In order to create the perfect score for the show, Buckley had to get a “crash course” in Neil Gaiman’s comic books so that he could understand the show and its hero, Dream of the Endless (Tom Sturridge).
“Neil was very much a part of the show, the new incarnation of his comics, the latest manifestation of it, so it paid dividends, I think, to know what he originally dreamed up, no pun intended, and just to get to know the absolute DNA [of it],” Buckley told Newsweek. “I would say, of course, that I’m not being charged with composing music for a comic book, I am in charge of creating music for a television show.”
He went on: “The very beginning of the process for me was really not a musical one, it was of reading the comics, reading around it, talking to Allan Heinberg, the showrunner, and really talking about characters, understanding it in a non musical context, almost like becoming a fan.
“I got this crash course in becoming a Sandman fan and he sort of held my hand and helped me go through that.
“When I knew enough about the backstory and the mythology about all this, and I felt that I had a good read on what things were supposed to be then I thought right now’s the time to segue into actually the music part.”
“I wanted to give as much time I could to just feel some of the journey that the creators have been on so that I wasn’t just knocking out the first bit of music, saying ’try that.’ I wanted to be more informed,” the composer added.
David Buckley Has ‘Never Made Anything Like’ the Netflix Show
Buckley, who has made the score for films like Nobody and Angel Has Fallen, likened composing The Sandman soundtrack to making “seven pilots of a TV show” because of how much variety the show has, in terms of genre and story.
“I was warned that it was going to be the equivalent of doing seven pilots of a television show, saying it’s one thing but when you actually see it and you jump in you think ‘Oh God, yeah, they really mean that.’
“It was probably a bit intimidating and it was a bit ‘how do we do this so it doesn’t sap [your energy]?’ Obviously Dream is the thread that weaves between these episodes so we know that there’s going to be some consistency there, but there’s a couple of episodes for example in the diner episode [“24/7”] where he’s not really in it until the very beginning and the very end.
“So it was at trick of making sure that I was making it dark. The diner episode is a very unmusical episode in many ways, there’s no whistle or tune. It’s more about ill ease and musical squalor or sound, but that’s as it should be because there’s nothing tuneful about what goes on in that episode.
“Whereas an episode with Cain and Abel, for example, when they’re with the little gargoyle Gregory, that is very cheerful.
“So, that was the big trick. How do you [go from] these little lullabies for gargoyles to someone effectively letting everyone in a diner mutilate themselves? How do you make that sound consistent and not just eccentric or frenetic?
“And I don’t necessarily have the answer to that but… I never stopped thinking about it. And, I think, almost the act of knowing that I had this enormous task probably just kept me focused on things. […] But it’s definitely a one-off thing for me in terms of scoring a television show that had this amount of variety. I’ve never done anything like this before.”
On Creating Dream’s Signature Sound and More
The Sandman follows Dream as he tries to rebuild his realm, recover his tools and undo the damage done after he is captured for over a century, and for Buckley the most important thing was to figure out the right sound for the character.
“Establishing his theme, his sound, both for him as a character and also for his environment, the Dreaming, that was sort of the first mission for me,” the composer shared. “That just seemed like where I needed to start, because if I’ve got that, and if that resonates, then we can go to funny places, we can go to hell, we can go to diners, we can go to a 14th-century London pub.
“And if we’ve got something established then it actually becomes fun. […] That required cracking and that took a while and it took some missteps.”
Buckley did crack it, though as a character he felt that “Dream is a difficult character. […] I think it has some melancholy in there, it has a little bit of complication in there.”
“I’m trying to sort of live up to Gaiman’s interpretation of this, and there is a sort of Gothic, dark spin on all of this,” he added.
Buckley explained that it was important to focus on making music that represented key characters and environments and he had a “hierarchy” of all these to keep the score “character-driven.”
Characters like Dream, The Corinthian, Johanna Constantine, John Dee and his mother Ethel Cripps got their own musical moments, and Buckley created them by using “analog sounds” to convey “human organic warmth” within his music
“I wanted to keep the humanity in place, but the score embraces choir, orchestra, piano, percussion, some early musical instruments like the viola da Gamba, Baroque lutes, mandolins Baroque recorders, so it’s kind of a gallimaufry of instruments,” he said.
Particular highlights for the composer included his work in the show’s two-part bonus episode, “A Dream of a Thousand Cats” and “Calliope,” and also composing a song for Stephen Fry’s Gilbert for when his true identity is revealed.
Buckley added: “I wanted to give something sort of emotional… I think any of the tunes, any of the pieces, certainly the pieces that I ended up putting on the soundtrack, they’re all trying to sell, in a modest way, human emotion.
“So that’s what I was going for, that’s what Allan wanted me to tap into here. Make sure that these people feel human, and they’re feeling things, let us help the audience feel things. If your music can help the audience feel what they’re feeling then mission accomplished.”
The Sandman is out on Netflix now.
