How ‘Birdman’ Composer Improvised the Year’s Most Audacious Film Score

Antonio Sanchez turned an hour of drum solos into the backbone of Alejandro G. Inarritu’s daring film

Michael Keaton in Birdman

The most audacious thing about Alejandro G. Inarritu’s “Birdman” is unquestionably the director’s decision to shoot the entire film as if it were one continuous, unbroken shot. But the movie’s music is a close second, because the entire film score (apart from passages of Mahler, Rachmaninoff and Tchaikovsky that surface at regular intervals) is percussion – a careening, ramshackle-sounding drum score that underpins most of the scenes and gives the film the feeling that the whole glorious mess may come crashing down at any second.

“I didn’t want to have a classic score, and it came to me that the drums would be my metronome to measure the beat and the internal rhythm of the film,” Inarritu told TheWrap.

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