Daniel Pemberton; Spider-Verse Orchestra

Belinda Jiao/Getty Images; Eric Charbonneau/Getty Images for Sony Pictures

Following last week’s announcement of the now fast-selling U.K. tour, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse composer Daniel Pemberton is revealing that the film’s live-in-concert experience is now web-swinging across the Atlantic and into the States. 

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse Live in Concert’s 50-plus-date U.S. tour will kick off Sept. 1 in Nashville, Tennessee, featuring a live-to-picture performance of Pemberton’s mold-breaking orchestral and electronic score. A scratch DJ on turntables and a designated whistler will also be present to add two of the score’s most unique ingredients, and at a select number of events, you might even catch Pemberton on guitar and a number of other instruments including his own face. (He’ll explain below.) For more U.S. tour information, visit the official website as further details become available later this week.

The Emmy-winning and Oscar-nominated composer channeled the rave and club scenes of ‘90s London to create the musical identity of the Oscar-winning Spider-Verse saga. And while this experimental approach could be done with relative ease in the recording studio, Pemberton was initially uncertain if the multidimensional scores of Into the Spider-Verse and now Across the Spider-Verse could be re-created for a continuous live-to-picture performance.

“I always thought it’d be impossible to do live, because they jump between so many different ideas and genres. But a long time ago, I did a couple of cues at a one-off film music festival, and I was really surprised at how effective it worked,” Pemberton tells The Hollywood Reporter. “So that got my brain thinking about trying to do the whole film live, and we did a couple of tests that went down phenomenally.”

Pemberton is quick to credit the Phil Lord- and Chris Miller-produced films for providing him with the leeway that inherently comes with the franchise’s revolutionary approach to animation.  

“One of the things that I love about these movies is that I’m given creative freedom that often doesn’t seem to exist so much in live-action,” Pemberton says. “And because the Spider-Verse films look like nothing else people had seen before, it allowed me to try and make something that didn’t sound like anything people had heard before. The difficulty with live-action is that a lot of live-action looks like live-action you’ve seen before, and so there’s a pressure to make music that sounds like stuff you’ve heard before.”

Below, during a recent conversation with THR in support of Across the Spider-Verse’s U.S. tour announcement, Pemberton also explains how the first cue he ever wrote for Across wound up serving as the film’s thematic bookends involving Gwen Stacy.

So how did you arrive at this point where Into the Spider-Verse and Across the Spider-Verse both have live concerts and tours?

The Spider-Verse films probably have the most complicated scores I’ve ever done, and I always thought it’d be impossible to do live, because they jump between so many different ideas and genres. But a long time ago, I did a couple of cues at a one-off film music festival, and I was really surprised at how effective it worked. So that got my brain thinking about trying to do the whole film live, and we did a couple of tests that went down phenomenally. 

I’ve been chatting to the promoter, and they do a lot of live-to-picture events like Lawrence of Arabia. It has one of the all-time great film scores [by Maurice Jarre], but in a live context, that film is front-loaded with loads of big orchestral thematic things. There’s nothing really happening with the orchestra in the last hour, whereas Spider-Verse almost has this perfect arc in terms of the shape. It has a big intro, and then it comes down and goes back up, so it’s just a great film to watch with an audience. It has a specific kind of excitement and energy that makes it a very unique experience for the audience and the musicians onstage, so there has been a lot of enthusiasm for doing more of these events live.

So Into the Spider-Verse has now been on a tour, and it’s crazy that it’s become quite a huge thing with a touring band and a whole bunch of musicians driving around America in a truck. But we’ve only done Across the Spider-Verse live once, and that was at the Academy Museum in L.A. That was the first and only time it’s been done so far, but it’s so much work to get the show watertight. Once you’ve done that, then you can start working out how to turn it into a touring show.

On certain dates, will you be there to pick up a guitar and play various other instruments?

