‘The Tank’ Composer Max Aruj on Scoring The New Creature Feature
As seasoned horror fans know, a randomly inherited piece of remote property is rarely the windfall it is made out to be. Whether it is a small town with a long memory, cursed land, haunted walls, or simply bad luck, something typically sends the new owners packing hastily.
In director Scott Walker’s new film The Tank, these tried-and-true tropes certainly stand sturdy for Ben (Matt Whelan), his wife Jules (Luciane Buchanan), and their daughter after Ben inherits a mysterious piece of abandoned coastal property. However, a bevy of cleverly fresh elements and wonderful creature effects from Weta Workshop keep this new creature feature from feeling bogged down by familiarity.
For The Tank to successfully pull from genre classics while slyly subverting them, attention to tone and balance was needed from everyone involved. This fact especially rang true for the film’s composer, Max Aruj. Blurring the lines between sub-genres, the film’s score is required to act as the emotional undercurrent on multiple levels and in myriad ways. At times, the score sells the family’s wholesome optimism and grounded dynamics. At others, it embodies the stealthy, lurking ancient creature seeking the most basic needs.
Lucky for The Tank, Aruj is no stranger to scoring high-tension, high-action films. Better yet, he is no stranger to scoring high-tension films that specifically involve dangerous, water-dwelling creatures that somehow find themselves in domestic dwellings. With previous credits, including Alexandre Aja’s Crawl, The Ice Road, and Lansky, along with his years of working with award-winning composer Lorne Balfe at Remote Control Productions, Aruj was the perfect composer to balance The Tank’s specific musical requirements.
Dread Central recently spoke with Aruj, where we crawled through his process for scoring The Tank, shone a light on musically embodying an ancient creature, the importance of pacing, and how his years at Remote Control Productions set him up for success.
Dread Central: It has been a minute since Scott Walker directed a film. How did you come to be involved with this project?
Max Aruj: Scott Walker is a friend of my old boss, Lorne Balfe. So I met Scott literally ten years ago, which is wild to think. It was when he did a Nicolas Cage movie [The Frozen Ground] that I think is on Netflix right now. He worked on that with Lorne, and at the time, I was just getting started with, “How do you even score a film using a computer?” I was literally at that stage of just learning the tech stuff. He was really easy to get along with, and then this one came along. Lorne reached out, and then it was easy for Scott and I to kind of jump back in because I’ve seen him over the years, and we just went for it.
DC: The Tank plays with a lot of classic horror tropes and makes some subtle nods to classic creature features and horror films. Was that something that you talked about with Scott? Did that at all influence the initial musical direction for the film?
MA: I think that’s a great question, and my overall answer is I have no problem at all paying homage to a style that works so well. When I first spoke with Scott, the vision for the film was traditional in that the music needed to be right there with the audience and play on the emotional aspect of the story.
There are some unique sounds in the score, but in general, it’s grounded in a traditional format. I think that allows the audience to understand the thrills and enjoy them and then be able to identify with the family and the emotional stuff. And absolutely paying homage to these classic scores. Because, in general, film music is still quite traditional. Even though it’s an ingestion of a lot of new styles and a lot of new sounds, in general, the way we do it and the way we score a picture is to support the drama. So in that way, yeah, absolutely. And I was happy to be traditional in that way.
DC: The physical space of the film feels big, but it’s an intimate, grounded story that centers around this small family unit. How important was establishing that family dynamic with the music early in the film?
MA: The most important role the music plays, in the beginning, is that car ride and the journey when we are first with the family. If we don’t nail that tone, then we don’t understand why we’re watching them. And to get that just right is essential.
With an early version, before I even sent it to Scott, I remember I did one where the first chord in the progression was wrong. I can’t remember if it was either too happy or too sad, but it’s amazing how you change one little thing like that, and it changes the way you think about the story or gets you in gear. If you do that incorrectly and then you get somewhere 10-20 minutes down the line, the audience can feel misled. So getting the bittersweet family aspect right is essential to know what we’re getting into.
