War’s Temp Soundtrack
Thomas Drescher (Maleficent), the film’s temp music editor, explains his process. “Most of my conversations with Andrew and Zach had to do with tone, point-of-view, and what I might call dramatic temperature. If you look back at Gattaca or In Time, you notice a certain feeling of cool detachment and restraint that is typical of Andrew’s style. The surface waters are still, even when there’s lava bubbling below. In Good Kill, Tommy Egan is a quiet, duty-bound military man, but he’s a man on the edge of a nervous breakdown. Each time he fires a missile, he worries about becoming an accidental murderer. Tommy doubts not just himself, but the underlying military rationale. Finding the right balance between those opposing emotions was the trickiest part of temping the movie.”
Drescher guessed, from Niccol’s previous films, that the director liked “glassy synth textures and restrained melodies with little motion. A slight change of color could be enough to highlight a moment; a single piano note might be ‘too much.’ In action scenes, Andrew likes a good groove, but a subdued musical palette is what works best for him. He’s cautious with orchestral strings, and leery of brass. When we needed ethnic elements in the score, I tried to use them coloristically—combining bits of oud, santur and ney with the synth beds. I found excellent material in several obscure film scores—Ararat, The Trigger Effect, The Siege, and Solaris—along with a few better-known ones, like Drive, Contagion, Zero Dark Thirty, and Syriana.
“There was one synth-heavy track from Drive that was effective as temp music in a number of scenes—just a slow progression of simple chords, like a Bach chorale. There was a hymn-like cue full of gentle bell tones from Michael Clayton which we used in a couple places, and one important sequence where I laid a string orchestra over a layer of pulsing synths as an F-16 fighter jet flew overhead doing acrobatic maneuvers. It all worked.”
What was the most difficult scene to temp? “Missile strikes,” says Drescher. “I had a tendency to over-hype them at first, to play the action too strongly for Andrew’s taste. Doing that made them exciting, but cheapened them as well. It focused too much attention on the mechanics of the kill at the expense of Egan’s feelings about it. Still, we had to acknowledge the physical action on the screen. So rather than playing the scenes conventionally, with suspenseful music ending on a strong climax, we would instead finish the music gently, or even go out entirely just shy of the climax. That left a kind of ‘negative accent’ in the track, which made the climactic ‘boom’ not one of victory, but of anxiety and uncertainty.”
State Secrets
“There’s no black and white with this subject,” says Niccol. “There are some beneficial things about the drone program, and, of course, there are some horrific things. In 2010, the military was showing off new drone technology proudly; that’s where I could access a lot of the photography from that time. But then they decided it was getting quite sensitive and controversial. Journalists cannot go to Creech Air Force Base, which served as the model for the one in the movie.”
Most people do not understand the protocol or execution of drone strikes. “I educated myself in the making of the movie,” remarks Niccol, who does not expect a warm reception from the CIA (“I’m on a watch list for the rest of my life”).
Peter Coyote provides the voice of the CIA in the film. “Peter has this fantastic reasonableness to him. A lot of his dialogue, I didn’t write,” says Niccol. “They’re all from the CIA. It’s all drone justification. Do I have to give them a writing credit?”
There was no intent of showing the CIA in action, as the director believed that would take away from the film’s momentum. “Andrew wanted this movie to be focused on the lives of the crew of the GCS trailer,” says Staenberg. “They never meet the CIA, so why should we meet them? To me the CIA is working within an abstract environment. They’re in Langley, Virginia and working off of theories. They’re not really on the ground and don’t have any skin in the game. It shows you how out of control one can get, trying to work off of a theory.”
Hawke and co-star January Jones, who plays the wife of Tommy Egan, Molly
Technical advisors were recruited to counter the prevailing dearth of information. “Andrew had these drone pilots on set while we were shooting, and they were watching everything we were doing,” remarks Hawke, who found the GCS trailer claustrophobic. “I remember asking them, ‘Does it make you crazy in there?’ You could go nuts sitting for hours in this tiny room surrounded by these other peoples and video screens everywhere. ‘Are you allowed to use your cellphone? Could you call your wife from here?’ They said, ‘You’re not allowed to.’
“It’s funny—there’s a shot of Tommy hiding the fact that he is texting from his commanding officer. That’s our life now. We all do that. Part of being an adult is being allowed to have a discerning mind. My brother is in the military and one of the things that he would say is, ‘Egan is asking questions that he shouldn’t be asking because they’re not up to him.’ At the same time, we’re all damning of people who just follow orders.”
Still, Hawke tries to maintain his sense of humor. “I had this idea that Tommy Egan probably joined the Air Force as a result of seeing Top Gun because that’s my age. Every time I sat down I was thinking, ‘Where’s my motorcycle? Where’s the volleyball court? This is not what I signed up for!’” MM
Good Kill opens in theaters May 15, 2015, courtesy of IFC Films. Images courtesy of Lorey Sebastian, Clear Skies Nevada LLC.
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