Picture Credit: Getty Images / Netflix
Composer Marcelo Zarvos sees The Diplomat as a dance. Given all the personal and political maneuvering in the series, a dance is a suitable description for Debora Cahn’s drama. The Wylers, played by Keri Russell and Rufus Sewell, are often performers.
They are two of the best characters on television at the moment.
The richly drawn characters, with all their contradictions and strengths, provide plenty of inspiration for Zarvos. He is the composer behind Fences, Enough Said, Wonder, Nonnas, and Ray Donovan, not to mention KPop Demon Hunters. Recently, the composer spoke with What’s On Netflix about his approach to scoring the highs and lows of the Wyler couple in The Diplomat.
When you started The Diplomat, did you think about one of your earliest scoring jobs, The Good Shepherd, when approaching the show’s political intrigue and maneuvering?
I really did think about it. There was something in the DNA of those scores. Ultimately, at first, I thought, oh, it’s going to be just like The Good Shepherd. But of course, a big difference with The Diplomat is, first, how the music is used very sparingly and specifically; it’s the opposite of wall-to-wall music in The Diplomat. Also, there’s humor in it that’s a little bit different than The Good Shepherd.
But I thought about it, and some of the things that they were looking for, they talked a lot about this kind of confidence and leanness in the score. And I remember talking to Robert De Niro when I was doing The Good Shepherd, and he really… It was a less-is-more approach. But it was a movie, and there was a lot more score.
Certainly, my experience in writing for The Good Shepherd informed my writing for The Diplomat.
What were your early impressions of the Wylers? What themes, cues, and motifs did you establish that you still return to?
There was a lot of talk about a lot of waltzes. I always think that in those settings, there’s a real formality to those settings, and I thought immediately of European court dances, waltzes, minuets, things that were light marches and things like that, all the way to really heavy, also the light version and the super-heavy version.
Then Deb would sometimes talk about almost like the devil’s waltz. Sometimes there’s devilish things going on with the shenanigans of the Foreign Service, all the intrigue and some of the sabotage. It was courtly dances, but not just the gentle kinds, sometimes the mean and a little bit shocking. There are things that happen in the show throughout, and certainly all the way, including the last season, that are very big things.
The writing is a big part of the show’s appeal. The stakes are both personal and global. How much does that give you to work with as a composer?
A lot, because there is this thing that I love in shows and storytelling in general: when you see big events from a very personal point of view. So these are fictitious characters, but they’re talking about events that are very much in the zeitgeist. I love how it goes from very mundane couple bickering to superpowers bickering, and that is a very enjoyable part of it.
Every time there’s a cue, Deborah is very, very particularly, deeply, deeply involved in the music. Every cue, every second of every cue, is something we discuss and revise, all the way to the very end, always. But I know that once the music is there, it really has a reason to be there.
It’s a show that is not going to just put music in because the scenery is nice and all of that. There’s always a dramatic or emotional point of view that is quite strong, and always in these short bursts with a lot of energy. I would say that a lot of the music I’ve written in other movies and shows has a longer time to come up and hover over it and sprinkle the action and then get out. And with The Diplomat, you’re in, you’re out. Like Kate Wyler herself, who’s very confident, walks fast, to the point, and the music has to really reflect that.
The Wylers are master communicators professionally, but their home life is another story. How do you approach scoring characters who can be so morally ambiguous? What does your own moral compass tell you to do and not to do as a storyteller?
Yes. Well, as a storyteller, it is not my job to judge. You have to have compassion for all the characters. Even the bad ones, the villains, from my point of view, benefit from my compassion. Doesn’t mean that I’m going to do a rosy score for something horrible that happens.
I always try to think of mythology when I’m thinking of forces and powers and good versus evil and all of that stuff. And of course, when you’re looking at people at those extreme positions of power, sometimes the choices are a bad choice and an even worse choice. So it’s not so much between right and wrong. But regardless of that, I’ve done music for some despicable characters over time, because you do.
To pivot a little bit, I did this series called The Loudest Voice. It was about Roger Ailes in the beginning of Fox News, and talked about a character that would be very easy to… But even then, I remember thinking, no, it’s not my place to judge here. It’s my place to try to understand these characters.
All the characters, I feel like I have to ultimately, even the most flawed, the most horrible ones, I have to try to understand and come from a place of empathy and try to clarify their journey and the journey of the director, of the showrunner in the case of The Diplomat, that’s trying to clarify that, but without judgment.
