SEPTEMBER 10, 2019
BY LESLIE COMBEMALE
Benjamin Wallfisch is an award-winning composer of over 60 feature films, best known for scores like Hidden Figures and Blade Runner 2049. He created the score for Andy Muschietti’s 2017’s adaptation of Stephen King’s It, and was brought back to help finish the two-part epic in It: Chapter 2. The Credits talked to Wallfisch about his experience building on the first film, and how he brought nuance, complexity, and tremendous scale to what he believes, at heart, is an adventure story.
It Chapter Two sounds like a more grown-up version of the It score, with a bigger scale and more instruments—Can you talk about how you expanded musically on the first film?Â
We were lucky enough to record with a 100-piece orchestra and a choir of 40 voices, and we really didn’t hold back in terms of the sonic scale that the score inhabits. I wanted to take the themes, which have become familiar, and part of the storytelling from the first film, and give them the sense that they’ve gone through 27 years of not just maturing, but developing a complexity that time brings. That was something we tried to mirror in the musical choices. For example, in the first movie, what we called the Pennywise theme, you would hear it only when it was associated with the appearance of Pennywise. In the second film, of course that happens, but also it takes on this bigger role, to give that feeling that the mission The Losers Club is on is hopefully to end Pennywise. His presence is more vengeful. He’s a bigger presence now. He’s happy that the losers have returned, he missed them, but the scale of his character, and what’s at stake for everyone, is bigger, so the theme needed to live up to that as well.