Michael Gatt is a composer for film and television as well as the Creative Director of Gattsound. After touring with various bands, he spent years traveling with nothing but his guitar and a backpack, visiting over 50 countries, and jamming with locals all around the world. Upon his return, Michael set his sights on composing. He established GattSound, a boutique music and mix facility, and began composing for commercials, video games, and movie trailers. After scoring a show for Shark Week, he was instantly hooked on the story telling nature of long form composing and scoring a short film for the Despicable Me Minions franchise led to numerous collaborations with Illumination and Universal, including six more short films featuring characters from Minions, The Secret Life of Pets, and SING. Syfy’s new Grindhouse homage Blood Drive has presented new challenges, as he discussed with Paul Simpson…

 

Blood Drive is a very violent show.

It is, but one of the charms of the show is that underneath that is a whole other narrative that’s going on which is very meta, and done with a nod and a wink.

So how did you get involved?

I have to give my agent, Alexander Vangelos, credit; he has just been phenomenal. He heard about Blood Drive very early on and just thought that I would be the right fit. I think about six months before they would really have been looking at composers, he started pitching me, and my understanding of the story is that he actually called the show creator, James Roland, on his cell phone, and said Michael Gatt’s your guy.

James told me that they had received quite a lot of submissions but something about mine really resonated. We had a meeting, and it just went great. I had read the first seven scripts of the first season and I just got completely engrossed in what was on the page, and so by the time we took the meeting, we totally hit it off.

What did you give them as a sample of your work?

I did have some exposure to what the show was about and as soon as I heard that it was going to be this homage to different genres of Grindhouse, the reel that I put together was quite eclectic. My background as a composer is exactly that: I’ve done everything from Shark Week shows to a lot of animation work with characters from Illuminations – characters from SING and The Secret Life of Pets, and the Minions from Despicable Me.

I have this really wide range of music that I’ve done, and that’s exactly what I sent in. That’s one of the things that really resonated with them.

There’s a lot of very different visual styles even in just the first episode which presumably you’re matching with the music – there was hard rock, Spaghetti Western, a certain amount of lyrical stuff in there. Was that what they were after to match the mix?

I have to say they really gave a ton of free rein with how I approached it. Right from day one, the brief was very short in what they were looking for, and I started scoring music to script without picture. To James and all the people behind the show’s credit, the characters on the page were so fleshed out I felt like I had a good sense of who these characters were – and also as I was reading, I was thinking “I can’t believe they’re going to put this on television. Are they really going to do this? This is going to be amazing.”

As a result, I really leaned into being a little bit on the nose with certain elements in the score – the Spaghetti western elements you mention, I imagine you’re probably talking about the tremolo guitar that’s in a lot of Grace’s moments. That’s part of what I was hoping for and I think what happened was the score really became part of the narrative. It really reinforced that this was done with a wink, and we are in on this. We know what we’re doing here. They did say they wanted a rock score so I leaned into that as well.

When I set out with Blood Drive, I wanted the score to be signature, and because it is this dystopian otherworld, I wanted it to not sound of this world, and yet have some threads that tie back to Los Angeles and the United States, because that’s where the first season is set.

Are there composers you feel influenced by, or are you somebody who absorbs music almost by osmosis?

I’ve never articulated it that way, but the latter of what you said is very much how I operate.

I’m not a classically schooled composer – I’ve played in bands and guitar is my primary instrument – so yes, for me at this point in my career, I have that formal knowledge, I do operate completely from heart-space.

With Blood Drive, I sat with a guitar tone expert and a synth designer and told them what I was looking for. I brought some samples and said “These are the sounds I want you to use as foundation, as a starting point for what we’ll create as custom sounds for Blood Drive”. In fact one of the synth sounds for Blood Drive is supposed to sound like the accelerator of a car, so I can hit a key, and using the mod wheel of the synthesiser, I can make it rev up. That’s used all over the score. If it wasn’t a show like Blood Drive you might not be able to get away with that stuff. It’s almost a little bit too on the nose.

Ultimately, I would say, yes, through osmosis, picking things up through an extremely diverse life and career in music.

