Nicholas Britell, one of the leading film and TV composers of his generation, gave more than 1,000 attendees of the Virginia Film Festival a night to remember when, after accepting the fest’s Achievement in Film Composition Award last month, he sat down in front of them to discuss his life and work — and occasionally jumped over to a nearby piano to play excerpts of his compositions — as part of a live recording of The Hollywood Reporter’s Awards Chatter podcast.
Britell is only 45, but few composers of any age have a resumé that can compare with his, in more ways that one. He attended Juilliard’s pre-college division then graduated from Harvard and worked as a currency trader on Wall Street. Following the financial crisis of 2007 and 2008 and a sense of melancholy about not pursuing his true passion, Britell quit his job and started from the ground up in music. He was playing Gershwin on the piano at a party when, by pure happenstance, he met Jeremy Kleiner, a principal at Plan B Entertainment, who eventually introduced him to the likes of Steve McQueen, Barry Jenkins and Adam McKay, who would become key collaborators.
The New York Times has described Britell as “a screen composer at the forefront of his generation … a chameleonic, sensitive creator of distinct sound worlds,” while arguing, “More than any other contemporary composer, he appears to have the whole of music history at his command.” Known for bringing R&B and hip-hop production techniques to classical music, Britell has been nominated for seven Emmys, winning best original main title theme music in 2019 for his most famous work: the main title theme for HBO’s Succession. That piece of music also brought him a Grammy nomination, in the category of best score soundtrack for visual media, and was selected by Rolling Stone as one of the top 25 TV theme songs of all time.
Britell also has been nominated three times for the best original score Oscar, for 2016’s Moonlight, 2018’s If Beale Street Could Talk and 2021’s Don’t Look Up. His Moonlight score was described by the New York Times as “surprising and perfect.” Jon Burlingame, a film music historian, told the publication, “What I’ve found in the past is that people have found it impossible to incorporate such modern musical forms as hip-hop into dramatic underscore for films. When Nick did it in Moonlight, I was frankly stunned. I didn’t think it was possible.”
The composer currently is garnering raves for his latest score, for Noah Baumbach’s new movie Jay Kelly, a dramedy in which George Clooney plays a movie star experiencing an existential crisis, and which is currently playing in select theaters en route to a Dec. 5 debut on Netflix. Per Baumbach’s request, Britell delivered a sweeping composition in the vein of those that were popular during Hollywood’s Golden Age — and he added numerous special touches to it, as well. For instance, he recorded it on analog tape instead of digitally. He performed it in reverse during scenes in which Jay Kelly engages with his past. And he used it to punctuate the film’s emotional climax, a scene in which Kelly watches a montage of his past work — and in which Britell himself makes a cameo.
As Britell discusses during this episode, he had already written chunks of the score before the film went into production, so Baumbach played it on set. Clooney and other stars of the film have told me that it absolutely influenced their performances. When you listen to it, the only question is: how could it not have?
