Notes On A Score: ‘The Fall Guy’ Composer Dominic Lewis On Crafting A Love Letter To Film Music

Having just debuted at SXSW 2024 to an all around gleaming reception, the proof being a current 92% rating on Rotten Tomatoes a whole two months out of release, the mainstream excitement for The Fall Guy is at an all time high. To any successful film, there’s most often more than meets the eye. Composer Dominic Lewis is crucial to The Fall Guy’s success, without a doubt, and broke down his process and time with the film for us, tracing all the way back to when he first got the job.

In reference to director David Leitch, Lewis notes: “so we were dubbing Bullet Train (the last film the pair worked on), and David had mentioned that he was gonna do Fall Guy. We just sort of carried on talking about music. Obviously they were in pre-production at that point, he was like “let’s just keep it going, let’s do the next one.”” Leitch and Lewis found solid success in the aforementioned Bullet Train; that was the two’s first outing together, and with Fall Guy flying through in quick succession, it’d be no surprise to see them stick together into the future, a la Nolan and Zimmer. Lewis remarks cheekily: “It’s been a very happy family.”

Lewis, with the unmentioned additions of Violent Night (2022) and The King’s Man (2021) has made a name for himself in the action comedy genre, but his work goes well beyond that zone. Take, for example, Monsters at Work, on Disney +. Lewis says of the dichotomy in tackling two totally contrasting projects: “It’s so different. Both are great in their own right. I think the difference between movies and T.V. firstly is very different. The T.V. turnaround is so quick… with all of those movies you mentioned, you go through multiple explorations, trying to find out what the sound is, and you have way more time.” Monsters at Work was made even more difficult for Lewis, as it was being made during the pandemic: “Musicians were recording stuff in their bedrooms and sending it in separately, and then they had to piece it all together, which was a nightmare, but needs must during a pandemic.”

In regards to the sound of Fall Guy specifically, Lewis walks us through the evolution: “It went through so many iterations. I started writing stuff from the script stage, and actually the first thing I wrote was this song that you’ll hear in the end credits. Dave called me and said “I want this really old school love ballad.” So I started working on that… and then I just started writing suites.” He goes on to credit the nostalgia of the sounds of the 70s and 80s as big inspirations for the score, matching the tone of the movie as production cruised along. “The movie is a love letter to film, so I wanted the score to be a love letter to film music. It’s been a really cool process.”

For Lewis, his work runs in the family. “My dad is a cellist, and he was in a quartet for a very long time, and then he moved into doing film and pop sessions… and I was writing songs, and I was trying to do string arrangements and horn arrangements, I never got the initial buzz that I did from my first string arrangement.” But film music was different for Lewis: “I think when my dad came home from, like, the second day on the Gladiator score, he was raving about it. I finally got to listen to it, and was like “This is what I want to be doing.””

Save for the special premiere at SXSW, you’ll have to wait until May 3 to catch The Fall Guy on the big screen. But if Lewis’ experience and the early reviews are any indication, it’ll be worth the wait for movie and music fans alike.