In the midst of the 2023 Hollywood writers strike, Jeff Danna received one of those rare kinds of calls – in this case, from executive producer Erwin Stoff – that screen composers, even award-winning ones, long for.
“Erwin Stoff and I had done a show before called Julia [2022], which was the origin story of Julia Child, which we did for HBO MAX,” says Danna. “We had a good collaboration on that, and he remembered me when he got a new show going. He just called me and said, ‘If you want to do it, I want you to do it.’ You love to get those ones; there’s not many of those… that was a good start to what turned out to be a really fun collaboration.”
Select the image to access the YouTube video of the The Hunting Wives trailer, with music by Jeff Danna
Danna has had many successful collaborations before. He’s won 17 SOCAN Film & Television Awards since 1997. His disparate credits include Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck; Ang Lee’s Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk; Fracture, starring Anthony Hopkins; the documentary about producer Robert Evans, The Kid Stays in The Picture; Resident Evil: Apocalypse; Lakeview Terrace; Terry Gilliam’s The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus; Guillermo Del Toro’s Tales of Arcadia; and Closing the Ring, for Richard Attenborough. Not to mention The Good Dinosaur, a 3D, computer-animated, Disney comedy-drama-adventure film that grossed more than $330 million worldwide – which he scored with his Oscar-winning (for scoring The Life of Pi) brother Mychael Danna.
Once on board with Erwin Stoff, Jeff Danna delved into the new series, The Hunting Wives, written and created by showrunner Rebecca Perry Cutter. (Additionally, SOCAN member Goldie Boutilier co-wrote and performs the main title theme, “King of Possibilities.”)
“The first thing I did was read six of the eight scripts,” says Danna. “Now, this was in the heart of the writer’s strike, which made it an even better surprise – because nobody was even working, or knew when the strike would be over. So, to know there were people who had shows that were interrupted, and were basically just waiting to get going again, was exciting… So, I read them, and I could sort of see immediately the potential for some interesting music. The next time I had anything to do with the show, they were in the editing room, cutting what they’d shot on the East coast.”
The Hunting Wives follows new East Texas transplant Sophie O’Neil, as she’s befriended by socialite Margo (Malin Akerman) and quickly assimilated into the lives of Margo’s elite circle. However, once in, dark secrets, and eventually, murder, shatter this supposedly glamourous world, leaving everyone in danger. The creators had a very important sonic request for the series, on which Danna was determined to deliver: a sound that was Texas but not Texas.
“We ended up with a kind of interesting Texas murder mystery soap opera”
“It takes awhile at the beginning to find what the sound is; to figure out what the language of the characters is, what the language of the setting [is],” says Danna. “Also, the language that your filmmaker wants to hear. I can have all the ideas sitting up in my room here, but if I don’t sell them to my filmmaker, then they’re not going to be much good… It was definitely one of those shows with a bumpy beginning. We had about 10 weeks to play with this idea, Texas but not Texas; sexy but not sexy. I tried to figure out how to indirectly handle this story, which could have been handled in a very prosaic way that I don’t think would have elevated it very much.”
For Danna, a six-string enthusiast with a stellar collection of guitars, the creative process is what keeps him hooked on a project, allowing him to experiment with items in unusual ways, like using a beat-up piano, or creating sounds from a set of drinking glasses destined for the recycling bin.
Says Danna, “When I was going through my [guitar] collection, thinking [of] what would be a good choice for this show, I found a couple instruments that I hadn’t used in a show yet, that I bought out of the Claremont Folk Music Center, which is one of my favourite, sort of, secret weapons. It’s about 30, 40 miles east of L.A.
Select the image to access the YouTube video of Jeff Danna’s The Hunting Wives music cue “Mrs. Banks”
“I’d gone out there and I talked to Henry behind the desk, and he said, ‘Hey we’ve got these five things in here, and they’re kind of neat. Maybe you’ll want to look at them.’ And it was this family of tiny guitars. Starting with a very tiny one, and working its way up to something that was more of the size of a tenor ukulele. And he said, ‘These are from Croatia. They’re called prims… They kind of sound a little bit Eastern and Middle Eastern, they just have a bit of unusual resonance.’ So, I played around with them for a few minutes, and I said, ‘Yeah, this is really cool, I’ll take the smallest one and the biggest one,’” says Danna with a chuckle. “‘I’ll just figure out everything else in between.’ Then, I just put them away.
“So, when I saw them there, in the cupboard, and I thought how – especially the little one – sounded like a mandolin if you ran it through the Middle East, so to speak, I thought, ‘Oh, this really could be really interesting.’ I started to play around a bit, and I immediately came up with the motif that’s now the beginning of the cue called ‘Mrs. Banks,’ which is really Margo’s theme on the show. As soon as we hit on that, I thought, ‘Oh, this could be cool. OK. Let’s follow this one up.’
“It was the scene with Margo and Sophie in the bathroom, and if you played it sexy, it was just dumb and trashy. If you played it mysteriously, it didn’t work. It took a long time to think [of] what’s going on in the head of Sophie when this is all happening. And it took awhile, on this show, to figure out what that thing was. Then… you had to run it through the network gauntlet, and everything else. That process was a little complicated on this one. But I’m glad that once Rebecca and I had this idea, we stuck with it, because we ended up with [what] was a kind of interesting Texas murder mystery soap opera.”
Danna’s contribution to The Hunting Wives has been a resounding success. But as he reminds himself, and other artists, the creation process is one of wins and fails. “The thing about being a film composer, that’s only half the battle,” he says. “You have the filmmaker that you have to convince. Many are the ideas on the floor of the studio, believe me, that were great ones that didn’t get a chance.”
And, according to Danna, some of them may also have their day to shine in some future endeavour.