Finneas O’Connell (‘Disclaimer’ composer’): ‘I want you to feel suspense if the character is feeling suspense’
“Every step of the way, I felt like I hit the jackpot on this,” declares two-time Oscar and 10-time Grammy-winning singer/songwriter and musician Finneas O’Connell about debuting as a TV composer for the prestige drama “Disclaimer.” For our recent webchat he adds, “like any opportunity like that, you feel this immense pressure to not be the weak link, to not mess it up. I love pressure like that. I think one of the things that drew me to composing for film and television in the first place was the feeling, like when I make a pop album, the first several albums, when I was less experienced, I had this real feeling of anxiety of ‘I don’t know how to do this, I don’t know what I’m doing,’ but it really pushed me to learn all this stuff and to create stuff in a way that I would never otherwise have created. So to me, composing the score was the perfect extension of that. It was this excuse to learn a new language,” he says, adding that it “was a real privilege and an honor and I learned so much doing it.” Watch our video interview above.
“Disclaimer” is written and directed by five-time Oscar winner Alfonso Cuaron, based on the 2015 novel of the same name by Renée Knight. The seven-episode psychological thriller stars two-time Oscar winner Cate Blanchett as an acclaimed documentary journalist Catherine Ravenscroft. The story unfolds non-linearly as Catherine discovers she is a prominent character in a novel that exposes her darkest secrets that she has tried to conceal for years and which threatens to destroy her family. The Apple TV+ limited series co-stars Oscar winner Kevin Kline, Oscar nominees Lesley Manville and Kodi Smit-McPhee, with Louis Partridge, Leila George, Emmy nominee Hoyeon and Indira Varma (as the narrator) rounding out the stellar ensemble cast.
O’Connell likens working for Cuarón as like hitting “the jackpot,” he also shares that he had to bring his A-game because of the quality of the material that he as composer was tasked with enhancing the show’s themes and tone, but in a particularly mindful and nuanced way. “I don’t want this music to be tipping the hand of the audience. There are many twists in this show. There are unexpected things, and we were very careful every step of the way to not have music that would give anything away, that would tip you off to something to come,” he explains. “I think sometimes you watch a show, and there’s a scene happening where the characters are walking around and they’re laughing, and the music is ominous, and you know that something terrible is going to happen. You just know that in your bones. You’re like, this is going to go terribly wrong. His goal was ‘I want you to feel suspense if the character is feeling suspense,'” O’Connell explains, adding that he most valued collaborating with Cuarón because “he’s very careful about his score and I think that’s a great and added bonus of the job; this very mindful use of score.”
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