Julia Newman (‘Feud: Capote vs. The Swans’ composer): ‘I wanted it to be alive more than anything’ [Exclusive Video Interview]
“I wanted it to be alive more than anything, and there to be a sense of real delight and weirdness,” reveals “Feud: Capote vs. The Swans” composer Julia Newman about her score for the FX limited series. For our recent webchat she adds, “What I love so much about this show is that there’s no good guys, but we empathize at different moments with all of the characters. Everyone inhabits a real humanness and in inhabiting that humanness, of course, everybody is flawed. I loved the idea of Truman Capote always listening, always with the typewriter going on, as everybody was always scheming. It’s actually part of what makes the story so powerful. As shallow as human beings can get and as deep as human beings can get, what does it mean to be on your deathbed and to regret a friendship lost? That’s so profound. So, in order to achieve the profundity at the end, there has to be this element of fun, because I think we’d all be lying if we said that there wasn’t a moment where we sat around a table and gossiped and had our ideas and plotted and schemed, hopefully not to the extent that some of these women, as well as Truman Capote, did.” We talked with Newman as part of Gold Derby’s special “Meet the Experts” Q&A event with 2024 awards contenders. Watch our exclusive video interview above.
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After a seven-year break, FX’s anthology series “Feud” is back with second installment “Feud: Capote vs. The Swans,” in which acclaimed writer Truman Capote (Tom Hollander) ruins his friendships with a high society New York City socialite group known as the Swans, which includes Babe Paley (Naomi Watts), Slim Keith (Diane Lane), C.Z. Guest (Chlo? Sevigny), Lee Radziwill (Calista Flockhart), Ann Woodward (Demi Moore) and Joanne Carson (Molly Ringwald). After Capote writes a thinly-veiled fictionalized account of their scandalous and hedonistic lives is published in Esquire, several of the Swans vow to ruin his life in revenge. The eight-episode limited series was created by Ryan Murphy, Jaffe Cohen and Michael Zam, directed by Gus Van Sant, Max Winkler and Jennifer Lynch, and written by Jon Robin Baitz, based on the book “Capote’s Women: A True Story of Love, Betrayal, and a Swan Song for an Era” written by Laurence Leamer.
“My dad had this great line,” Newman recalls, referring to her legendary award-winning composer father Thomas Newman, “where he said, ‘don’t spend too much time on anything that’ll be rejected in seven seconds or less.’ I think that that’s particularly true at the beginning of a project. You want to honor the idea that you’re putting forward, but don’t want to be so attached to the idea,” she explains about her process of finding the right tone when scoring for a series. “Part of my job is to remain light on my toes and to maintain a sense of dramatic flexibility. I started off with a couple of chords that then developed into a tune, and I thought, all right, I’m going to take a risk.”
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