Interview - Kingsman : The Golden Circle : Let's talk with Matthew Margeson

By Mulder, Los Angeles, 22 september 2017

Q: You were asked about working with Klaus Badelt, and also you've worked on additional music as well as scores, synth, programmer, and arranger with James Dooley, Rupert Gregson-Williams, Heitor Pereira, Brian Tyler, Hans Zimmer. What things would you say helped forge a great relationship with those composers?

Matthew Margeson : I think being respectful to the fact that they are the lead composer and deciphering what their intention is for the score, and then bringing your creative influence to see how you can lend to that intention. And also on a more practical level, I think they hire additional music writers to help dissect their themes and their motives and their musical grammar and come up with new derivatives of those ideas, someone that can do that confidently, and look at a scene and see what it needs and apply these principles.

Q: How did you end up working with Henry Jackman?

Matthew Margeson : I was kind of doing temp assistant duties at Remote Control while Henry was writing his score to Monsters vs. Aliens, and when time started to get a bit thin, Henry had seen me in the middle of the night fixing a computer or something and asked if I could finish an arrangement for him because he hadn't slept in a couple days and had a meeting in the morning, and that's kind of how my relationship with Henry started. I started working with him in bits and pieces at the tail end of Monsters vs. Aliens, just kind of doing night shift in his studio for a couple of weeks. He would start writing things and I would finish them, or doing some fixes or conforming to new versions of picture, and our relationship just kind of bloomed from there.

Q: The two of you have worked on a lot of comic adaptations like X-Men: First Class, Kick-Ass, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, and the two Kingsman movies. What do you feel is the reason behind the success of these movies, and the great inspiration for the scores you create for them?

Matthew Margeson : I think in the past dozen years or so, maybe really starting with Christopher Nolan’s Batman or even some of the first X-Men films that came out, these comic series superheroes, these gods of ours that we only kind of saw in comic books, composers started coming up with more realistic ways of portraying them in films; there's a tangibility and a relatability to their characters, and you can really empathize with them. I think seeing the superheroes have their own internal struggles, most of them in these films is kind of seducing as a viewer because you can relate. For the first Kingsman, we created this world of British espionage music- the notes that we chose, the instruments that we chose to play it on. And so for the sequel I think we, on one hand we bring that world back, because we still have some of the main characters from the first film and parts of the second film are in London where we left off with the first film. On the sequel you now have new characters, and of course the Statesmen are a new group of characters who are in Kentucky, and there's a whole entire kind of Kingsman turned upside down. So I think bringing this Western flair to the Statesmen, who are essentially cowboys, bringing this Western element to the score really helped differentiate it from the score of the first film.

Q: How did you choose the bluegrass music in the score?

Matthew Margeson : I think that just lent it, it was almost the obvious choice when we started talking in initial conversations with Matthew Vaughn about who the Statesmen were and how we wanted to portray them. They wear spurs and cowboy hats, so we tested out a lot of different instruments, different Dobros and slide guitar and lap steel guitars and kind of came up with this potpourri of Country Western/ bluegrass / Americana roots sound. And of course it is a big action film, so once we inject the Western orchestra into that, we kind of came up with our own world for the Statesmen with all of these instruments kind of dancing around each other.

Q: Which part of the score was the most difficult to create during the composition and why?

Matthew Margeson : The most difficult part was definitely the Poppy theme. We initially thought that the Statesmen were going to be the hard nut to crack, but the villain, Julianne Moore's character Poppy, turned out to be really difficult for us. We went through probably two or three completely different iterations of musical identity for her, and each time we had thought we had nailed it and it was really sticking to the character, and then you kind of keep looking at these things and you watch the film every month or every couple of weeks and see where you are and see if everything sounds cohesive and consistent, and you're double-checking yourself that this is the movie you want to make. And her musical grammar was something that the first couple rounds, and this is, I'm talking for weeks and months that, you know, every time we came back to it we said it wasn't quite right, let's try going back to the drawing board. So her theme was kind of the first thing we, I remember doing stuff on her scenes very early on and still working on the same scenes, seven, eight months later was when we had a crack at them. But I think we finally got something really unique in the end.

Q: What was your best memory of working on the score?

Matthew Margeson : I have to say, anytime you work with the live orchestra, that's just a highlight for me, and I think a lot of composers and directors would agree that hearing your music being played by 70, 80 people in an amazing hall, whether it be Abbey Road or AIR Lyndhurst or studios in Los Angeles, it's the highlight. On this film I will also say that we had a lot of overdub sessions with some of the top Country and bluegrass session people in LA, in the States, in the world, really, and hearing some of those guys, just really masters of their instruments, and especially in this idiom, of bluegrass Country Western music, that was a real treat hearing some of these guys really that know their act do their thing.

Q: What do you consider the best place to record a score?

Matthew Margeson : I think it depends. I think there are the obvious choices as far as the orchestras goes. You have amazing film music orchestras all throughout the world, Los Angeles has great orchestras, you have Eastern Europe, I think they have amazing halls- and I think depending on what the orchestra is, they bring certain things to the table, and that goes the same for the recording halls too. I love recording at AIR Lyndhurst; and Abbey Road has an amazing sound too, and they have different advantages and disadvantages when recording there, when mixing there, and you know, for each project you might want something slightly different depending on the bigness or the more intimate sound, These choices that you have to make can lend themselves to your recording at different places.

Q: Does the budget of a movie have an impact on your creation?

Matthew Margeson : Absolutely. That's an unfortunate statement, but it's a reality. I think that if you know in advance that you're not going to have a budget to record a live orchestra, that can definitely affect the palette that you start writing with, and hopefully this is a conversation that you have with producers and with the director, whoever is the kind of creative person that's heading up the post-production department. If a director wants a massive live symphonic orchestral sound, but there's no budget for it, that's definitely a conversation to be had, isn't it?

Q: Which software do you use?

Matthew Margeson : Pretty much everything that's out there. My main writing tool is Cubase, but my studio also has a plethora of software, synth, and samplers, and VST Host, and I run Pro Tools as well for video and for recording.

Q: Our last question, as a franco-american website, are there any French directors that you would like to work with?

Matthew Margeson : Specifically French directors. There are so many that come to mind. I would rather not name one because, a director I forget to mention might not hire me then.

Kingsman: The Golden Circle
Directed by Matthew Vaughn
Produced by Adam Bohling, David Reid, Matthew Vaughn
Screenplay by Jane Goldman, Matthew Vaughn
Based on Characters by Mark Millar, Dave Gibbons
Starring Colin Firth, Julianne Moore, Taron Egerton, Mark Strong, Halle Berry, Elton John, Channing Tatum, Jeff Bridges, Edward Holcroft, Elton John, Pedro Pascal
Music by Henry Jackman, Matthew Margeson
Cinematography George Richmond
Edited by Eddie Hamilton
Production company : Marv Films, Cloudy Productions, Shangri-La Entertainment, TSG Entertainment
Distributed by 20th Century Fox
Release date : September 22 2017 (USA), October 11 2017 (France)

Photos: 20th Century Fox International

We sincerely thank for answering our questions Matthew Margeson
An huge thanks to Ray Costa for helping us to have this great interview..