I’ll play! I’m definitely going to do the London show [June 30th’s Royal Festival Hall] for a number of reasons. It’s also conveniently close to my house. It’s a 10-minute ride. But when we do a really big show and they can get me there, I’ll try and do it. So I’ll definitely be at the world premiere, and I’d hope to be at some of the bigger ones in America. But it’s really about the schedule and all those kinds of things. I’m also not the world’s greatest guitarist, but I’m probably one of the best face slappers you can get. The second movie is funny, because there’s a mix of things in it where I get to look cool, like playing the guitar. But I also get to look like a complete idiot slapping my face, so it feels like a good leveler for me. (Pemberton proceeds to slap his cheek in a way that creates five ascending notes.) I can’t feel like too much of a rock star if there’s six minutes in the film of me just standing in front of a microphone and slapping my face. 

There are moments in the score with opera singing and whistling. Will the live shows actually have designated opera singers and whistlers? 

The whistling we normally do live, but the opera singer is probably going to be on track. There are a lot of things in this score that are so complex to balance. So we’re trying to give a live experience, but it’s not like a symphonic orchestra where every single element is all being performed live. We have loads of live stuff backed with electronics and turntables, and that’s the only way we could really make it work. It’s really about how much of an exciting show it is. And if you see the show on two different nights, you are going to get a slightly different experience, but also a very unique live experience. 

What percentage of Into the Spider-Verse’s score did you expand on in Across the Spider-Verse?

The first one was establishing the language, and that’s always challenging. So the second one was about massively expanding on that language. The first one was really just Miles’ world. That was the only world we were really dealing with, and in Across, there’s all these new characters, all these new universes and all these new worlds that all need their own language. So Gwen’s theme and Gwen’s world have a certain sonic approach. 2099’s world has a different sound, as does Spider-Punk‘s world and Pavitr’s world in India. So the musical landscape got so much wider in the second film, and there’s no real music that’s just reused from the first film. Everything is expanded upon. 

For me, great film music is when you have strong themes and strong identities that are completely recognizable to that film. Great film music is when you can hear something away from the film and it takes you back into that universe. And that can be as simple as a certain noise or a huge melody. And with Spider-Verse, we have created quite a unique melody and sound, so it’s really fun to keep expanding on that. Everything is connected in these two movies. Every sound and motif connects together. 

One of the things that’s been interesting is watching the reactions of younger filmgoers who are starting to learn about cinema and film music and how surprised they are at thematic continuity and motifs that can connect characters. It is one of those very iconic and also straightforward parts of film music. But there hasn’t been a consistent approach, especially with the superhero movies over the last couple of decades. Often you have different composers scoring different episodes in different franchises, and if you look at The Lord of the Rings or Star Wars movies, there is a very strong thematic and melodic approach between those. You’ve got one vision, one composer, and with Spider-Verse, that’s what we’re trying to do. So, for a lot of younger people, that’s often quite new to them, which is obviously quite weird to me.

When I spoke to your bike-riding companion Ludwig Göransson, he told me how difficult it was to translate most of his Oppenheimer cues into a continuous live performance. He had to do a lot of reorchestrating and rearranging since the cues in the final cut of the film were edited to varying degrees. Did you run into similar obstacles? 

Yeah, it’s really difficult. In the good old days of film music, the composer would get a cut, write their piece of music, and then they’d record it and stick it on the film. And then there’s a round of applause for everyone. In the modern world and the modern way of film composing, everything changes all the time. So you might write something to picture, but then that picture might get slightly tweaked: something gets put in or extended or taken out at the last minute. So the music is always in flux, and while you can make that work for a film, you can’t do that when you have musicians playing it live. You have to make it in a way that is enjoyable and exciting for the musicians to play. If the musicians are only thinking about the technicality of very complicated tempo changes, which you might have when you’re editing a film to move between things, it is going to be a terrible live performance.

So, like Ludwig, I had to go back to the beginning and rebuild the score, scene by scene. Some scenes will be slightly different on a very minuscule level. I’m talking tiny, tiny stuff, but you still have to build the whole thing from the ground up again, and that is very time consuming. It’s a bit like pulling a car apart and rebuilding it. You get to learn all the bits in the score again. But I saw Ludwig’s performance. It was brilliant, but I would not want to be a musician during that performance. It never stops. It’s exhausting. It’s a beautiful score, but Oppenheimer feels like the musician equivalent of running two marathons back to back.

As far as Across the Spider-Verse’s live show, did you take any inspiration from Ludwig’s Oppenheimer concert? 

