One of the hits of the 2020 Sundance Film Festival was the documentary A Thousand Cuts. Its composer, Sam Lipman, sat down to speak with FSMO in the corner of Atticus Coffee, Books and Teahouse in Park City—but then that interview, among others, were lost as the world descended into the current and unending pandemicscape. We were able to catch up, however, just in time for A Thousand Cuts to make its PBS debut on Frontline in Jan. 2021.

The film charts the drug policies of Rodrigo Duterte’s presidency in the Philippines and journalist Maria Ressa’s crusade to publish the truth. Director Ramona S. Diaz followed Ressa’s tireless pursuit as well as the stories of Duterte’s supporters—a cadre of social media influencers who spread the president’s cult of personality throughout the nation. Lipman noted that the film began as a close look at Duterte’s re-election campaign, and that Ressa was more peripheral to the story. “As they filmed, Duterte started to threaten [Ressa] and go after her; she was arrested three times during the filming,” he said. “It got really scary. It still is, for her.”

In fact, over the summer of 2020, Ressa was convicted of “cyberlibel” in Manila. “So, the film took some dark turns. They spent, I want to say, six months out there filming and they went back and forth. Things kept on changing, so it was a difficult film to assemble and to score,” said Lipman. As he recalled, he was sent five different cuts of the film within a month, making a challenging project into a painful effort as they tried to piece together the story. “There would be developments that shifted the overall message of the film, so we’d have to reassemble it over that. I don’t know if we were expecting to get into Sundance, and when we did, we had three weeks!”

Lipman normally gravitates toward orchestral composition—he especially has a soft spot for the masters of the mid-20th century—but A Thousand Cuts spoke to his second love, electronics. “The first thing we agreed on was that this was going to be a gripping movie. It’s not gonna be fun or hopeful. We also had a pretty solid agreement to keep things electronic and weird. Unrecognizable sounds,” he said. Instead of hearing piano, guitar or a violin, this score would be more inspired by Hildur Gudnadottir’s recent Chernobyl soundtrack. “It was my first mostly atonal score. I find that atonality is where fear lives. Is that a chord? Is that a melody? What instrument is that? I was trying to make it sound like the inside of your mind or your heart when you’re frightened or disturbed.”

His score also makes liberal use of Shepard tones, a specific request from the director. The infinite rise of the tone creates unbroken tension and nods to the continuous chaos in Duterte’s Philippines. “This was not a melodic score by any means, but it’s much more of a psychological score. There were heroic moments where it was completely tonal—I reserved a few of those. Most of the film is just focused on the unrestrained nature of the government down there and their use of technology. I think tonality would have pierced that.”

Sometimes, films go through several more edits following their Sundance premiere, but A Thousand Cuts—at least from Lipman’s side—remained fairly intact. Although the remainder of its festival run (including SXSW) was canceled due to the pandemic, its message hasn’t faded. “I feel like there’s a new age coming of film and film composers,” he remarks, “and I feel like we have to be activists and a score has to be an activist score. I don’t quite know what that means, though.”

Fast-forward to the present, and Lipman has also scored a B horror film called Cyst, about a mad doctor who creates a revolting monster. “It’s an icky, silly film,” he says, describing his start on the project. “A couple of years ago, this young filmmaker, Tyler Russell, made a film. He was working in L.A. for about five, six years as a camera man and decided to try out being a director. So, he came [to Texas], and he found this guy, George Hardy—who’s a dentist, really, but who had also been the star of this old cult film called Troll 2. They made a film called Texas Cotton, and they needed a composer—a cheap one. And I was just starting out!” Russell and Hardy were looking for someone with orchestral experience, and Lipman fit the criteria. “A couple of years later, they wanted to make another bad B cult movie. So, they decided to do a horror film about a doctor and they literally wrote the script over the weekend.”

The resulting score covers the film almost wall-to-wall, and it gave the composer the opportunity to sink his teeth into some big moments. In the very beginning, over the opening titles, Lipman introduces the star of his score, the violin. “The violin is the central character, Patty. We agreed that violin would be her, and the organ would be the evil doctor. So, rather cliché. But that was the only straight-ahead, orchestral piece on the score,” he says. “As soon as you get into the film, you start to hear guitar and a jazz quartet with flute. When the orchestral music comes back at the end, it’s big and pounding as the monsters devour their victims.”

He comments that Cyst was largely temped with early Jerry Goldsmith, like his episodes of The Twilight Zone. “They really wanted that vibe. The first stuff I gave [Russell] was too big—they wanted it to be minimal and sinewy, so I really went to school on Jerry Goldsmith’s stock. And I was really impressed with the economy of how they used to make records and scores back in the ’60s, where they could only afford one recording day. You could hear errors on the score. You could hear little edits, little clicks and things like that.” In the spirit of this economy, Lipman recorded the instruments himself and used those recordings to sweeten his soft synths.

One instrument that he did borrow and learn to play was a theremin. Rather than rely on an admittedly good library of samples, Lipman wanted the authentic instrument, which has too many performance quirks to faithfully reproduce with a computer. “It was harder than I thought! I was like, ‘I’ll be a natural at this. It’s easy!’ No, it’s not. A huge part of the theremin’s problem is that each theremin behaves completely differently,” he explains. “But I feel pretty good. I think I got a good sound and I didn’t worry too much.”

Lipman continues to be busy through Covid, both working as a professor at University of Texas at Austin, and doing orchestrations for the Budapest Scoring Orchestra for The Last Planet, Terrence Malick’s upcoming feature on the story of Christ. He describes the process of coordinating a remote recording session as “weird,” but goes into further detail: “So, we book the session and we send the parts over. Then we go on this website called Source Connect where we can hear the orchestra, the control room and the conductor. They play through each cue, just like a real session, but you just don’t see them. It’s kind of good in a way, because it forces you to really listen. Then, you give your notes and they’ll do another take and you move on. It’s worked really well. They send all the sessions back in a Pro Tools file that you download and it’s done.”

Just like that.

—FSMO