From writer/directorAlfonso Cuarón, the seven-partApple TV+seriesDisclaimerfollows acclaimed investigative journalist Catherine Ravenscroft (Cate Blanchett) as she receives a novel from an unknown author that she quickly realizes she’s actually the main character of. It delves into her past and her darkest secrets but does so from a perspective that is very different from her own memories. As the audience learns about Catherine, she is reminded of her experience many years prior with a young man named Jonathan (Louis Partridge) while facing how that has shaped her and affected her own family in the present. And everything is complicated even further by the fact that timelines and perspectives are woven together in a way that bursts the bubble Catherine has insulated herself, but that also doesn’t fully grasp the true extent of the trauma until she’s willing to open her own past wounds.
After watching the season, Collider got the opportunity to chat one-on-one with series composerFinneas O’Connellabout his collaboration with Cuarón. During the interview, the multiple Academy and Grammy Award winner discussed how he came to scoreDisclaimer, what he learned from trading music playlists with the filmmaker, how the compositions evolved, the way his songwriting process works, what he took from experimenting with orchestral work, and how bittersweet it is that he and sisterBillie Eilishwon’t be on tour together, but that they’ll definitely still collaborate in the studio and he hopes they’ll score something together in the future.
Finneas O’Connell First Met Alfonso Cuarón When He Brought His Daughter to a Billie Eilish Concert
Collider: My emotions were all over the place watching this series. It really stays with you. It sounds like you’ve been cultivating a bit of a relationship over music with Alfonso Cuarón over the period of a few years. Had you been actively looking to do a project together when this finally came about, or was it a little bit of a surprise that it was this project right now?
FINNEAS O’CONNELL: Actively looking? I never like to presume. The origin of our relationship was my sister (Billie Eilish) and I were playing a tiny show in Milan in 2018, in February or March. Alfonso came with his daughter, Bu, and we met both of them. They were both lovely, and it turned out Alfonso knew so much about contemporary music and has a real appetite for it. We started talking about music and he asked for my number.We started sending each other playlists of music that we liked and stuff we were inspired by.That was a big honor for me. I think he’s really one of the great filmmakers of our time. This was beforeRoma, which is a movie I couldn’t love more, and I already felt that way fromChildren of Men,Y Tu Mamá También,Harry PotterandGravity. I felt very lucky to just have his endorsement of Billie’s music. It was so exciting that he liked what we were making. Fast-forward a couple of years, and he called me one time and said, “Hey, I’m gonna do this series. Maybe you should do the music for it.” I was like, “Candidly, I have never scored a TV show.” And he was like, “I’ve never made a TV show, so that’s fine.” He was not intimidated by the fact that I was a novice at this art form in the way that I was, so I set about trying to educate myself. I was given the opportunity to score two films. I scoredVengeanceand I scoredThe Fallout, and I learned a lot from each. And then, we began this collaborative journey, which was just such a deep honor and such a wonderful experience.
Was there anything you learned from Alfonso Cuarón in those exchanges about music that surprised, just with his taste or what he responded to?
O’CONNELL: I learned so much. My fondest memory is the first playlist I sent him, sending him a song by the amazing gone too soon DJ Sophie. I sent him a song called “Ponyboy” that has some of the most interesting production I’ve ever heard. That song is really intense and I assume probably kind of polarizing, and I couldn’t love it more. I remember sending it to Alfonso and he was like, “I really like this ‘Ponyboy’ song.” It was a good litmus test for me, of being like, “Alfonso is cool. He’s gonna be on board with the crazy stuff I sent him.” And then, he sent me amazing pieces. He would send me contemporary pieces. He knows so much about classical music. He sent me tons and tons and tons of classical music. I learned about so much music from him.
I always love jumping down rabbit holes of music. When I have a favorite band, I love knowing what their influences are and just continuing to follow that.
O’CONNELL: Right? Isn’t it interesting when you look up your favorite bands’ favorite bands, and oftentimes they’re a band that doesn’t connect with you? Your favorite artist is most influenced by something that you listen to and you think, “Wow, this music is not really for me.” Isn’t that so interesting? I always feel that way.
