'Bond 25' To Reunite Director Cary Fukunaga With 'Maniac' Composer Dan Romer
James Bond is getting a new sound. Dan Romer, who collaborated with Bond 25 director Cary Fukunaga on Beasts of No Nation and Maniac, has landed the job of composing the Bond 25 soundtrack. The James Bond films primarily feature film scores meant to invoke the iconic work of original composer John Barry, but with Romer on board, there's a good chance this score will be distinct from the others.
IndieWire is reporting that Dan Romer will reunite with Cary Fukunaga for the Bond 25 score. David Arnold handled music duties for the first two Daniel Craig Bond films – Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace. He was succeeded by Thomas Newman, who scored Skyfall and Spectre. While it's impossible to know for sure what Romer's Bond 25 soundtrack will be like, it's probably a good bet that it's going to change things up considerably.
Romer's score for Maniac is one of my favorite soundtracks in recent memory – sweet, melancholy and altogether lovely. It also sounds nothing like music you'd hear in a James Bond movie. Romer's other soundtrack work includes Beasts of the Southern Wild, Beasts of No Nation, the Netflix series The Innocent Man, and many more.
"I think the reason I generally come off as an unconventional composer is that I come from a music production background as opposed to a composition background," Romer said in a past interview. "I spent a lot of high school at LaGuardia in NYC obsessively studying Bach Chorales, which is where I really learned harmony and voicings. Once I started college, my studies were focused on timbre. I was very focused on how to make organic instruments seem unreal."
Romer also spoke of his collaborations with Fukunaga:
"He's not dark or depressive at all. He's calm and caring, and he inspires a feeling of camaraderie. I have a mild case of Tourette's syndrome which is exacerbated by sugar, and whenever he would hear me tick he'd quickly start talking about what I was eating and made sure I put something healthy in my stomach, which, when you're working as intensely as we were, is often difficult. As far as out collaboration goes, he was very hands-on with his musical ideas....Cary has a vision for everything he makes, and nothing ever feels coincidental, no matter what the process is for the specific piece."
In the still-untitled Bond 25, Daniel Craig's Bond is recruited to rescue a kidnapped scientist, and soon "finds himself hot on the trail of a mysterious villain who's armed with a dangerous new technology." The film is due out April 8, 2020.