Director Skye Fitzgerald’s documentaries have garnered dozens of awards and two Oscar nominations. Many of them featured scores from William Campbell, with whom he has worked on ten movies. Here, he discusses their creative partnership, shared storytelling philosophies and the crucial role of pleasantness in the filmmaking process.
Editor’s note: Some answers have been condensed or clarified.
Q: How long have you known Bill?
A: Oh, forever! We were at the University of Oregon together. He was getting his Ph.D. in composition, and I was getting my MFA in directing. We’ve done ten movies, plus one mainstage production in grad school.
Q: That’s a lot of history. What keeps you wanting to work with him?
A: Working closely with another creator in this medium, it’s a bit of a dance. On the one hand, you need someone who is incredibly talented and creative and responsive and collaborative. But you also want someone you want to be in the room with, and he’s a great human being. He’s wonderful just to spend time with, and that has value in my world.
You spend long periods, and you have deep conversations as you go through the process. I think that’s one of the reasons our collaborations have been so long-standing and successful.
Q: Pulling back a bit, can you speak to the role the score plays within the movie making process? It feels like such a critical but, in some ways, backgrounded element.
I think it can play different roles within different genres and even within genres. In the nonfiction sphere, it can be used in a multiplicity of ways.
A score can lead a viewer to a particular emotional place. It can support the place you want an audience to go. But, I think sometimes scores are misused to urge viewers to feel something rather than allow them to experience it, and that is something Bill and I talk about extensively when we collaborate together.
I always see the score as a supportive element that isn’t telling the audience how to feel but rather to support the world of the scene, whatever it may be. It creates a doorway that lets you walk into a new world.
It’s a delicate dance, musically and emotionally, that not all composers are used to working within. Bill does it beautifully and delicately, and very subtly as well.
Read more about Campbell’s musical work
