As we head into our 5th staged production, I sat down with composer, Deeba Montazeri, who scored September’s production of BURBANK, and is currently scoring TELEVISION, in previews on April 6th.
Montazeri is a Persian film composer from Toronto with a background in classical piano and acting. Since coming to New York to train and complete her schooling at different film conservatories around the city, she is now working professionally as a soundtrack composer and sound designer. She's worked on an array of projects from commercials, to film, to podcast theme songs, currently working out of Manhattan, and gave us some of her time to chat about the process of putting live theater to music, and how it’s different from traditional film scoring.
FE: First question, how exactly did you get your start in music? And do you have any early influences?
DM: I’ve been playing piano since I was 5 actually so it has always been a way of life. I tried guitar, trumpet and violin for a while but piano stuck the most. I grew up loving classical music and found myself gravitating to composers like Rachmaninoff, Chopin, Liszt etc.
Truth be told, I never had an emo phase as much as it was a “staring out the window, reminiscing to Albinoni’s Adagio, while pretending my lover is off to war” phase.
But at the end of the day, music was always a side passion for me. What I really wanted was to find a way to work in film. Movies consumed my life (as you can tell from my emo equivalent phase) and I found myself being deeply immersed in every aspect of film. I was actually pursuing acting for many years, which was definitely right for me at the time, and is also the whole reason I am a composer now.
FE: Eventually, when did film and music really come together for you?
DM: In my late teen years, I started to seek out piano teachers who specified in teaching film scoring. It still continued to be a side hobby as I learnt how to write sheet music and got into transcribing existing film scores so I could analyze them. The first one I ever did was a piece from Jonny Greenwood’s There Will Be Blood soundtrack. I left Canada a couple years later, to move to New York to attend acting school and casually started writing mini scores here and there for student films I was a part of. It was slowly becoming something I was known to do “on the side” and it became a little side hustle to make some money. I was growing to love it, but it wasn’t until a little later that it solidified as my chosen career path. And I can confidently say, it is the best path for me.
FE: When it comes to working with directors, what characteristics/working styles do you gravitate towards?
DM: I feel like working and navigating with directors is a specific skill in itself. You have to be a team player but also take the lead in certain creative choices. I will say that the best directors I have worked with, are directors that don’t think of the music as an afterthought. I very much appreciate when directors use music to inform their actors ahead of time by, for example, making a playlist that their character would listen to. When I first started out, I worked with a few directors who didn’t have solid views and I wasn’t confident enough yet, to have all my questions answered. It never led to very strong scores. I have also learnt the hard way to never accept the answer of “just do whatever you want” because 9/10 times, we will not be on the same page. Thankfully I don’t hear that as often nowadays, as I did when first starting.
FE: So you recently scored Thirdwing’s Original Theatre Production Burbank, what was that process like, and how did it differ from film?
DM: I had known C.D. Bossert’s work for a while and was always intrigued by how he captures truthfulness in his characters. So when I joined on to score Burbank, I was excited to work with a director/writer who has such sharp precision in the Cameron is also musically trained so this was a fun new experience, of being able to get into the nitty gritty aspects of music theory when writing a theme for one of the characters. The challenge here was firstly that this was not a film, but a play, so my score had to be done before I ever had anything tangible in my hands. The prep was very important. I sat in on some rehearsals with the actors, I researched the music surrounding 1940’s America, I also had versions of the script printed and covered in scribbles and notes, deciding when would be a good time for a music cue. In the end, it all came together with the help of producer Robert L. Smith who mixed and mastered the score. We were on a very tight deadline and I couldn’t have done it without his expertise and guidance.
FE: So what do you have currently in the works?
DM: In February, a museum exhibition at the Canadian Museum of Human Rights opened up and I had the privilege of getting to work on a score in collaboration with some very talented Ukrainian Artists. I have a few films lined up for the year that I am looking forward to. A horror film, a documentary and a biopic, to name a few. I think I may release some of my own music this year, if all lines up well. And as for right now, I am currently beginning my second collaboration with C.D., a play called Television, which is set in the 1959 Colorado Plains, and starts April 6th!
FE: Thanks so much for taking the time to answer these questions and look forward to seeing these projects come together.
DM: Thank you so much Finn, this was so fun.
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