Team Deakins · James Ellis Deakins, Roger Deakins

NICHOLAS BRITELL - Composer

February 11, 2026·1 hr 16 min·4 clips

Britell says the idea behind Don’t Look Up became “like World War II but we were gonna lose the war.”

1. Team Deakins talks with Nicholas Britell about film composing and his work on Moonlight, Don’t Look Up, and Jay Kelly. 2. Roger and James Deakins interview Nicholas Britell, a composer whose role matters because he scores films for Barry Jenkins, Adam McKay, and Noah Baumbach. 3. The episode asks how Britell finds the sound of a movie and how that sound changes once the cut appears. 4. Britell says he started playing piano at age five after watching Chariots of Fire and hearing Vangelis’s score. 5. He describes a musical household where his mother sang Rogers and Hart and his father played classical music on the school run. 6. He went to Hopkins in New Haven, Juilliard pre-college, and Harvard, where he met filmmaker Nick Lavelle. 7. Britell says he joined the Witness Protection Program, a live instrumental band with two rappers, and wrote music every day. 8. He says that band work and his friend’s short films made collaborative creation feel more joyful than solo concert piano work. 9. Britell explains that film scoring adds a second demand beyond writing music: the movie itself. 10. He says scoring from a script can produce ideas that disappear once the picture and cut arrive. 11. Britell says some films “eat the music up,” while others reject almost everything and need extreme specificity. 12. He argues that the best score feels “inside the fabric of the movie” rather than sitting on top of it. 13. He says Barry Jenkins often starts with a strong musical instinct, like “I’m feeling brass” for If Beale Street Could Talk. 14. Britell says Adam McKay asked for “the sound of dark mathematics” for The Big Short. 15. He describes a piece called “the tessellation,” built from six overlaid pianos, that became one of the movie’s main themes. 16. On Don’t Look Up, he says he began with “ode to science” material, then shifted to a big-band idea that felt like “World War II but we were gonna lose the war.” 17. He says Noah Baumbach wanted Jay Kelly’s score to behave like a character with its own voice. 18. Britell explains that he played draft themes for actors in Italy while they were shooting Jay Kelly, which changed how they thought about their scenes. 19. The conversation is exploratory and technical, with Roger and James pushing specific examples and Britell answering in detailed process language. 20. Listeners who like film scoring, collaboration, and director-driven craft will get the most from this episode; listeners wanting celebrity gossip or plot summaries may skip it.

As heard by us

Britell makes film scoring feel like instinct, experiment, and discovery unfolding alongside the cut.

Nicholas Britell's conversation with Roger and James Deakins treats film music as a process of testing, listening, and recalibration rather than a polished layer added at the end.

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Why you'd press play

For when you want to hear a composer think out loud about the cut.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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