Hey, Composers!
If you’re interested in how film scores evolve from early sketches into full narrative architecture, this is a gorgeous deep dive. Composer Max Richter joins Jon Burlingame to unpack his haunting, emotionally saturated score for Hamnet, Chloé Zhao’s new film.
Watch the conversation here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-CCHVEVnqAY
Richter talks about how he began writing music long before production and how those early sketches shaped the creative language of the film. He goes into detail about blending Elizabethan-period instruments with modern processed textures, creating a sound world that feels both ancient and contemporary, intimate and mythic.
One of the most compelling parts of the conversation is how he describes drawing from Elizabethan choral and instrumental traditions to tap into the film’s folkloric, almost otherworldly sensibility. That influence helped him underscore the film’s themes of nature, grief, psychology, and the emotional undercurrents that run beneath the characters’ lives.
Richter describes it this way: “Elizabethan music is one of my great passions… an amazing moment in English music history… It was a wonderful opportunity to go back and connect to that material, which evoked what Chloé called the witchy sensibility, the folkloristic, maybe dark fairytale quality of the relationship between human beings and nature.”
If you compose for film, TV, or games, or if you’re just a Max Richter devotee, this is a beautiful look at how a score can feel timeless while being deeply tied to character and theme.
What struck you most: the period influences, the textural blending, or Richter’s approach to emotional minimalism?
Thanks for sharing the video, Ashley Renee Smith. I didn't know composers made sketches for music. That's interesting, and it makes sense since a composer can look at the sketches and visualize where music will go in the scenes.