‘You have to give artists the freedom to say no’

Susan Jacobs became the first ever recipient of an Emmy for music supervision last year thanks to her acclaimed work on hit US TV series Big Little Lies.

The win arrived after a 20+ year career that has seen Jacobs work on critically acclaimed films including Shortcuts, Keep the Lights On, Little Miss Sunshine, and American Hustle (for which she was nominated for a Grammy). She also soundtracked the Tonya Harding biopic I, Tonya, Silver Linings Playbook and TV series including Mozart in the Jungle and The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst. Her most recent project is the soundtrack for HBO mini-series Sharp Objects.

As Jacobs revealed during an interview at by:larm festival in Oslo earlier this year, the role of a Music Supervisor didn’t exist when she started her professional career, which was as an assistant to Island Records founder Chris Blackwell. Whilst working on the record label side her path crossed with director Robert Altman and she ended up as a Music Coordinator on his ’93 film Shortcuts.

Through managing Irish singer/songwriter Gavin Friday, who is prolific in the world of film scoring, Jacobs was involved in the music for Jim Sheridan’s In The Name of the Father, and the phone calls haven’t stopped since.

While her career path wasn’t immediately obvious, looking back, her taste making skills were honed from a very early age. It all began while battling for her mother’s attention at the family dinner table.

“We weren’t allowed TV so [someone was always going to] pick the dinner music. I’m one of nine children and when you’re the eighth of nine kids, all girls, one boy, you just want someone to recognise you. So my feeling about picking the songs that were going to play during dinner was about getting my mother’s attention for her to be like, ‘Oh, that’s so cool, I haven’t heard that in a long time.’”

Here Jacobs chats to Kristin Winsent — the Head of Music at Norwegian digital radio station NRK P13 — about the psychology of music supervision, professional bugbears and her strategy for securing licenses.

When a director comes to you for help with music, how do you normally work?

Every director is different, some want to have me present music and score ideas to them and know what they want when they hear it. Some have really strong ideas, and others have long relationships with a composer way before I come in.

For the most part, I think people hire composers too early. Directors will be like, Oh I’ve made this movie that feels like a Coen brothers movie I’m going to go hire Carter Burwell, who isn’t always going to be available. Composers get hired for the wrong reasons at the wrong time.

“Films are like children, once you shoot it and get the edit those things are like wild teenagers — they are so clear about what they want and don’t want.”

It’s great to have ideas and to try them but the movie will kick your butt when you’re wrong. Films are like children, once you shoot it and get the edit those things are like wild teenagers — they are so clear about what they want and don’t want. So I always let the movie tell me what it needs rather than going for some name. Patience is really important when it comes to putting music into films.

How do you change a director’s mind about music?

There is no one direction in that. I look at music like a colour box, some people tend to like yellows and oranges and you can have ten shades within that. I think of myself as a decorator, I put things up using a whole spectrum of colours and if the movie likes the music it will absorb it like a sponge.

When it just sits on top of it that’s when you know the music and picture aren’t married. Once you find that they are married, you can go really far and that’s when the director can have a lot of choice and you try to lead them to that place. Every song in film is ultimately the director’s choice.

Tell us the story about getting Alabama Shakes in Silver Linings Playbook.

I remember trying to find an ending title song for Silver Linings or a theme song from new bands. I tried to get the director David O. Russell into Alabama Shakes and he was like, ‘No, they are all wrong’.

When something felt right to me I didn’t let go of it but I never talked about it again. The editor really liked them and many months after, David was sitting watching an end reel and we had just put the song in there.

He watched the whole thing, this great music comes up and it works to the picture and he was like, ‘Wow, what is that?’ We said… That band you hate, Alabama Shakes. That was it, he went and met them and we ended up putting them in the whole opening sequence.

Often, music is better played in the picture than outside because it’s only about what it’s going to do to the picture.When something feels right you just have to be really patient and lead somebody to try it.

So part of your job is psychology.

Yeah, a big part of the job is psychology, dropping Xanax in coffees in a metaphorical way like; here, chill out, it’s okay!

“A big part of my job is psychology, dropping Xanax in coffees in a metaphorical way like; here, chill out, it’s okay!”

My job is to make directors understand that music is a point of view they have a choice about. Just like how you light a room or how you do anything — I don’t think people think about music like that enough.

You did the music for I, Tonya, was that a difficult film to get licenses for?

I, Tonya was a movie that I didn’t want to do. When I got the call there was already a supervisor in the UK working on the movie, and they had gotten into a lot of trouble. No-one wanted their music in the movie, Tonya Harding was toxic. When somebody called me going, ‘We’re going to do a biopic on Tonya Harding’, I had the same reaction and I wasn’t interested.

But when I talked to the director Craig Gillespie, really as a favour to a friend of his, there was a confidence about him — he really believed in the movie.

I love Margot Robbie as an actress so I saw the film and I was pissed off because it was so good and I knew that I would have no summer, I gave up all my weekends for that film!

I saw myself at the end when Margot’s character playing Tonya said, ‘And all of you judge me,’ I really felt like, Yeah, I do. It was such a prescient film about how we label complex people to being good, bad, black or white.

If people realised how much Tonya had gone through and was still performing at that rate even with all the abuse, the pressure and the judgement… we just thought she was a bad girl. I had so much admiration for her when I met her, she is a powerful woman.