I like to think it was the other way around because he saw mine first. (Laughs.) So he came to my show, and we worked with some of the same people, actually. It was the same production team, so Mike Kasper from Black Ink worked on that with Ludwig. But we like to keep an eye on what each other is doing. We’re good friends, and I’ve got massive respect for his work. It also makes me a bit jealous, so that’s a good sign. 

Are composers pretty competitive with one another? 

Oh, for sure. The best film music in the world is stuff that makes 50 percent of me incredibly jealous and annoyed, because it’s better than anything I’ve done and it’s everything I aspire to do. And the other 50 percent is like, “This is everything film music should be.” So you’re incredibly excited because it’s everything you care about, and when you hear it done well, it’s very exciting. So it’s the 50-50 rule of excitement and jealousy. If you get that, then it’s a great score.

Ludwig also had tempo changes to account for, so they had to introduce a new click track just one bar before the tempo change happened on the page. Did you run into similar tempo challenges?

On Oppenheimer, there’s loads and loads of crazy tempo changes, and I remember Ludwig telling me about that when we were having a beer in London. And what’s interesting about that is you’ll get smudge and imperfection. Sometimes, this can be really interesting because players are not all going to play together, and we have something similar to that with Spot, the baddie in Across the Spider-Verse. I recorded multiple de-tuned cello parts that weren’t all in tune, and if you keep tracking stuff that’s de-tuned, it’s like drawing a line many times. If you draw a straight line once, and then you badly draw a line 60 times, you will start to get a feeling of where the central line is, making it very unstable and interesting. So we have something similar with the cellos. They’re detuned, but they all align around one melody. That’s more of a melodic idea than a tempo idea, but putting multiple tempo changes in is something I try to avoid. It’s a nightmare when it comes to editing, so if you don’t have to do it, don’t do it. 

Some of my favorite scores of the past decade have been initiated before a single frame has been captured. Do you ever start writing before you have any footage?

Yeah, it’s different, and I like working that way. It allows you to experiment and not be dictated to by the picture. So I will go through a very long process, which I call research and development, where I’ll try out loads of ideas and come up with sounds, themes, motifs. So I do write that way, but to do a film like Spider-Verse, the music is so reactive to the picture. You can’t just slap a track on and then go to the pub. You have to work at it so much to make it in sync with the visuals and in sync with the story, because the movie moves at an incredible pace and you have to hit so many different emotions and beats within seconds of each other. So I need to write themes that you recognize within two seconds because we are going to move somewhere else afterwards, and that’s a very complicated task.

If you’re doing an indie film where you might have one tone or one mood, it’s easier to do that, but this has the movement of a big blockbuster. So you need music that’s incredibly nimble, and over the years, the only thing that’s been able to deal with that kind of nimbleness has been the symphony orchestra. So I was always like, “How do I create a sound and a palette and an approach that has the speed and nimbleness of a full orchestra but isn’t a full orchestra? Something new, something different.” And with Spider-Verse, we created all these techniques through scratching, turntables, weird electronic sound design, live orchestra drums, and we built a language that allowed me to write a score that could be that reactive to picture. But you try to do it in a way that hopefully feels elegant and simplistic enough that you don’t notice the movement.

The cue that bookends Across is probably my favorite, as Gwen’s (Hailee Steinfeld) heavy drum parts are right in my wheelhouse.

Funnily, that was actually the first piece I ever wrote for Across the Spider-Verse, and it was “in the bin” for a long time. You write a lot of things to just get stuff out of you and try things. So I originally wrote this piece where I wanted to play with the idea of a punk rock band, and I just did this piece with very trashy, thrashy drums and guitar and some electronics and strings. So it was an early sketch, and we forgot all about it. It was put in the bin along with many other things as we were working on the film, and one day, we were like, “We need something for the opening drumming sequence.” And I was like, “OK, let’s give that a go.” So we pulled it out of the bin, and it was quite interesting. 

