‘The Color Purple’ composer Kris Bowers on creating ‘the glue between the songs’ of a musical [Exclusive Video Interview]

Composer Kris Bowers met with “The Color Purple” director Blitz Bazawule six months before shooting began on the musical film. “We talked about the score needing to be the glue between the songs,” Bowers recalls. “Even if the score was going to have its own identity, it was important that we had some sort of tangential connection between the songs and whatever I was writing. He involved me that early so that I could be embedded in the process of creating the pre-records for the songs. I was a part of every single conversation so that I could listen to how they were approaching it.” Watch our exclusive video interview above.  

While discussing the Quincy Jones score for the 1985 film, Bowers says, “I was thankful that Blitz encouraged me to put it away in our first meeting. Something that Blitz always talked about was that this was going to be our version. We really needed to stand firmly in that and not be concerned with how this compares to the original. Having the book as a north star was so helpful, because we’re looking at Alice Walker‘s words as opposed to another movie that had been made, or even the Broadway show.”

SEE Blitz Bazawule (‘The Color Purple’ director) on ‘contributing something new to Alice Walker’s brilliant canon’

“For Celie’s theme, it was about this sense of simplicity, a bit of loneliness, especially in the beginning,” he explains. “It’s very sparse when we first hear it. As her story grows and as she steps into her power it becomes a fuller, orchestral sound. With Celie and Nettie, it was all about the joy of them as young girls. Anytime that reprises, it just feels like this lift in the midst of what Celie’s going through. I wanted to have something that had that brightness and that sense of joy, and at the same time had scope and scale to it. In a lot of ways that huge swelling of emotion that she gets from her connection with Nettie were some of the biggest moments of the score.”

“The Color Purple” is a decades-spanning tale of love and resilience and of one woman’s journey to independence. Celie (Fantasia Barrino) faces many hardships in her life, but ultimately finds extraordinary strength and hope in the unbreakable bonds of sisterhood. The Warner Bros. film opens nationwide on December 25.

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