Thelma is one of the best films of 2024, it premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and then had a successful theatrical run this past summer. The film was written and directed by Josh Margolin and stars legendary actress June Squibb as the title character who is determined to get back at a scammer who duped her out of money. A modern film that is also a throwback to the Comedy Dramas that used to be so prevalent in Hollywood. It features an excellent score by Nick Chuba that channels the past and supports the film’s perfect blend of fun, emotion, and action in equal doses. Chuba recently spoke to Immersive via Zoom.
[This conversation has been edited for length and clarity]
Let’s talk about Thelma. How did you get involved in this project?
I went to high school with Josh. We’re both L.A. natives and I’ve known him for over 20 years, but we’ve never had the chance to work together before. I knew he had this project and we got in contact and I just started sort of writing. I got the script before they started shooting. I was inspired by it and I thought it would be a cool opportunity to showcase some musical interests that I hadn’t explored before in film scoring.
What are those interests?
I am a huge fan of Lalo Schifrin and a lot of that era of film scoring and just those films in general, like Bullitt, Mission: Impossible, and Dirty Harry and all these kind of seventies jazzy type scores, that have the famous themes, but they also have this weird abstract music that’s also associated with it. I always wanted to make music like that, and it’s not something that comes up a lot.
It’s a great sub-sector of film scores and it’s before the modern era that is an indelible part of 60s, 70s film music…
There’s the jazz combo aspect, but then there’s also this very experimental instrumentation in Chinatown or Klute or any of those where they use an instrument called a Waterphone, which uses water and these metal rods and you bow it and it’s like atonal.
When you were putting together the recording, how did you decide which instruments you wanted and how big was the group that you wanted…
Pretty small. It was a process of discovery. I think I started out thinking it was going to be one kind of palette and then it veered into this more seventies type palette. I originally did everything myself and did everything on the computer. I sent an hour and a half of material based on the script to Josh for him to listen to on set, and then hopefully edit once he started cutting things together. A lot of the more emotional piano-type pieces came from that batch, but the sort of action references weren’t in there until I visited the set…
After that, you were inspired to use different instruments.
I started to think about definitely drums and percussion, and it had to be live players who knew that style. And then flute and saxophone. Then there’s an instrument called the Mellotron, which I used a lot, which is a keyboard, but it’s the original sort of sampler keyboard. It has a dusty aged quality to it, playing these sounds back on tape, real tape. So it has a degraded sort of old feeling to it.
Did you use modern recording techniques or did you have any of it kind of date back other than the instruments, like the actual recording itself?
It was a combination, the cool part was once we got into thinking we’re going to go for this tone of the seventies kind of thriller feel, you have to do that one way, which is doing it in a proper studio with real players. I went to this famous studio here in LA called EastWest and it just has this great-sounding room with an analog board and all equipment from that era, they have all these old microphones.
We went in with a drummer and I had him improvise over various scenes, and then I would take those recordings, put them in the computer, chop them up, and make my libraries of loops and little bits and pieces, and I would put them together in the computer against the picture.
Were there any specific challenges, any parts that were like, I don’t know what I’m going to do for this?
The tone was hard to get right. It’s really easy to tip into broad comedy or sometimes you would do something that would almost sound like you’re making fun of her versus being, I think the important thing was just being with her. Everything needs to be from her perspective, especially with the action and just riding that line basically of never being too big with it, but also feeling tense.
I like how it’s never too busy and it’s never manipulative. It strikes a perfect balance. The movie is essentially a comedy and a drama, and it kind of veers too far in either direction.
It took a lot of tweaking from me Josh and the producers. I would pull up my entire session and we would go through and sometimes mute things and we would discuss how things were placed. It was a collaborative, much more detailed process than I’d ever had before. I think part of that is because it’s about Josh’s grandmother and connected to the movie that he was sort of like the bellwether on when we’re shifting too far in one direction or another and honing in on that.
Do you have any favorite tracks? Are there any particular ones that stand out more than others?
I love the track called ‘Opening’. That never happens in the actual movie, but it’s one of those tracks that sometimes at the end of the movie you kind of feel like you finally figured it out. I wrote that for the album after we had done all this legwork on figuring out the tone, and then it suddenly came together and it was sort of like a medley of all these different parts of the movie. I think that track encapsulates just the feel of the score.
So for Thelma, did they do a temp track or were you just giving them score bits and skipping the whole temp track?
We skipped it. That’s kind of why I do it so early on, is to hopefully arm the editor and director with a bunch of music to at least talk about. It may not be right, but it should be at least a starting point. We can sort of avoid the whole temp of problem that can occur.
You cut to music. When you’re cutting to music, having a new piece of music come in after you have a temp track, it just kind of screws with things. It’s not a good process. They should always have the composer in earlier.
Some editors are like it’s just a placeholder. But then some get in there and line everything up to the music, and I’m sort of constrained into what I can do with that. In this case, we didn’t have that problem, which was awesome.
What do you hope people get out of the movie from a musical standpoint and the score as its own thing?
I just hope people hear the music and they just think of the movie. That to me is the sign of the best. My favorite scores, if it’s The Third Man or There Will Be Blood, it’s like I hear that music and it’s just like I’m in the movie almost. What I strive for on every score is it feels completely bespoke to the film and there’s no separating it from the movie itself. I think that would be my main goal for people both when they hear the album and when they watch the movie, that it just feels like it’s enmeshed with the character of the film and everything like that.
Thelma is available to stream.