DC: There’s also a mystery element to The Tank. I mean, it’s never good to inherit a random house you didn’t know about, especially an abandoned one. That never seems to work out well for anybody. So how did you approach scoring that mystery element while leaving room for it to build it up throughout the movie?
MA: Absolutely. To play into one of your earlier questions, one of the scores that I’m sure is one of everyone’s favorites is E.T. When John Williams needs the audience to feel this sense of wonderment, and before anything really goes down in The Tank, and the stakes are up, we need to feel that sense of wonderment because we don’t really know what’s going to happen.
I’m trying to hint that it’s not something really good, but when they’re in there, they’re going, “What is going on?” They’re just leaning in, and we want the audience to lean in and feel a little bit of that sense of sci-fi wonderment and curiosity. Scott did a really good job of planning all these moments out.
Because if you miss one of these moments, you lose an important part of the story. If they thought it was dangerous from the get-go, then there would be a very different reaction. So really, this sense of wonderment draws them in at first. So they’re not worried; they just find it interesting.
DC: Now, this is not your first wet basement creature-infested rodeo.
MA: [Laughs] Correct.
DC: However, with Crawl, there was no mystery about the creature. The alligator was always right smack on the front of the poster. That is not the case here, and your music plays a huge part in developing the creature’s identity. Can you talk a little bit about building that identity without visual cues for the audience to feed off of?
MA: Scott wanted to create the creature sounds such that it sounded ancient. Because this thing has been around for millions of years, living beneath the earth. And we thought a detuned orchestra and a really kind of gritty sound was one that one could imagine could be heard millions of years ago. It’s not polished. It’s dirty. And we’re trying to represent this creature trudging through the earth.
[We] did that with this low, bending cello figure that you hear throughout. However, we try and use it sparingly so that we hear it at key moments, but between those moments, there’s this simmering tension. So placing it at just the right spot so that he’s around the corner lurking seemed to work most successfully rather than potentially overdoing it. That was a really important part of our process.
DC: This creature also makes a lot of noises, and a lot of sound design surrounds it. Did you have to be extra mindful of that to ensure the music was complimentary to the sounds? Was that ever something you had to address or deal with?
MA: Well, as usual in the process, there’s often not time for everyone to be working together and in tandem. Sound effects guys are working up to the deadline. I’m working up to the deadline. It was perfect because Scott would say, “Don’t do this because this sounds too much like the door creak.” He was the gate of acceptance for sounds.
And there were a few times when he kicked them back and said, “This sounds too much like a frog croak.” Or, “This sounds too much like a wood board creaking.” So he just told me and then I either deleted it or replaced it with something else. That practical feedback in these sorts of situations is perfect. And it takes someone with experience to be able to point that out and just say, “No, wait a minute. We’re not going to know if that’s music or a sound effect.” He was so great about that, and he made it really easy on me.
DC: I’d like to discuss how you work on pacing, specifically with action scenes, as I think The Tank handles that well. How did you approach scoring the multiple action sequences in The Tank and utilize space and tone to maximize tension without overdoing it?
MA: Absolutely. I think what you’ve identified was actually the hardest work of the movie; that is to plan out the climaxes, even within scenes. If you plan them out, you are able to know how to pace yourself. There’s a track on the album, it’s one of the longest ones, but it covers the most ground—there’s simmering tension, action, emotion, and heroism. So essentially, if I’ve identified the most important moments in that seven-minute scene, I know where the melodies should reach or resolve in each one of these places. From there, I can map out how I’m going to start.
For example, if there’s a big action climax within two minutes, that gives me two minutes. So I plan out where I’m going to end and then start working backward. And I’m very careful with dynamics. I’m, of course, watching the movie as I’m going, but I think for the audience member who’s just watching the movie, they don’t care to identify every single moment of what’s happening musically as long as the music is a perfect baton handoff between action and emotion, or emotion and simmering tension.
