No One Will Save You Director Explains Film’s Unique Music Process

Brian Duffield’s latest film, No One Will Save You, is now streaming on Hulu and it follows Kaitlyn Dever as a woman named Brynn who finds herself in the middle of an alien invasion. No One Will Save You is unique in many ways, including the fact that it features almost no dialogue. For a film like that, the score is especially important. Luckily for Duffield, he was able to reunite with his Sponatanous composer, Joseph Trapanese. During Duffield’s recent interview with ComicBook.com, the writer/director broke down No One Will Save You‘s unique music process. 

“Joe got hired on Spontaneous way deep into post because Spontaneous was such a shit show of a production,” Duffield explained. “Just because the studio dissolved in the middle of shooting the movie. It was just all over the place. But I knew Joe, I didn’t get to work with Joe when we did the Divergent movie together. We were just kind of two passing ships. But I met him at the premiere and we became friends. And so then Spontaneous, I didn’t think I could afford him, and I think gave us a cut rate because I’m so charming,” Duffield joked. 

“And then we’ve just been such good friends. And then he’s now the guy I send everything to immediately. Sometimes if I’m like, ‘I’m thinking about doing this, what do you think?’ And then on this one, it was so great because he was involved before the studio, before anybody, and then we were just talking about it a lot. And he usually sent playlists for other things we’ve worked on, like, ‘It could sound like this.’ And it wouldn’t be his music, it would just be Spotify playlists. And then he was like, ‘I really want to just start writing and seeing what works.’”

Duffield continued, “And so he wrote a bunch of music and then Kaitlyn and I were kind of like, ‘Oh, that would go great here. That would go great there.’ And this was before I even had an editor. We were sharing the music with the studio and the studio has this huge soundtrack nerd, and he was losing his mind for tracks and being like, ‘Oh, that would be great here.’ And we recorded and he rewrote everything in post. But it was so great … Kaitlyn listened to her theme. We didn’t play music on set, but everyone on set could hear it if they wanted to, and it just kind of instantly made everyone know what the tone was and know what the feeling of the movie was.”

“And it’s one of those things I know financially why it doesn’t happen, because usually you hire a composer for eight weeks or whatever at the end. But now that Joe and I are buddies and he’s done it for me once, I won’t work another way. It’s such a great way to work is doing the music before shooting. It’s bananas to me that you don’t do it that way,” he added. 

ComicBook.com’s Interview with Joseph Trapanese:

Earlier this year, ComicBook.com attended The Machine premiere and spoke with Joseph Trapanese, who has created music for The Greatest Showman, Shadow and Bone, The Witcher, and much more. During the chat, we asked how scoring an action comedy is different from other projects.

“I love my job because it’s all about storytelling,” Trapanese shared. “So each one is unique. So this one, I did an action comedy called Stuber several years ago. Jimmy Tatro’s also in that, and he’s awesome. But that all takes place in LA in a car. That’s a certain type of scope, a certain type of vibe dynamic between… It’s a buddy movie. This is also a bit of a buddy action comedy because you have Bert and Mark. But at the same time, they’re going around the world, there’s a different scope, and they’re going to another country. So there’s a different scope, a different scale to this score.” 

No One Will Save You is streaming on Hulu. You can view our interview with Brian Duffield at the top of the page.