Are you purely electronic on this or do you have some live instruments as well?

Actually there’s a fair amount of live stuff as well. I’m playing all of the guitars and all of the basses, and I have a cellist, Ro Rowan, who plays cello on the entire first season. Sometimes it’s not completely out front but just bringing in a handful of live instruments gives everything, for lack of a better term, a humanity. It raises up a heightened connect to the music.

That said, it is a heavily synthed score – analogue synths that have been tweaked. There are orchestral sounds in the score, but everything except the strings is really so effective that you really can’t tell – you think you might be hearing a brass section but it’s so distorted and so tweaked and mangled, you wouldn’t know what it was. I ran it through such heavy effects!

Did you work with particular themes or sounds for the characters, or is it more generic across the piece?

Actually with Blood Drive, there are recurring themes that are used quite heavily. That was a very conscious thing from where I was operating. I thought since each episode leans into a different Grindhouse genre, along with the instrumentation and the custom set of sounds, having these very identifiable themes would help glue everything together.

Just from reading the scripts I had written eight pieces of music that I sent to the show creators and within those eight pieces were the themes for Slink, Grace, Arthur, Heart Enterprises, Blood Drive – the actual Blood Drive main title theme. Those get reused and reimagined through thematic transformation throughout the entire season. That’s one of the many things that made scoring the show such fun – figuring out ways to sneak those things in there.

Were you scoring the shows in chronological order?

Yes. Once we got rolling, anywhere from 23 to 30 minutes of score was being generated every six days – it was very, very fast. But that’s also what made it super-fun and the people making the show could not have been more of a joy to work with.

You know you watch those DVD extras and everyone gushes about each other? I can authentically say that that’s what it was like. Everybody empowered each other and because of how fast things were going, people made decisions – it was awesome.

It’s kind of like uniting aingst a common enemy – that enemy being the clock or budget – and everyone figuring out how they’re going to win that battle, if you will. With Blood Drive, for sure, everyone felt that there was something very special about this show. This is something that’s very uncharted and fresh, and while Grindhouse gets used as a descriptor, to their credit they’ve made a show that is completely their own.

Blood Drive is its own world – it is a homage not a facsimile.

It has that “we’re going so far over the top we’re coming round the other side” element to it! What was the biggest challenge for you?

I think you can say this about any piece of music you write or any show you score: the biggest challenge is letting go of a cue or an episode score. That’s where the deadlines become your friend. It’s almost like that old adage of playing in bands where an album is never finished, it’s just when you decide to hit print. You can just tweak and tweak, and one of the beauties of being on a deadline such as they are in television scoring where you have to go with your gut – when it’s done, it’s done.

What have you learned as a composer?

I think more than learning something new, I would probably have to go with it reinforced some things that had served me in the past but really came to a head scoring Blood Drive – which is really about being prepared when you get into a score, really having a plan and a conscious approach to how you’re going to do this.

Especially with that kind of turnaround time, and what we were all trying to achieve with Blood Drive which was really to make an epic, there’s no just sitting down with a blank page and hoping for the best.

For me, it was a very calculated approach to this: sitting with synth and guitar experts and creating a very specific set of sounds and very specific themes and saying “this is what the show is going to sound like, these are the themes”. That became a huge expeditor of being able to generate material that was appropriate for the show on the schedule that it was. I felt like whatever I wrote, it would sound like Blood Drive by the sheer nature of the instrumentation and the thematic recurrence.

And assuming it goes again, do you have ideas of what you’d like to do musically for a second year?

You can’t see my smile! You can’t push it too far with a show like this. I’m smiling about a second season thinking not only of what I can do with the score, but what they will do with the show.

It does feel like Wacky Races on acid…

That’s a pretty solid descriptor, but to the show’s credit, I think you get so quickly pulled into the world and the characters’ viewpoints that let’s just say that there’s much more than a race going on.

It has many familiar elements, but it’s the way they’re put together.

I think it’s to their credit that they made something all their own while still honouring this homage, these traditions.

Blood Drive begins tonight (June 14) on Syfy – read our review of episode 1 here

Thanks to Beth Krakower and Grecco Bray for their help in arranging this interview