‘Sing Sing’ Composer Bryce Dessner On Defying Expectations By “Responding To The Poetry Under The Heartbeat Of The Film”

deadline.com:

For composer Bryce Dessner, working on a film like Sing Sing was all about defying expectations in the score. Though the film takes place in a prison, the story itself avoids the usual stereotypes of violence to focus on a tale of rehabilitation.

Dessner decided to focus on a sense of freedom for the score, even using opera as a jumping off point. Sing Sing tells the true story of Divine G (Colman Domingo), a man imprisoned as Sing Sing for a crime he didn’t commit, who finds purpose as part of a theatre group, along with newcomer Clarence “Divine Eye” Maclin.

Since the film focuses on the power of art as a means of escape and finding peace, Dessner used an image of Domingo and Maclin looking through a window into the horizon as a major point of influence. DEADLINE: What were some of your biggest influences for the score? BRYCE DESSNER: The film avoids those kinds of clichés or stereotypes like a prison drama or a documentary, the obvious one being the music doesn’t really venture into the kind of violence of the prison or any of that sort of tension.

It keeps this kind of distance and a sense of horizon about it. I think of the two characters, Divine G, played by Colman Domingo, and Clarence Maclin playing himself, and there’s this image of them staring out through the window that’s really powerful and we come back to it several times.