Forrest Gump is Andrew Scott Bell’s origin story, in a manner of speaking. When his parents bought the two-disc soundtrack, packed with cuts from Bob Dylan and Creedence Clearwater Revival, he gravitated most to the final track, “Forrest Gump Suite,” by composer Alan Silvestri, who is also known for What Lies Beneath, Castaway, and Avengers: Infinity War, among countless other works.
“I remember hearing the track and lightning sparks going off in my brain,” he tells Bloody Disgusting. So, he listened to it over and over again until he learned how to play it on piano. “I’ll never forget how to play it,” he adds.
From upstate New York, Bell grew up in a very religious home. Being a “weird queer kid,” he found himself taking dance, ballet, and piano lessons. “When I was very young, I landed on art and drawing, and I was really into that. In an art class, you get to just do your own painting. You don’t have to paint like anybody else. You can just express yourself.” Jim Davis’ iconic Garfield comic strip inspired him to one day have a comic strip of his very own in the Sunday paper. “That was my dream,” he says with a laugh.
Another important figure in his early artistic development was James Horner (Casper, Aliens, Deep Impact). “I didn’t really realize until I was an adult that looking back on the movies that I loved as a kid and how many of them 一 like ‘Land Before Time,’ ‘An American Tail,’ ‘Casper’ 一 were written by him,” says Bell.
As he developed his own style, Bernard Herrmann (Psycho, Citizen Kane) would become an integral part of his work. “I love the way that his scores are bold and really get you right in the face. Somebody once described my music as a combination between Bernard Herrmann and Hans Zimmer. That really spoke to me. I kind of gravitated towards 一 I wouldn’t say more classical, but more old school horror harmonies.” Think Frankenstein and King Kong, as far as their “big, bombastic old tricks.”
Through piano lessons, Bell began writing his own pieces of music. “I would sit at the piano and come up with a movie,” he says. “I didn’t know I was doing this, but I had a song about a robot and a kid. It probably subconsciously was inspired by ‘The Iron Giant.’ I’ve always wanted to be part of storytelling, and music is kind of the way that I come into filmmaking and storytelling.” At one point in his journey, he wanted to be a director. “I would run around with a video camera with my friends,” he reflects, adding that telling stories is “one of the best things that humans do.”
Life eventually took him to Christopher Newport University in Newport News, Virginia, where he studied classical orchestration, music theory, and composition. He began scoring films in 2009, but things didn’t properly kick into gear until 2012. The mid-2010s brought a slew of projects, including films like The Last Punch and Rocket, a short film that won him a student academy award. In 2015, he finally made the move to Los Angeles.
In the coming years, he earned credits for Deathcember, NBC’s Home Sweet Home, and Psycho Storm Chase on Lifetime. Landing the gig for Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey came about from a series of serendipitous events. He’d heard rumblings about the film months beforehand, but it wasn’t until stills were released and “went massively viral” that it really caught his attention.
He reached out to director Rhys Frake-Waterfield via Instagram by replying to a story about ruining someone’s childhood. “Can I help you ruin people’s childhoods?” he posted with a violin emoji. Later, he came to realize that he’d previously met cinematographer Vince Knight on the festival circuit during the Rocket run. Knight immediately recommended Bell for the job, and it was off to the races from there.
Regarding his biggest takeaways from the project, he shares, “We made this movie for scraps. Everyone poured their passion and fun into it. I could tell that when we watched the rough cut and people were laughing between takes. I wanted to join in on the fun. Musically, I just dove in and had a blast.” Below, Bell digs into his work and how he approached select tracks.
Bloody Disgusting: What other film scores did you gravitate toward?
Andrew Scott Bell: Well, I loved John Williams. I remember knowing who he was, but maybe not to the extent that I know now. I knew the big ones like ‘Star Wars,’ ‘Indiana Jones,’ and ‘E.T.,’ which is one of my favorites. I distinctly remember 一 I must have been in first or second grade and we were taking a hard test 一 finishing the test and walking up to my teacher and humming in my head the Dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun. I must have been humming it out loud because the teacher said to me, ‘Oh, you like Star Wars. I like Star Wars, too.’ My mind was blown that she knew ‘Star Wars.’ As a kid, you don’t realize that the things you watch on your VHS tape at home, everybody else also watches.”
BD: When tinkering with ideas, what instrument do you go to more often than others?
Bell: I play most on the piano. As we talked about earlier, my introduction to music was sitting at the piano. Everyone’s brain is so different, and I like the piano because it’s visually laid out. Every note has its own key, and you can see it and build chords. Unlike a guitar, where there is a fret per note, but then there’s the next string and the next string to the next string. So, there are six strings. With piano, that’s where I sit first. I come up with thematic ideas and melodies. When I start to orchestrate it, that’s when I start to play things in different instruments and have fun with that. Some ideas come from the instrument itself. With Winnie the Pooh, for example, when you finally see him in his adult form, I recorded myself playing the cello 24 times, which is three times larger than a normal cello section. That idea came from the instrument. It wasn’t like I was sitting here at the piano going, ‘Oh, I’m going to do this for ‘Pooh.’”
BD: How do you make sure that the score has an arc to it?
