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Who is the ex-trader turned composer behind the credits of Succession?
Like Hans Zimmer, who wrote the grandiose soundtracks for Interstellar and Dune, Nicholas Britell has become the versatile and virtuoso composer that all film studios are snapping up. While the fourth and final season of the series Succession, for which he signed the heady credits, is available on Prime Video, portrait of an artist as discreet as his music is grandiloquent.
Nicholas Britell, the man behind the cult credits of the series Succession
What if, behind every great film, there was always a great soundtrack? Nicholas Britell’s name is almost unknown to the general public, but the music he has composed for many feature films and series makes him a highly prized figure in the shadows. It is even rumored that he could soon overshadow the sacred monster of the genre, Hans Zimmer. We owe this 42-year-old New Yorker the brilliant orchestrated theme, dark and epic, of the series Succession (2018), but also pieces noticed for
Twelve Years a Slave
by Steve McQueen (2013), The King (2019) with Timothée Chalamet or the Oscar-winning Moonlight( 2016) by Barry Jenkins. The artist can also boast of being adored by his former university friend Natalie Portman – he will soon sign the soundtrack of the first film of the actress’ partner, Benjamin Millepied, entitled
Carmen
– and the filmmaker Adam McKay who called on him for The Big Short (2015), Vice (2018) and the highly anticipated Don’t Look Up (2021). And each time, his scores play as important a role as the actors in the works.
The greatest strength of this virtuoso composer? Knowing exactly what cadence should punctuate a scene. Is it an F major or a B minor that would better correspond to this intense gaze shown on the screen? Does it take a playful clarinet, a lyrical violin or a heartbreaking piano for the spectator to understand, even without a word, the hero’s feelings and the stakes of the action? A fine psychologist, the artist plunges us into an emotional roller coaster through a maze of arpeggios often imbued with a certain violence and great poetry. Legend has it that in his New York studio, where there is a poster of
Chariots of Fire
(his first musical crush at the age of 5) as well as a giant screen, the musician most often imagines his sound cavalcades with the lights off. As if the film was played out above all in his head…
Natalie Portman as a loyal friend
If Nicholas Britell knows how to magnify the images of directors so well, it is undoubtedly thanks to his astonishing career. The composer played the piano as a child and then took lessons as a teenager at the renowned Juilliard Conservatory in New York. He then decided to forget music a little to follow a psychology course at Harvard where he met Natalie Portman. After graduating, he joined the wolves of Wall Street, making a lot of money by taking on the role of a ruthless trader. But managing funds does not make him completely lose sight of his first love. Influenced by Rachmaninoff, Gershwin, Philip Glass,
Quincy Jones
and Dr. Dr., the golden boy imagines, at first just for himself, soundtracks for non-existent films that draw as much from classical as from hip-hop (in the way he fiddles with sounds). Quickly, they will be real feature films that will benefit from his sense of rhythm as useful in the world of finance as in Hollywood. It is surely because he was a trader that the artist managed to transcribe so well in music the intoxication of ultra-wealth and power in the heady theme of Succession… If money had a smell, it now has its own melody.
Season 4 of Succession is available on Prime Video (with the Warner Pass).