If you plan those goalposts out first, then you’re doing the hardest work upfront. If you don’t do that planning, then you’ll find out that all these sections start to run into each other. It’s the job of a film composer to be patient and spend extra time marking when and how these shifts happen.
DC: I’d like to shift gears and discuss your time working at Hans Zimmer’s film score company, Remote Control Productions. There are many pathways into film composing, but this one seems to have worked well for you. How did your time there help set you up for professional success?
MA: Yeah, when I started there, it was over ten years ago, so I was 20 when I started. When you’re there and working, you don’t have a say in what you do. You just do. You have to figure out all this stuff and come up with all these different solutions for anything that comes across your plate. And there’s a deadline! So you really, you just perform. It’s the best possible situation to learn things, for sure. The volume of cues you have to write and the volume of genres of music forces you to learn so much so quickly.
DC: I have to imagine at Remote Control, you have access to all the equipment and gear you could ever possibly want, but that’s not necessarily the case as a freelance composer. When you decided to strike out on your own, how long did it take you to transition and ensure you had gear and a setup that you could work with?
MA: I think that’s a great question. Leaving was the scariest thing I’ve ever done in my life, for sure. But I was there for ten years, so that’s a long time. The way it went down was I spoke to Lorne one day, and we just decided on the date that I would go out on my own and that was around six months away. So then I got started.
This was also at the beginning of COVID, so it was two-pronged. I needed a rig, and I needed to work at home, so that just worked out perfectly. So I built a rig immediately and I had to set it up immediately because I had work to do. It had to happen super quickly. So I worked from home for six months.
Then, in that six months, I also signed with an agent at Kraft-Engel Management. So we got that going, and then I booked The Ice Road around the time I finished. The timing couldn’t have been more perfect, really. I was also in the middle of doing Lansky, so in that way, it was really healthy that I had things to work on the second that I was done. Going freelance, there’s a different set of challenges, and I was so nervous leaving. But here we are, two and a half years since I left. You just figure it out, and it feels great when you do because it’s a whole new frontier.
DC: You spent most of your time at Remote Control working with composer Lorne Balfe, who certainly had to be an amazing person to learn from. However, the work was always in service to his style and ideas. Once you were firmly on your own, did you have any issues defining and establishing your own sound and style and, metaphorically, setting Lorne’s aside?
MA: I’m learning the answer to that question over time. I can already tell that, after having left him for a little while, it’s taken me time to revert to things I might not do for him, but I would do for my own stuff. But of course, seeing his success and working for him for so many years, you learn when a client asks for something, how to accomplish that, how to get it approved, how to make sure it sounds good. I would guess that the learning curve is hard when you’re not working with someone like Lorne because you might be floundering around looking for a solution.
I’ll bet you, anytime we were looking for a fix or we were looking for a solution, Lorne would solve it in around 10-15 minutes. The point of that being, it’s just experience and practice. If you have to try too hard to figure out a very simple solution, then it’s probably not the right solution. That’s the stuff that is invaluable.
DC: You compose for all film genres, but do you particularly enjoy scoring horror or have a personal soft spot for it?
MA: Yeah, of course! And you know what I watched a couple of weeks ago? Have you seen Scream VI yet?
DC: Oh, yes.
MA: I thought it was so much fun. I really thought it was a masterclass in Hollywood filmmaking where it’s fun, it’s exciting, and, like The Tank, it reveals information to you at just the right spots. Just when you think you’re comfortable, BAM! You’re hit with something else and surprised. It was great. And the audience at Century City just loved it. Everyone was having so much fun.
When I was watching, I just got the sense, “Man, there are some really smart people planning out every part of this movie.” It’s so articulate.
DC: Well, I’m so happy to hear that, and I hope we get to hear you in the horror genre again. Although, maybe we can get you out of the basement next time. Dry you off a little bit.
MA: Even just up on the ground floor. [Laughs] Yes, love it.
The Tank is now playing in select U.S. theatres and is available digitally on VOD. In addition, Aruj’s score for the film will also be available on April 25th on all major streaming platforms via Lakeshore Records.
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