Bell: That comes in themes. There is a book that I read called ‘On Repeat: How Music Plays the Mind.’ It essentially is all about repetition in music and how it tricks our brain into pumping dopamine. The simplest version of this is like the pop song, where when you’re listening to it, you’re like, ‘This sounds cool.’ You hear the chorus the first time you’re listening, and you’re like, ‘I like this. I’ve never heard something like this before.’ And then it goes back to the verse and that whole time during the second verse, you’re like, ‘Get me back to that chorus.’ And you’re just waiting for it to come back. When it does come, our brain subconsciously goes, ‘You thought that part was gonna happen that you heard before, and you are right. So here’s a little bit of dopamine for being right.’ It also happens every time you hear the song for the rest of your life.
So, for me, I’m always kind of chasing that in a film score over a longer period of time. You may hear a theme a little bit sprinkled in, maybe it’s just a pure statement of the theme. Maybe in the very beginning of the movie. There’s Christopher Robin’s theme in full force, so that later when you hear it sprinkled in through the scenes, it kind of gives you, subconsciously, that feeling of an arc. It also is very, very rewarding.
BD: What is most striking about the score is its sense of whimsy. How did you walk the line between whimsy and darkness?
Bell: I never wanted the music to feel like, ‘Oh, here’s that whimsical moment, and then, here’s that dark side.’ I wanted them to feel like one cohesive sound together. The main theme at the very start of the movie during the prologue really changes keys, almost every two bars, and it keeps bouncing back and forth. It doesn’t feel like it lands. It’s like shifting sands underneath your feet. That’s kind of like taking you on a journey. The intro has those two sounds, and it feels like it marries those two sounds together. Then, for the rest of the movie, I’m just mixing them together. There’s a track called ‘Together Forever.’ It doesn’t necessarily feel darker than the opening prologue, but it’s the same theme. It’s low bass and low cello. I never personally know if it feels like two different scores in one, but I think I pulled off. You take stabs in the dark, and you hope the intention comes across that you show them separately in the beginning prologue, and then meld them together into one cohesive sound throughout the film.
BD: The track titled “100 Acre Wood Chipper” is an essential piece of music. How did it come together for you?
Bell: That’s a fun one. That was one of the first ones I did. Let’s see: I think that was the second scene that I scored. This one was the first one I did after purchasing a bunch of clay pots. You can hear that kind of right here. [plays a bit of the track] It’s me with a bunch of microphones with a drum set of pots. There’s low percussion, and I’m playing over the top with those. That was kind of a weird, goofy idea. It’s kind of cheesy but we needed to mirror Pooh’s honey pots. For example, right here [plays another snippet] you can hear me with a mallet between two clay pots going back and forth between them.
Then, there’s a sound that I call the bear head. It was a custom instrument made for me by an experimental luthier named Tyler Thackray. It’s the only one in the world that looks like this. [lifts it into view] It’s a bass ukulele neck with bass ukulele strings, though I broke two of the three strings while recording. Then, it has a children’s violin neck with what’s called sympathetic strings that resonate as you play and bow the string. It’s a cigar box body with a paint can lid resonator. Inside the cigar box are rows of springs, so that when you plug it in the signal for the jack, the electronic signal goes through the springs. It’s called a spring reverb, and it sends the signal through the springs and makes an echo.
BD: “100 acre Hoodlums” is another track that immediately stands out.
Bell: It also has clay pots. Then, there’s cello here. [plays clip] Maybe two of them. It’s just me playing with a microphone really close so that you hear the breathiness of the horsehair on the bow. It’s unlike how you might normally hear a cello. I’m really obsessed with what’s in music called three against two [known as a polyrhythm]. The idea for the synthy background came when we were on a cruise ship to celebrate my dad’s retirement. I woke up in the middle of the night, recorded a voice memo, and then I went back to bed. I had some drinks or something. I listened to it the next morning, and it just said, ‘Drums underwater.’ What am I talking about? But there’s this. [plays snippet] I didn’t literally record drums underwater, but I was trying to get that sound.
BD: Toward the end of the soundtrack, there’s “Pooh Gives Maria a Head Start,” possibly the best of the bunch. What was the process to create this one?
Bell: You can hear me doing a little of the choir. We didn’t really have the budget for a huge orchestra. I never want the budget to make the music suffer. You’re hiring me for a job, so let’s figure out how to get a great sound out of the budget you have. I play a lot of instruments myself. I play and layer violins, cello, trumpet, a couple clarinet solos. I also have this instrument here called the Beehive-o-lin, and this is the only one that exists in the world.
When I first signed on to do this movie, I remembered an article I read in The New Yorker about Tyler Thackray. One sentence was ‘For example, I put a violin inside a beehive to see what would happen.’ I reached out to him and asked about it. He goes, ‘Oh, I forgot about that.’ I asked him to use it on a soundtrack. He was like ‘sure, come on up!’ We went up to San Francisco and pulled it out. It was covered in honey and honeycomb. It sounds really strange. I played with it and layered it. I discovered it kind of sounds like buzzing bees. This is five performances layered on top of each other. [plays track]
Throughout the entire soundtrack, there’s a big menacing men’s chorus. I recorded them all myself, maybe 18 or 20 times. The thing I love about Rhys is he never said no. He always said ‘I want to hear that.’ It’s the most fun environment to work in 一 the director getting excited with you. I texted him, ‘What if we had a choir singing ‘blood and honey’ in Latin which is ‘sanguis et mel.’’ And he goes, ‘Sounds expensive.’ And I go, ‘I got it covered.’ It’s me. You just make a bunch of different voices. Once it’s combined with the other instruments, it has this presence.
Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey is now playing only in theaters.