So I reworked it for that, and then much later, for the ending of the film, we didn’t know what to do and we tried different approaches. And then a great [supervising] music editor on Spider-Verse called Katie Greathouse, who’s a very important part of the team, just said, “Oh, why don’t we try that track over this?” So she just pulled it out and put it on, and we were like, “Fuck, this really works. Wow.” So I was like, “OK, the idea works, but I need to go away and rework it.” So I ran to this other office, because I was working in the same offices as all of them, and then I just wrote like crazy. And suddenly, we had the ending. So that was one of the most exciting moments for me; I felt we had something that was really special. By the way, that bit is great live. It’s such a fun ending to end a concert on.

Every live set list has a song or a cue that every musician anticipates, usually because it’s the most challenging piece. Is there one in particular that will allow your musicians to breathe easier once they nail it live? 

On Into the Spider-Verse, it was always “What’s Up Danger.” It’s the sequence with Miles’ leap of faith, so that was always the biggest moment. But with Across, we’ve only done this show once before, and the last 30 minutes is pretty much this relentless crescendo that just builds and builds and builds. So I think the ending is the most exciting bit; everything comes together into a big climax. But what is remarkable about doing these things live is that the audience is so excited about things. It’s not just a polite round of applause at the end. They’ll cheer when characters turn up and when certain things happen, but they also give a big cheer at the end of a particular cue.

So it’s a very unique and unusual way to experience cinema. I don’t know of anything else that’s like this communal experience with an audience. I know Americans like to make a lot more noise, but people are generally quite restrained in cinema. And I like that. I am not a big fan of lots of noise in the cinema, but when you see a film live with an orchestra and a band and a scratch DJ, make as much noise as you want. It’s a whole different way of seeing a film. So that’s why I’m excited for people to experience this on tour. You can’t have this cool and unique experience anywhere else.

If you were handed these exact movies in live-action or you went into them with the foreknowledge that they were live-action, how different would both scores be in your estimation?

That’s hard to say because, as a composer, one of the things that I love about these movies is that I’m given creative freedom that often doesn’t seem to exist so much in live-action. And because the Spider-Verse films look like nothing else people had seen before, it allowed me to try and make something that didn’t sound like anything people had heard before. The difficulty with live-action is that a lot of live-action looks like live-action you’ve seen before, and so there’s a pressure to make music that sounds like stuff you’ve heard before. So, when I get offered projects and what could be a huge film, I don’t get very excited about it if I don’t think I’m going to be able to do anything particularly artistic or creative in it. I don’t always avoid them, but I don’t put it out there that that’s my jam. I’d rather do a small film where I can be really creative and do something individual, than do a massive film and just sound like every other film score out there. A good example is a DC film I did called Birds of Prey with Margot Robbie, which a lot of people didn’t seem to enjoy as much as they should have.

I enjoyed it.

Cathy [Yan], the director, had a very strong and unusually different vision for how that film should feel and look, and I got very excited by that. So I felt that it was a way to be a bit more creative, and that score is probably close to what Spider-Verse sounds like. It’s more trashy guitar-based, but if you look at King Arthur: Legend of the Sword that I did with Guy Ritchie, that’s got a similar sort of aesthetic where I got to do something a bit more creative. So it always depends on the film and the filmmakers and the approach, really, but I like things where you can push at the edges a bit more.

From Aaron Sorkin and Danny Boyle to Spider-Verse, is there an underlying principle to working on opposite ends of the spectrum? Do these projects have more in common than people might realize?

Yeah, I always look at the film and see what it wants. In some ways, the film is in charge more than anyone. You feel a film and you can feel ideas that stick to a film, and unusual ideas can make a film very exciting and entrancing. Unusual ideas can also make a film bad because they stick out and they’re trying to be too clever. So it’s always about getting under the skin of a film and finding out what it needs. I don’t like dictating my sound or my style. I try to adapt my sound and style for every project. Some people have a very cool and distinctive sound that they put on different films, and that’s what you get. But I like to change what that is for each project and see what’s going to work with the film itself. So Spider-Verse is very different from a Sorkin project. With Sorkin, you’ve really got to make sure you’re doing something that doesn’t get in the way of the dialogue because his scripts are so fantastic. At the same time, you’re trying to create a sound that has an identity and a uniqueness, but you don’t necessarily have the big boldness of a Spider-Verse score. Although, on The Trial of the Chicago 7, we have some really bold moments that I really enjoyed. So every film is different.

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Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse Live in Concert tour information is available at SpiderVerseInConcert.com