(Welcome to “Notes on a Score,” GVN’s interview series highlighting the composers and musicians behind some of the year’s most acclaimed films and television series.)
It may not look like it on the surface, but Citizen Sleuth demands to be seen with an audience. The second feature from first-time documentary director Chris Kasick follows the infamous rise and fall of Mile Marker 181, a true crime podcast hosted by Emily Nestor. What begins as a playful examination of true crime fandom patiently morphs into a stunning interrogation of its ethics and boundaries. Its final moments will have any unassuming audience in collective shock.
A film this humble in origin would be lucky to screen at a few independent theaters, on the off-chance a quality distributor picked it up. But Kasick got luckier – much luckier; he was invited to show the film at this past year’s edition of the SXSW Film & TV Festival. P. Andrew Willis, the film’s composer, was also in attendance for what became a sold-out World Premiere screening.
“The audience seemed to react the way everybody wanted them to,” says Willis, speaking to Geek Vibes Nation from his home studio in Boston. “It couldn’t have gone too much better.” Willis’ score is one of the secret ingredients to the film’s aforementioned transformation. By channeling a familiar “true crime” sound, Willis sets the foundation for Kasick to then subvert audience expectations in a major way.
Both Willis and Kasick cut their teeth working with master documentarian Errol Morris on projects like First Person and The Fog of War. That’s how the two became familiar with each other, but it wasn’t until Kasick’s debut feature, Uncle Nick, that the two would formally collaborate. When it came time to score Citizen Sleuth, which begins with a Morris-inspired opening sequence, Kasick suggested Willis return to one of their mentor’s most iconic films.
“He was like, ‘Go to the Thin Blue Line soundtrack and listen to “The Electric Chair.”’” The piece, composed by Philip Glass, begins with two different string melodies being played in counterpoint. “He wanted something similar where two themes were operating simultaneously.” Willis decided to follow suit and incorporate strings into his music, which gave him license to fully lean into the genre’s signature sound. “We were like, ‘We’ve got to do some true crime tropes in this. We just have to.’ Once they were introduced, we were like, ‘Well, we can have any strings we want at this point.’”
The challenge was balancing this tongue-and-cheek approach with the film’s darker edges. “Most of the fun stuff was in the front and middle of the movie, before the latter half gets very serious. By the end, when she has a reckoning point, the music had to take a very serious tone because she’s struggling with how to approach how things had evolved in her ‘investigation.’” Willis uses air quotes, referring to the hollow nature of Nestor’s theories surrounding Jaleayah Davis’ murder.
Towards the end of the film, Kasick personally interviews Nestor’s top suspects: Davis’ friends who were with her the night she died. Nestor is convinced they are conniving murderers, but their cries of defamation flip the script. This is reflected in an essential, if uncharacteristically ambient moment for the score. “Chris was just like, ‘Man, this should sound like angels.’ It had to have a gravity to it.”
In this exclusive conversation with Geek Vibes Nation, Willis goes in-depth on collaborating with Kasick, the choice to pair strings and synths throughout the score, and the cringiness of “CrimeCon.” Here is that conversation, edited for length and clarity.
The film had its premiere at South by Southwest, which was when you first got to see the finished film. Talk to me a little about the experience about being at that festival. Were you able to gauge what audiences’ reactions were to the film?
The festival was fun. I was there for four days. The premiere screening was a packed house, and I went to the second screening as well, which was also a sold-out screening. Both times, the audience seemed to react the way everybody wanted them to. They laughed at the parts that I thought were also funny, so all the feedback I got from it was good. It couldn’t have gone better, in my perspective. The festival itself was fun. I had never met the team in person – I’m in Boston and they’re in Los Angeles – so it was good to hang out with everybody. We spent one day grabbing food and running around seeing movies, so it was a good time.
I’ve got to ask, what did you guys see?
I saw three docs: the Donna Summer biopic, which was pretty good, one about a [mariachi] band from Texas…
Yeah, Going Varsity in Mariachi.