When you started working on the music for this, how much did you actually know about the series and story? What did you work from? Had you read all the scripts? Had you seen footage?
O’CONNELL: I read the scripts in 2022 and was very moved by them. They were a testament to Alfonso as a screenwriter. The scripts were very true to what the show became, which I loved. I was very moved by the script. I wrote a couple pieces of music and sent them to him, just after reading the script. I didn’t go too far with that because you don’t know how the show is gonna look and feel and the pacing of each scene. I had a couple pieces of music to base something off of, and then in 2023, he started showing me rough cuts of episodes.The first piece I wrote then was what I referred to, for a long time, as “the love theme,” which is the motif that plays over young Catherine and Jonathan’s romance scenes in Italy.The motif that you hear all throughout Italy was the first melody that I wrote for the show. And then, we collaborated on everything from there.
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You compose music for yourself, you compose music with your sister, and you’re composing for films and TV shows. Is the basic process always the same? Does it differ depending on what you’re composing and for who and what the ultimate goal is? Is there a different sort of creative fulfillment to any or all of those things?
O’CONNELL: I would say that they’re, in some ways, all very similar and all very different. I know that sounds like a cop-out answer, but it is how it feels. Sometimes I work on a cue for a piece of music forDisclaimerand I think, “Oh, yeah, this makes me feel how I felt when Billie and I were writing that song.” And sometimes I’m doing something that feels so alien and so different. They both have good qualities and I learn a lot from each. I learned so much doing this show that I was able to apply to Billie’s album. I obviously learned so much from my years of making music with Billie that I was able to apply to this score. I think they really cross-contaminate in an effective way.
When you’re composing for characters and for a story, you can push things musically in ways that you might not with your own music or your own albums. Was there anything that you hadn’t done musically before that you wanted to do with this, that now might influence your own solo work?
O’CONNELL: I think the big, obvious one was all this orchestral work. I’ve dabbled a little bit in orchestration. I’ve done string arrangements for some of Billie’s songs, namely “Lovely,” the Khalid/Billie duet. I did the string arrangement for that. I’ve done a couple of string arrangements for my own music, but not in the way that these are, where these are pieces of purely orchestral music. Those are string arrangements that play behind the vocal and chords. All the string arrangements and orchestrations that I got to do for this were a unique, new experience for me, and that’s all music that I’ve loved forever, but had no formal education in. I really leaned on my collaborators, Aaron Forbes and David Campbell, to help fill in the blanks for me.Most of the strings on this show are a string quartet called the Attacca Quartet.I’d write two midi violin lines and a midi viola line and a midi cello line, and I’d come up with melodies and counterpoints and a structure and a movement, and then I would rely on David Campbell to actually physically notate. He would take my piece of music and he’d write out all the notes and give that to the four members of the quartet, and they would play it. It was an amazing experience and such a fun experience to hear a quartet bring those pieces to life.
With ‘Disclaimer,’ Finneas O’Connell Saw the Score as an Interpretation of the Performances
I’m such a music fan and I love music of every kind, but the whole idea of songwriting or composing music just seems so mysterious and magical and hard to understand if you don’t do it.
O’CONNELL: It’s hard to understand if you do it. That’s the amazing part of it. It’s something from nothing, every time. The thing that you made before might make you feel like, “I could probably do that again,” but it’s not gonna help you get there. You still have to build the thing from scratch. That’s the beautiful challenge of it. One of the great joys of scoring, and I felt this way about writing “What Was I Made For” with Billie and writing ‘No Time to Die” with Billie, and it’s certainly been true of this show is, if I’m writing a song for myself, or myself and an artist are sitting in a room writing a song, we’re often looking inward at what we’re feeling at the time and what we’re going through and what we have to say. That’s beautiful and cathartic, but sometimes you don’t have the perspective to fully understand it. I think one of the real beauties of scoring something is, I watched the scene with Cate Blanchett giving this unbelievable performance, and I’m scoring that. I’m interpreting her performance. I’m interpreting her turmoil. Same with all the actors on this show.I’m interpreting their performance and the dialogue that was writtenand that they’re saying. I’m able to be the vessel for that, which is such a treat.
