“I assumed, ‘Oh, this is great. We’ve got some music we can work with, right? We’ve got a back catalog now.'” That was Oscar-winning composer Chris Benstead‘s initial reaction when director Guy Ritchie asked him to score his Netflix series “The Gentlemen,” a spin-off of the 2019 film they collaborated on. Watch his full video interview with Gold Derby above.
It turns out Ritchie wasn’t looking to rehash the same music in this new action comedy about aristocratic Eddie (Theo James) inheriting the family estate, and then discovering that it’s home to a huge weed empire. “Guy wanted to completely reinvigorate the music and try something completely different, which was fun,” Benstead explains.
“I do tend to get a lot of footage early and just start to experiment,” he says of his process. “Some things stick and some don’t, and that’s part of the process. And not be precious, but just because I’ve written a piece of music, it doesn’t mean it’s the right thing. I always say a film score, and a TV score, you have to unlock the little secret recipe that it’s asking you to find. And luckily we found it pretty early on with ‘The Gentlemen,’ with this operatic stuff, with these staccato choirs, which keep prodding the listener, kind of saying, ‘This is a bit silly, isn’t it?’ But it’s fun. That was the idea there.”
Benstead won his Oscar in 2014 for Best Sound Mixing on the film “Gravity.” “It was insane to be part of that,” he shares. “It’s quite a circus, isn’t it? It’s quite a thing. But yeah, it’s something I’ll never forget. It’s just magic. I think I got to say [two] words on stage, which were, ‘Thank you.'”
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