Sundance: Scoring the Documentary ‘2nd Chance’ – with Composer T. Griffin

Richard Davis, the idiosyncratic inventor of the bulletproof vest and founder of the Second Chance body armor manufacturing company, is the central focus of writer/director Ramin Bahrani’s documentary 2nd Chance , which premiered at Sundance 2022.

Davis’s larger-than-life personality is put on display in the film, but so is his backstory. Bahrani explores what may have made Davis (a man who shot himself point-blank 192 times) who he is instead of simply exploiting the sensational aspects of his story.

2nd Chance was acquired by Showtime Documentary Films, with plans for a theatrical release before its network premiere later this year.

Here, composer T. Griffin talks about finding the ‘voice’ for Richard in the score, using music to underscore the emotion in the story, creating cues for Richard’s rise as a businessman, and more!

Composer T. Griffin; photo by: Ebru Yildiz

What were director Ramin Bahrani’s ideas in terms of the score initially on 2nd Chance?

T. Griffin (TG): One thing I loved about working with Ramin on 2nd Chance is that he proceeded from the emotional center of the movie first and then all the other decisions spoked off of that.

Richard Davis — who this film is about — is a flamboyant, theatrical character. We wanted to make sure that we supported that element of him without making him into a caricature or a cartoon. This film gathers human depth as it goes and we wanted the audience to be prepared for that element of it. That played a big part in how we conceived of the score. I was particularly conscious of that.

This film gathers human depth as it goes and we wanted the audience to be prepared for that element of it. That played a big part in how we conceived of the score.

I recently went back and listened to some of my initial demos for the project. It was fairly early in the process when there was an early Rough Cut. In the way the music was temped, there was more theatricality and overt fun — a bit of a circus feel to it. Much of the temp music was from a film I scored, called Boys State, which does have this sort of showmanship to the music. Once I started working off that as an idea, it became very clear that was not the way to go. It felt like it was commenting on Richard Davis.

The word that Ramin kept using to me was “haunting.” There was something haunted about Richard that kept him in this performative state and that was what he was interested in. He was interested in the thing behind what you see when you meet Richard.
 

So you’re not emphasizing the showboat aspects of Richard, but he seems like quite the character. To not comment on that with the music must have been challenging. How did you walk that line of supporting this strong personality without making him feel cartoonish?

TG: One thing that unlocked it for me was a scene toward the middle of the film where we encounter Richard’s family and his upbringing. We uncover some things that seem very painful although Richard doesn’t acknowledge them. So, in scoring that part of the film, it had to be very heartfelt. The task that Ramin had given me was to make the audience feel for Richard in the scene.

Dir. Ramin Bahrani

The solution to that, the melody that I came up with for that moment, then became something that threaded through earlier in the film. It helped to prepare the audience for something they haven’t experienced yet, and music can do that very powerfully because you’re scoring the subtext not the surface of the film.

In doing that, Ramin kept asking me for more. He wanted a specific instrument, some unusual instrument that we could associate with Richard and what Richard is not saying when he’s talking to us. Ramin wanted to capture the pain that underlies Richard’s personality.

I had just worked with a bassoon player on a film that was completed previous to this and felt that the bassoon could be a possibility. We had been working with a lot of Americana instruments in the palette, like pedal steel guitar and acoustic guitar, which felt pretty good to me. For this section, I wrote a solo line for a bassoon player and brought in a bassoonist to record it. Both Ramin and the editor heard it and said, “That is it. That’s the thing we’re looking for.”

The bassoon ended up being central to the score throughout. It’s now the first piece of melody you hear in the film.
 

What was the most challenging cue you wrote for 2nd Chance? Is there a track you had to try a couple of times before you got it right?

TG: I’d say that cue, where we meet Richard’s father and learn about his experience. His father had a horrifying experience during WWII. As an audience, we understand that terrifying and deadening experience he had has now created what we see as three generations of disassociation.

This cue where we go through what happened to his father was the deepest I had to go into the psychology and emotions of it.

In the film, we meet Richard, his son, and his father through archive material. This cue where we go through what happened to his father was the deepest I had to go into the psychology and emotions of it. So it’s something that I spent quite a lot of time on and it took a lot of work to uncover it.

But once it happened, the instrumentation, the harmonic language, and the style I used to record things became the template for very different cues at different points in the movie.

What cue would be the polar opposite of this ‘childhood’ cue? What pushes to the other end of the spectrum?

TG: The first half of the movie is about the rise of Richard. It was quite a challenge to give this celebratory feeling to this man who is building his own dreams and bringing quite a few people along with him.

It was quite a challenge to give this celebratory feeling to this man who is building his own dreams and bringing quite a few people along with him.

There were a few cues that explored the times that Richard was at his highest. He was a man who created a huge number of jobs in this small town he lived in. Everyone in the town worked for him and he would present these big, expensive fireworks shows every July 4th. So, within the palette we already set up, those cues had to be joyous.

Pictured (L to R): Jim White, Joy Guidry, Phil Weinrobe, Jack McLoughlin, Jay Rodriguez, T. Griffin; photo by: Pete Sillen

When getting to work on a track, do you first use virtual instruments to get your ideas out? Then, re-record those parts with live musicians? Or, how do you like to work?

TG: For me, it’s very iterative. I’ll start out by playing real instruments myself. I can get around on the guitar, keyboard, banjo, and harmonica — much of what went into this palette. I played slide guitar and lap steel on this.

I’ll start out by playing real instruments myself.

Once I’d begun that process and sketched things out for the director — which ends up being a combination of virtual instruments and live parts that I’ve played – I’ll bring in other players one at a time throughout the process. This film I started in July and we didn’t mix until the end of December. I was recording live instruments from the time we felt like the cues were starting to come together.

What was unique about your experience of scoring 2nd Chance?

TG: This was a film that required rigorous thematic development, musically. For much of what I work on, I tend to respond to more textural material. I like to be unaware of the music in the movies I’m working on, or that I watch. I think a very light touch is the most powerful, especially in documentaries or smaller scale indie films where you don’t want to be over conscious of the craft of filmmaking. And music is one of the most noticeable expressions of the craft.

This was a film that required rigorous thematic development, musically.

In this one, Richard is described as operatic and we thought of it as a somewhat operatic approach in that there was a solo voice (the bassoon) and then a specifically selected choral voice, which was the pedal steel guitar.

A lot of the cues are pedal steel and bassoon, and the pedal steel represents the community and the world in which Richard is living and the bassoon is the individual man that Richard is. To me, that was something that I haven’t so specifically tried to do, to create the arc of a film using musical material like that.

A big thanks to T. Griffin for giving us a behind-the-scenes look at the score of 2nd Chance and to Jennifer Walden for the interview!