When composer Thomas Newman was approached by Ryan Murphy Productions to work on “Feud: Capote vs. The Swans,” he was told he would work on the main title – while his daughter Julia would write the music for the eight hours worth of TV.
“So I got to watch as she did her thing and she watched as I did mine,” Newman shared of his daughter in Variety‘s Artisans Behind the Song, presented by HBO.
He said in the case of the second installment in Murphy’s Feud anthology, he wanted to focus on the notion of swans having a gossipy chatter on the Upper East Side of New York City.
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The series, based on Laurence Leamer’s novel “Capote’s Women: A True Story of Love, Betrayal, and a Swan Song for an Era” following acclaimed writer Truman Capote, follows the true story of Capote and the elite women of high society in New York that he dubbed “the swans.”
The group included Barbara “Babe” Paley (Naomi Watts), Slim Keith (Diane Lane), C.Z. Guest (Chloë Sevigny) and Lee Radziwill (Calista Flockhart), who Capote betrayed by writing a thinly veiled fictionalized version of their lives.
After an excerpt from the book exposing their intimate secrets, “Answered Prayers,” was published in Esquire, it marked the downfall of his relationship with the group.
Since the opening is an animation sequence, Newman said, “the intention was always that the music and the image and the editorial cut and the music tempo would really be aligned.”
“The notion of the series, which is Feud, that it’s Capote versus the swans that all these women were very, very close friends,” Newman said of his musical inspiration. “He betrayed them. There was alcohol, there was drugs, debauchery all along the way. It was pretty A to Z on that level, and again, with a frenetic cocained pace maybe.”
He says he used an instrument called the jay call for the opening sound – a bird call to reinforce the presence of the swans.
At another part in the opening sequence, a bullet is loaded and a gun goes off, marking one of the first shifts in the music.
“There’s a different idea now,” Newman explained. “And a low tone, so more darkness and spilling champagne.”
He used a processed violin raga to bring about a sense of distress, which he describes as “not something that I’m looking for, it’s something I find with the help of these players. I feel like, I’ve got a butterfly net, I’ve got these people in front of me and they have these great ideas. And how can I grab it?”
When deciding how to end the main title, he decided to insert strong, complex string chords to capture the room. While he originally wanted to end on a part in the animation where a man gets punched in the face, he decided to go with the more transitional route, leaving lingering strings as viewers get ready for the show.
“This was designed to say, ‘Fasten your seatbelts or unfasten your seatbelts and get ready for an hour of this,'” Newman said.
Additional reporting by Tiana DeNicola
