The 'Deadpool' and 'Mad Max: Fury Road' composer explains how he makes his massive scores

After seeing most of the movie in 2013, Holkenborg immediately went to work on the guitar sound for The Doof Warrior and the massive drums that accompany him, but he also came up with the music to accompany the massive sandstorm the lead characters drive into.

The music that features horns and strings matched with the chaos inside the eye of the storm caused Miller to completely change his mind about only having The Doof Warrior guitar be the main score.

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“I was so inspired after seeing the movie that I immediately took on the massive storm scene and finished it in four weeks. It was a writing extravaganza,” Holkenborg said. “[George] loved it so much. He said, 'It’s done,' and he never came back to me with any notes about that section for two years.”

But Holkenborg wasn’t done with the film. For the next two years, it was constant “experimentation” in filling in the emotional music Miller needed for the second half of the movie.

Holkenborg said that this movie that looks inside the violent reign of infamous crime boss Whitey Bulger is his most by-the-numbers score.

“It’s live strings, live woodwinds, and piano. It was the first time I had done a movie like that,” he said.

Holkenborg had come onto the film with only four weeks until it was to be locked, so he said the discussions with director Scott Cooper on creating this evolving music to resemble Bulger’s rise as a crime lord were essential.

But, at times, having no music was the best play.

The composer admits that for select parts of the movie he would convince Cooper to not put in any music.

“There were a couple of scenes where I wrote music for it, and the music was close to my heart, but I would always be the one to say, ‘I don’t think we need it — let’s just take it out,’” Holkenborg said. “It serviced the film better.”

To Holkenborg, doing a movie with a “wall-to-wall musical score” is easier than a movie like “Black Mass” because with this film, it was challenging to have gaps without music and still make it work.

Here’s a sample of the opening title:

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To create the sound for a movie that breaks all the rules of how we think about superheroes, Holkenborg took his cue from the trailer he saw of “Deadpool” shown at Comic-Con before he got the job.

“I couldn’t help but laugh through the whole thing,” he said.

So when pitching ideas on how to do the music for the movie to director Tim Miller, he went retro. “I said to him, ‘What if we took the worst bits from ‘Miami Vice’ and combine that with Frankie Goes to Hollywood, but on acid — how does that sound?’”

Miller was hooked.

“So I started writing this music that was like '80s music on speed, and it was right for the character,” Holkenborg said.

Holkenborg calls himself a “full-contact composer,” which means he can’t watch a movie and then sit next to a piano and write the score. He needs to first play with sounds, and with “Deadpool” he started with seeking out the tools he needed, which included dusting off old synthesizers he had packed away and even buying 1980s-era reverb machines on eBay to create the right feeling.

“I wake up the musician inside me and then the composer,” Holkenborg said of his process.

It took a few months to complete the “Deadpool” score, but he notes that it took a couple of weeks of just playing with synthesizers and drum machines to complete five minutes of music.

Listen to one of the tracks:

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You wouldn’t think Holkenborg and legendary Oscar-winning composer Hans Zimmer ("The Lion King") would have much in common, but in fact, the two have formed a strong working relationship and teamed on the “Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice” score.

The two recently locked the music, which they had been working on since last February, and though Holkenborg couldn’t get into any details on the making of the music for the movie (which opens March 18), he did touch on working with Zimmer.

“If you work on a movie like this, they are so intense and so long, there’s so much music that needs to be created, it’s really great to do it with a friend,” Holkenborg said. “It felt like a true collaboration."

Listen to one of their tracks:

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