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It’s really interesting with this score, in particular, because it feels like there’s so many layers to it. Even though they are not these big, loud, bombastic layers of music, when you see the emotion and you know where the story goes, and then you’re able to think back about the music, you feel the different emotional layers. There’s the layer that she’s conveying, and then maybe the layer that she’s inwardly feeling.
O’CONNELL: That’s very kind of you to say that. I’m happy to hear that you feel that way.
For me, as a writer, it’s hard to ever be fully satisfied with anything I write.
O’CONNELL: Same.
I mostly just have to eventually walk away from it, or it’s never done.
O’CONNELL: Yeah. Ken Caillat has a quote, “You don’t finish an album, you just give up on it.”
When it comes to writing songs or composing music, do you get a sense of when you’ve finished and you’ve put your all into it? Can you step back and feel satisfied with your work?
O’CONNELL: Yeah. Sometimes you’re tortured forever by the way you sang something or the turn of phrase where you’re like, “Ah, I should have rhymed this, not that.” I will say that in scoring, there’s a structure to it that can be really satisfying. There are 88 pieces of music and you end up with this red spreadsheet. As you turn them in, you check them off and say they’re delivered. And then, they change to a yellow color, and then they give you their notes. And then, you change it back, and it says, “Delivered.” And then, they say, “Approved.” You get this green light on everything. It’s really a very satisfying part of the process for a completionist like I am, where you’re like, “Wow, I really made progress today. I checked off those three little red boxes.” Maybe there’s a writer’s version of that, where you have a bullet point thing for yourself to check off.
‘Disclaimer’s Dual Narrators Have a Deeper Meaning
But even these voices aren’t all that reliable.
When you’re composing for film or TV, the scene does end, so you have to stop at that point.
O’CONNELL: Exactly. That’s right. Sometimes there’s a funny part of writing a piece of music for film, where you write it, you get really excited, you get to the big finale of this piece of music, and then you put it in the scene, and it’s way too long for the scene. And then, you’ve gotta really shorten it because you won’t even get to the end of it, by the time it cuts.
Finneas O’Connell Would Love To Team Up with Sister Billie Eilish To Score a Future Project
We’ve become so accustomed to you and your sister, Billie Eilish, being together and collaborating in the studio and live on tour. We’ve seen you at award shows, picking up awards together. This is a real turning point in both of your careers, where she’s going out on tour solo and you’re going out on tour solo. How do you feel about where you’re at, in this moment in your life and career right now?
O’CONNELL: It’s very bittersweet. If I had a million hours in the day, I would be everywhere. I’d be playing all of her shows and also doing mine, and on every other project. I think we have a divide and conquer attitude about our life and career,and one of the things that made me specifically decide to step away from touring with her full-time is to continue to make records with her full-time. I thought, if she tours and I’m touring at the same time, and then she comes back to L.A. and wants to make an album, then I’ll come back from my tour and we’ll make an album, as opposed to being on tour with her, and then her tour will end, and then I’ll go on my own tour, and she’ll wanna work and I won’t be there. In some ways, it’s in the name of being accessible and available to her. She’s also getting more and more practiced and experienced at these art forms. There’s a song by Nat and Alex Wolff that Billie produced totally herself. That’s her first time being billed as the sole producer of anything. I had nothing to do with it. It’s a beautiful track. It’s so exciting to see a person do new things and do things for the first time. I’m a big advocate for it and a supporter of it. I’m really looking forward to making another album with her. I’m also really looking forward to roping her into projects like this in the future. I love to work with her. If, in the future, I get to score something with her, that would be a real joy. I’d love to do any kind of slightly unorthodox collaboration with her, outside of just making albums together.
Disclaimer
Disclaimer is a 2024 psychological thriller miniseries following Catherine Ravenscroft, an acclaimed journalist known for exposing the misdeeds of others. Her life takes a shocking turn when she receives a novel from an unknown author that reveals her darkest secrets, forcing her to confront her past.
Disclaimeris available to stream on Apple TV+. Check out the trailer:
