance connection with the celebrated film composer Tyler Bates, whom she greatly admired. While studying Music Technology and Sound Art at the Royal Welsh College of Music, Joanne contacted Tyler, expressing her admiration for his work and citing specific cues and scores that had impressed her. She then spent a month interning with him, during which she worked tirelessly, paving the way for her professional collaboration with Bates. After graduating in Wales, Joanne kept in touch with Tyler, and her first official recording session with him took place at Capitol Records in Los Angeles. From then on, her career took off and she became an integral member of Bates' team, seamlessly combining her drumming background with his penchant for combining rock 'n' roll and classical music.
Starting out as an assistant, Joanne learned and honed her skills through hands-on experience, until she obtained her own studio. Working on a variety of projects with Bates has enabled her to diversify her musical portfolio, adapting her approach according to each project's specific instrumentation and requirements. Although Joanne prefers to record real instruments, she also uses samples and sound design tools to enhance her productions. She relies on software instruments and effects, keeping her Pro Tools session and equipment close at hand for an efficient workflow. In her creative process, Joanne places importance on life experiences and emotional expression, seeing music as a means of conveying feelings and ideas. She visualizes music in her mind before translating it into reality, relying on artistic instinct rather than software tools. Along the way, Joanne's collaboration with Tyler Bates has been instrumental in the development of her career, and her passion for music composition continues to flourish as she contributes to various projects in the film industry.
We would like to thank Joanne Higginbottom for answering to our questions.