The British prime minister is a good example. How do you score him, and what instruments or musical ideas does his brute force style call for?
He’s one of the examples of this. I remember one of the cues that we really worked very hard on in the second season to get was in the first episode of the second season, when we first go into 10 Downing Street, the residence of the prime minister. You hear him screaming, and you’re going up, and you just hear him berating all his staff. But I felt like he was a bit of this dance, this demented waltz kind of – this guy is a little out of his mind.
But he’s a perfect example of somebody who is deeply flawed, but whom I really love to score as a character, because also his performance is amazing. And this season, he really is also so strong. But yeah, he’s a good example of a person who says some crazy stuff and is very provocative and very unapologetic, but still deserves my love as a composer and as a storyteller.
When you go into season four of a show, what are you carrying with you, and what are you bringing that’s new? How do you want to evolve the score along with the characters and the story?
I write a lot of new music even before I get a picture, just based on the scripts. I like to write about the main themes. Knowing the show, this is my third season scoring it because I didn’t do the first season, and I feel I know these characters well.
You start to also compete with yourself in the sense that there are themes and character themes that come back. My impulse as a composer is always to, I’m going to write something new here, but sometimes the right thing is to honor that character or that thematic thread of something that happens. There’s a very meaningful piece of music that plays in seasons two, three, and four that has to do particularly with Kate and Hal. And so, there are times when it’s like, how can we present this again as different and evolved?
But of course, what you always want to do as a composer is just to be writing a lot of new material. This season has a lot of that. There’s always a need for this kind of motorcade music because there are those great set pieces where you have the motorcades going and arriving at all these places. I mean, the places they visit this season are incredible.
There’s the stuff in Tuscany and some other places where the music is then functioning in ballet mode. It’s just about this choreography of action that is happening, not necessarily in this case. It’s different than if you’re writing something where there’s an action cue or something, but it’s more about… especially in The Diplomat, some of these are real courtly, impressive settings and castles and palaces and all of that stuff. I find that really fun to score just from the movement of that.
How do you approach the romance between Hal and Kate in the score, given how complicated their relationship is?
It’s extremely romantic. Actually, they’re saying it in a very realistic way, because couples are not… it’s not always everything rosy, but it’s very clear that they love each other. I think it’s even through their falls, they still really love each other. It’s the mastery of Debora Cahn and the writers, how they stretch that to the point you say, okay, there’s no coming back now.
But they come back, and it is believable, and it is not like, oh, just we’re going to snap our fingers, everything’s okay. Every time that they have tension and they come back together, I feel like their love is strong, but it’s more and more complicated because they are deeper and deeper in it, both as a couple and as political figures.
Are there moments when you use strings or piano to bring out the romance between them, or does Deborah Cahn’s restrained approach determine how much the music can say?
We do, but Deborah is a very unsentimental writer and storyteller. There’s a lot of times when things are extremely romantic, but she might say, “It’s romantic enough. You don’t need to tell me that with the music.” So I think there are times that are very emotional.The ending of the season, in my view, is very romantic and very emotional too, but it’s not coming from that place.
It’s very economical. It’s the opposite of melodrama. It’s very restrained and just enough, just the right amount. But there are times that are emotional and heartfelt, and you just have to really be just so both with the writing and then with the recording and performance of the music so that it’s never over the top. It has to really be in that fine line.
It’s a dialogue-heavy show. What’s the art of writing under dialogue in The Diplomat?
One of my favorite things to do is to write it under dialogue. I cut my teeth in a lot of dramas throughout my career. When I go into dialogue, it’s another… The same way that there’s the ballet mode, I call it the recitative mode. In operas, when they’re in between the arias and the overtures, they have these things where they’re kind of singing, talking, and a lot of plot happens. The music is a very supportive thing where almost like the music are the words and I’m accompanying that music of the words. Deb’s writing is very much like that. It’s very musical and very, very beautiful.
I remember working 10 years ago on a movie, Fences, where there was a lot of dialogue. A lot of dialogue there 30 minutes before even a piece of music came in. I really love that. I love that challenge.
The music can focus your attention on certain things, which is something that it’s almost, it seems like not very instinctive that you would add something to the dialogue that would make you pay more attention to the dialogue. And there is music that can do this, and it’s something that I always enjoy. You can just support it in this way that people focus even more on what they’re talking about. Certainly The Diplomat, it has a lot of those moments.