‘Wicked’ composer John Powell was nominated for Oscar but overlooked by critics, which was the ‘ultimate compliment’
John Powell and Stephen Schwartz didn’t feel slighted that their score for Wicked was largely overlooked by awards groups in the run-up to the Oscar nominations. “No critics gave us any kind of recognition whatsoever,” Powell told Gold Derby, “and I take that sort of as a compliment.” That’s because, “if we did our job right,” then the audience, and critics among them, “would need to completely think that [this music was from] the musical and that it was already in existence.”
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But then the Motion Picture Academy bestowed a Best Score nomination upon the Wicked duo, and they felt validated. “You’re nominated by basically a bunch of other composers, lyricists, and music editors as well — music people. And they’re the ones that sort of sat through it and suddenly realized, holy sh-t, this is completely different, but it’s a hell of a job.” So, being overlooked by critics but embraced by his musical peers turned out to be the “ultimate compliment.” When the score is so well integrated into the song score that you don’t notice the difference, that’s a sign of a job well done.
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Still, it was a challenge “ trying to make something that people have loved so much into another art form and keep everything that was good about what was there, but allow it to expand itself naturally into this different medium.” Powell was coming into the film without previous knowledge of the stage musical, so familiarizing himself with that music was another challenge. “ I prefer to watch films with no music the first time, so my head can go running,” he says. “ Obviously I had the songs. So as soon as somebody started singing, the music would come in and it was just sort of demo backing tracks. But then as soon as they stopped singing, no music, so I saw it in a very different way from everybody else.” He discovered along the way that “ the songs had some incredible melodic material in it that I knew was going to attach itself incredibly well to the storytelling.”
Powell also leaned on co-composer Schwartz, who had written the songs for the original musical. “ I had days and days and days with Stephen right at the very beginning, grilling him and interrogating him about the original construction of everything.” Schwartz was “ happy for us to experiment with melodic things, shapes, rhythms, motifs, identifiable little parts of the musical construction originally, and use that as kind of the beginning of the toolbox that I would work with.”
The composer adds, “ We had months and months of work together where I would try things and he would react. He would try things. I would experiment with those things as well. It was a very collaborative process.” And there was a lot of trial and error. “ You just have to try everything and really experiment. … If you do it right, it eventually works. There’s all sorts of bits that were unexpectedly easy to do, but most of it was unexpectedly hard to do.”
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