Yeah! They were all there, too, which was kind of wild, the kids in their mariachi outfits. Then my friend, Chad [Ervin], who lives in Vermont, was down [in Austin] because he had edited Join or Die, which was pretty good. Definitely worth seeing. It’s about joining clubs and how society has fallen since people stopped doing social things as groups, and that was pretty deep. I would say of the three, that one was probably my favorite just because it left me with a feeling afterwards.
I know that you’ve scored true crime documentaries before, but what was it like working on a film where so much of the ethics and notions of true crime podcasting are being questioned?
A lot of the true crime stuff I’ve worked on has been directed by Errol Morris, and he’s usually pointing out all that stuff. It didn’t hurt that the director, Chris Kasick, and the cinematographer, Jared Washburn, were people who have worked for Errol on and off for years. That was my connection with them to begin with, so I was always coming at true crime from that perspective, with a questioning eye.
So this has been a long time coming, in a certain way.
Yeah. Chris and I got started in the business when Errol was doing First Person. I’m based in Boston and Errol was based in Boston and I just happened to be working with John Kusiak, who was doing the score [for that film]. When I met him, he was mixing Errol Morris’ documentary Mr. Death and I started assisting him on that project and then went into scoring work over time. I didn’t really know Chris well back then – we were on opposite ends of the production, but he was on my radar. This was around 2001. We eventually worked on the score for his movie Uncle Nick around 2015. Since we had a deeper working relationship where we had completed a whole project as a team before, we were both very comfortable collaborating on Citizen Sleuth.
Speaking of Chris, in a piece you wrote for No Film School about working with him on this film, you said, “I love working with Chris because he has constantly evolving ideas about the music, and it’s a fun challenge to see if I can actually make them happen.” This sounds like something every composer would want from a collaborator, to be in the same boat where you want to see where the music grows.
Yeah, and he wanted to make something special for this film and I’m all in on that. I want to try new things and come up with something cool that everybody’s happy with. I’m a team player.
Where did the ideas for Citizen Sleuth’s score begin and where did they evolve as the film progressed?
They had the film fairly temped out and were sitting on it for a while before I got involved. There were some temp music challenges, but Chris gave me some direction on one particular spot that was the place to start, which was the Errol Morris homage where [subject Emily Nestor] points out the crime scene on the highway. He was like, “Go to the Thin Blue Line soundtrack and listen to ‘The Electric Chair.’”
I love that.
He wanted something similar where two themes were operating simultaneously. That was the first cue he liked and then we just started branching out, hitting some of the more challenging spots where the temp was. I started bringing in some weird, old keyboards that were pretty wonky. That started grabbing his attention in some of those trouble spots.
Every time I interview a composer, whether I like it or not, the temp music monster finds its way into the conversation.
[laughs] It does! It’s just the way things are. I have experience with it, so I was like, “okay, let’s just try not to copy the temp music and make something really cool.” Over time, you hammer that thought process home until it lands on something. I think we got something good in the end, considering none of the original temp music is present in the final film.
I want to dive into some of the instrumentation choices. The strings and the synths are playing with each other in this really interesting way throughout the score. What’s the appeal of putting those two vastly different instruments together?
The synths that worked the best on this film were the ones that were slightly out of tune. It just had an unsettling quality but was mostly on the soft side. Strings sit well right on top of that. The strings were funny in a lot of places and dramatic in a few places, but they’re easy to blend with other stuff the way I was writing them. It was all chords and compact orchestration. We brought the strings in because we were like, “We’ve got to do some true crime tropes in this. We just have to.” The plucking strings came in for that and once they were introduced, we were like, “Well, we can have any strings we want at this point.” I always lean back on Nino Rota’s work in some of the more surreal Fellini movies. The sound of that music is always sitting in the back of my head when that kind of cue comes up, so I’ve got to bring the strings in there, if I can.
