On Wednesday, May 26th, you have the chance to see a private screening (from home) of the immensely powerful documentary CURED which “illuminates a pivotal yet largely unknown chapter in the struggle for LGBTQ equality: the campaign that led the American Psychiatric Association (APA) to remove homosexuality from its manual of mental illnesses.”
We recorded the soundtrack, our first, with pianist Daniel Schlosberg in Dallas just days before quarantine orders came down and it remains one of the most intense sessions we’ve been a part of. CURED composer Ian Honeyman is a longtime friend of Russ’ from their time in school at Peabody and Doyle recently caught up with this busy film scorer by phone.
Composer Ian Honeyman
Doyle Armbrust: When you and Russ met in college at Peabody, were you already heading down this path towards film scoring or was that something that came later for you?
Ian Honeyman: That developed later because at that time, when we were in music school, I don't think there was a lot of information about film scoring. I knew about Danny Elfman and John Williams, but I didn't know that that was a job that you could just have.
DA: So you moved to California to chase that dream?
IH: Yes, and per purely by coincidence, my first part-time job was working for National Public Radio, which kept me alive. The first entertainment job that I eventually stumbled into was in a film music studio. I just knew that I had to come to LA…and I loved LA anyway.
DA: Fast-forwarding to CURED, where does this documentary fall in terms of your body of work?
IH: I'm always looking for movies that are as genuine and meaningful as possible. The fight that this movie is about is this hugely meaningful. I guess to answer your question, my scores are all over the place, but I love working on stuff that has an important message.
DA: Do you feel as though your composer brain is working differently when the subject matter is something this consequential?
IH: Let’s say you have a beautiful suit. If the suit was cut for a different person, it's not going to look good on you, right? It has to be super custom made. If you take dialogue from some other movie and inserted into this movie, it's not going to work. The score becomes part of the characters and part of the movie in a really custom way that has to work together seamlessly to create this experience.
DA: What does the beginning of your scoring process look like?
IH: In this case, they sent me a 15-minute teaser that they had made for fundraising. From that I got the idea of where the journey was going and what the main conflict is and what the takeaway for the audience is going to be.
DA: How active is the back-and-forth with the filmmakers as all of this is coming together?
IH: There is a good amount of backend. There always is on every movie. The challenge challenge with documentaries is that the editing process is so long because they've got a crazy amount of footage and they have to create a movie out of it. And then they’ll find some new archival footage or a whole new person to interview, which kind of changes everything.
DA: Well, it's a very powerful film and I think your score is a big part of why it has the impact that it has.
IH: Thank you. I think [Spektral and Daniel Schlosberg’s] playing is a big part of it, too.
DA: It’s was funny to put myself back in that brain space of that day in Dallas. That was the last tour date we did before quarantine happened and it was such an intense recording session.
IH: I knew it was ambitious to record everything in one day. But I know you guys are amazing and more to the point you only had one day available. That's what professionals do, right?
DA: It was exciting for us. I mean, this is our first commercial movie score and I'm really glad it was the experience that it was. So, what’s the next project on your horizon
IH: It’s really cool, but I can’t talk about it yet. NDA.
DA: Oh yeah…that’s how that works, doesn’t it?