So I went into the job saying, Here is the problem everybody has denied. Mark Knopfler’s Romeo and Juliet was a very important piece of music for Craig, he played it the whole time he was shooting and put it into this big scene.

[When pitching for the song], the first supervisor described the scene to Mark like ‘Kiss, get in car, gets hit, make love, get hit.’ So the pitch was like kiss, hit, sex, hit, violence, and he said no. They kept going back but he still said no.

I sent the scene off to Mark with a letter I spent about three hours writing so that it was short and powerful. When I worked with Chris Blackwell, he always said if you can’t say it in a paragraph, don’t say it at all. I wanted every word to have meaning.

I asked him to please take a look at the film and I gave him just enough and said, Let me know if you want to see more. If you ask people to look at something for five minutes, they will, if you send a two hour movie, forget it.

They called and said, ‘We’d really like to see the rest of the film.’ I knew I had him then because the movie was so good so I just let it speak for itself. He left this most beautiful note to me through his manager, which was equally powerful and simple. It said, ‘Please tell Susan Jacobs thank you, I would have never known’.

That’s the job, to marry artists. I always say that I’m the energy to the appliances. They know how to do everything, I just help them get it done. You can have ideas but if you can’t facilitate those ideas it’s equally dead.

How long are you willing to wait for someone to say yes?

I come at it with a lot of respect for the fact artists didn’t write the music for the film. I’ve never gone to an artist and said, Please we have to have your song or the movie [isn’t going to work]. I don’t believe that you push someone into a corner and make them feel guilty, it’s very disrespectful.

‘I’ve never gone to an artist and said, Please we have to have your song or the movie [isn’t going to work]. I don’t believe that you push someone into A corner and make them feel guilty, it’s very disrespectful.”

They didn’t write that song for your movie and maybe its personal to them, maybe it has a deeper meaning or maybe they just don’t want the song in the film. They have to have the freedom to say no and that’s why we get so many yes’s.

You have to ask with openness: If you like this film and want to be a part of it we would love to have that. I’ll pursue things in the way that I’ll try and make sure they have all the information in order to make a decision but I don’t believe in harassing people. If they say no you take it. There is never one song and nobody notices what you don’t get.

Do you get a lot of artists submitting music to you when you work with a new project?

The hardest problem is the lack of the filter. I grew up with great A&R people like Chris Blackwell and Ahmet Ertegun that used to filter through everything. In some ways it’s great because you can discover music but the volume is so daunting. [Finding something useful] is all down to luck.

I really like to work with artists and scoring. Most of the films I’ve done don’t have well known composers. I love it when people don’t know what they are doing, when it’s not so formulaic.

What would your advice be to an artist who wanted to get into scoring?

The biggest piece of advice I can say to everybody about writing music for film is to have a lot of patience in the music. The hardest thing for artists that are coming from bands and trying to get into film is that there is no space [in their music], and you need a lot of space for music to work in film.

You have to have room for dialogue and images. So take some of your ideas and simplify them, strip out all the stuff that the image or dialogue could say. People tend to write in loops and anything that loops gets really boring when you put it to picture. If you don’t keep making modulations and changes, the thing falls apart, quickly.

I always encourage people to look at images and turn off the music. Or put their songs on while having a conversation. If the music is pulling your ear away while you’re talking to a friend and annoying you, it’s going to annoy the picture.

What’s your advice for anyone looking to get into the work that you do?

Find small filmmakers and do it. I think the success of my career has never been about anything other than what is going to make this movie better, I really love when I can take a scene and completely change it.

The lucky part for me is I don’t get to decide, the director does. You have to have enough time to keep putting music in, step back and watch. You can’t do a scene and go, that’s great, because it might be great in the scene but not in the whole run.

How do you deal with the licensing side of the job?

For me, it’s part of the job. If a director wants a song or if I want to pitch a song, I’m gong to be on the frontline of the firing squad in getting that song. I don’t want someone in the middle of it.

A lot of supervisors hire licensing people but if I had a licensing attorney, Mark Knofler would have said, ‘No thanks,’ and they would have moved on.

The licensing side is equally difficult and creative — how do you get so and so interested in whatever you’re doing? A lot of people have very successful careers who use licensing attorneys, but you don’t need to and I just happen to be a control freak!

How has your relationship with the music industry changed during your career, and do you think today’s business is making the most of sync opportunities?

The music industry right now is so sprawling compared to where I came from, where you’d look at an Island, 4th & B’way or Atlantic Records logo and you’d buy that record based on the logo alone because you understood what it meant. But there are still some independent labels and A&R people out there that I love.

My biggest problem is that I get sent links to music with no context and no visual. I’m a very visual person and very crap with lyrics. I really wish that people would send links with an image, some liner notes that say what the song is about and where it’s coming from — something personal.

Instead it’s like here’s an MP3 that a lot of times you’re not in the mood for, but if you read something about why they wrote it or what it meant to them, you might listen to it differently.

How do you manage small budgets?

Budgets are always going to be a problem probably because [the music] comes at the end of the [film-making] process. I finished a film recently where they shot the whole music budget. I like to use those times as an opportunity to find new artists that are doing incredible things. You have to keep it positive otherwise you’d lose your mind!

I worked on a film called Everything is Illuminated where we used a composer nobody had ever heard of before. He didn’t own a piano so I recorded everything on a hand held microphone on an acoustic piano, and we put all the money into hiring an orchestra. You just have to keep being creative.