This brings up an interesting idea. In the score, there’s a playfulness in terms of utilizing true crime tropes. At the same time, as the movie goes on, the consequences of everything start to feel very real. What was the balance like, musically, knowing when to have fun, but then also knowing when to let the gravity of the moments take hold?
That was a challenge. I’ve got to give a shoutout to Jeff [Seymann Gilbert], the editor, because he was really, really good at communicating ideas about how the music was going to play over the arc of the movie. Most of the fun stuff was in the front and middle of the movie, before the latter half gets very serious. You get a lot of lightness as we’re getting the backstory of Emily and her traveling to CrimeCon.
“CrimeCon” really made me cringe, I’m not going to lie. [laughs]
[laughs] Yeah. I don’t know if I would want to go, but maybe I would just once to see what it was like. I get the feeling that that montage told me everything I need to know. But by the end, when she has a reckoning point, the music had to take a very serious tone because she’s struggling with how to approach how things had evolved in her “investigation.” You can’t see my air quotes, but they’re there.
Talk to me more about your relationship with Jeff. Were you fully editing to a lock or was there still flexibility with picture?
I think I got involved somewhere between rough cut and final cut, so there was a lot of picture evolution still happening while I was working. Jeff is very experienced, and he would see problem areas and point them out. He was very good at describing how a certain cue needs to be different from another cue [and articulating] what it’s helping to support in the scene. He was very good at being like, “Okay, this is good up to this point, but the story changes right here, so we need the music to shift here.” He had very strong opinions and then kicked it back to Chris for the final decision. It was just a good working, collaborative team. We had the assistant editor, then the editor, then Chris, and then me. We had a pretty tight little group there.
Were there any notes that Chris gave you during the process that you thought were particularly insightful or you think really helped you solve a problem?
There were two cues that were long, and they were difficult because they didn’t fit, necessarily, into the other genres. One of them is the scene where Paul Holes basically tears apart her theories, and then the other one – which Chris got after the fact – is the scene where the suspects give their sides of the stories. I’ll paraphrase slightly, but Chris was like, “What’s different about these scenes is that the music is driving them, not the voice. The music is carrying this, in a way.” They were very slow paced, almost ambient, dare I say Brian Eno-esque. Once we got going on those, a couple little themes popped out, and then Chris was like, “Oh, we’ve got to sprinkle this throughout the rest of the score.”
I wanted to ask about that moment with the suspects. To me, that is where I think the movie unlocks even though it comes in the final stretch. That moment is really where audiences are going to be taken aback. What was the approach for that scene, musically?
Chris was just like, “Man, this should sound like angels. This should be angelic.” I don’t think he was trying to say that they were innocent angels in any way––
But in contrast.
Exactly. He [temped] this music that was very hymn-like underneath them. It was a pretty long scene, too, and the music was doing stuff. It wasn’t doing a lot, but it had to have a gravity to it. He was like, “More church, more Eno.” That was when I started getting the old Radio Shack Moog involved.
Last question: is there a score from a film or television show you’ve listened to recently that you’ve really enjoyed?
I would say that the music from The White Lotus is really good.
You’re the second interview I’ve done in a row to talk about The White Lotus during this section.
The music is weird, and I’m always a fan of that. It’s a cornucopia of musical sounds, with great vocal effects. I just like people who are coming out of left field with their ideas, it doesn’t have to be groundbreaking There’s a lot of good music out there, but only sometimes you’re like, “What was that?” and actually go on IMDB and start doing some research. There’s that one cue with a really fast piano part that sounds like a loop that goes on forever, but it never gets boring. I was just like, man, this is so cool.
Citizen Sleuth had its World Premiere at the 2023 SXSW Film & TV Festival. It is currently seeking distribution.
Larry Fried is a filmmaker, writer, and podcaster based in New Jersey. He is the host and creator of the podcast “My Favorite Movie is…,” a podcast dedicated to helping filmmakers make somebody’s next favorite movie. He is also the Visual Content Manager for Special Olympics New Jersey, an organization dedicated to competition and training opportunities for athletes with intellectual disabilities across the Garden State.