‘Alien: Earth' composer and music supervisor on Wendy's ‘whimsical' music-box theme and the ‘cathartic' way of ending episodes with Black Sabbath, Tool, Metallica

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In space, as the famous Alien tagline goes, no one can hear you scream. So that's where the music comes in.
For FX's hit new prequel series Alien: Earth, the job falls to composer Jeff Russo and music supervisor Maggie Phillips. The two artists spoke with Gold Derby following the third episode, "Metamorphosis," which aired Tuesday on FX. The hour-long installment features Wendy (Sydney Chandler) and Hermit (Alex Lawther) barely surviving their battle with a monstrous Xenomorph, and Kirsh (Timothy Olyphant) dissecting a facehugger to see what really makes it squirm.
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Alien: Earth reunites Russo and Phillips with showrunner Noah Hawley, with the trio previously collaborating on Fargo, for which Russo won an Emmy and Phillips received a nomination. Russo and Phillips have been working on the project under Hawley's leadership for about five years now, and tell us they're "excited" that fans finally get to watch Alien: Earth every Tuesday night on FX.
In the following Q&A, Russo delves into Wendy's music-box-esque theme, which he says has a "whimsical feeling" to it because of the nature of Chandler's character being a child inside an adult synthetic body. And Phillips discusses the reasoning behind the "cathartic" way she ends episodes with hard rock/metal bands like Black Sabbath, Tool, and Metallica.
Gold Derby: How big of a fan were you both of the film franchise?
Jeff Russo: I saw the second movie in theaters, but I was far too young to see the first movie. I might have actually even been slightly too young to see the second one, too. It's a pretty intense, intense movie, but I would say, it had a profound impact on my connection to filmmaking and my connection to loving movies. It was the very first time that I'd ever gone to a movie and felt my heart pounding and felt nervous and truly on the edge of my seat — not just the proverbial edge of my seat, but actually on the edge of my theater seat. So, I would say that I'm a pretty big fan of the first string of movies, loving the first one, the second one, the third one ... and then I just started to fall away from it. But I've now found my way back to the franchise.
Maggie Phillips: My parents were very strict about what we saw. I remember hearing about it for years before I even actually saw it. It was such a pop-culture moment, the alien coming out of the stomach. My dad was a huge fan, so he would talk about it, but I didn't see the first one or second one until I was an adult, or maybe late in my teens, and I loved them. When I found out five years ago that we were going to be doing this, I went back and watched them all in succession, and Jeff and I would talk about different aspects of each. Noah specifically was focusing on the first and second Aliens, so those two I went back and watched a few times.
is finally airing on FX after all these years. What is it like to see the audience's reaction?
Phillips: It's fun! Jeff and I lose perspective when you work on something for so long. And also, we watched this without the music, without the visual effects, without the sound effects, so we're working on it as a work in progress. Jeff and I were in London for the premiere and watched it together in a theater, with the reaction all around us. There were moments where we were poking each other with sheer excitement. The vibes were the best I've ever felt at a premiere, because it was palpable how cool this is, and how cool it's gonna be, and how exciting it is. It was as thrilling as the show.
Russo: With this kind of IP, you always run the risk of, for lack of a better way to put it, alienating the audience. I wrote my very first piece of music for this about five years ago. Noah sent me an early version of the script and a VFX mock-up that he wanted me to start sketching ideas to. When you've been on something for so long, you really do lose complete perspective. There have been moments where I was like, "Oh my God, we're doing it, we're making it happen." Maggie's right, we sat and watched the first episode in a theater with an audience, and it really did feel like nobody knew what was going to happen. And you hear the Black Sabbath song at the end of it, the really big release at the end of the episode. It was really incredible to experience that feeling of, "Holy f--k, we actually pulled it off." So, hearing the feedback, and seeing people enjoying it and drawing those correlations to the first and second films, that's exactly what we set out to do.
Jeff, talk about how you pay homage to the original 1979 score by Jerry Goldsmith, while still creating your own thing.
Russo: The idea of staying in that lane was a big part of it. The score needed to feel and sound familiar, but it needed to be unique. The way I can make it unique is to write new thematic melodies and material, while still utilizing the same sort of orchestra and the same feelings that Jerry was evoking in that first film.
A lot of it was also looking to the second film and listening to James Horner's score [for James Cameron's 1986 sequel, Aliens], which is a little more militaristic. We needed to do something with some more propulsion, because what I wanted to do was take the feelings of the first movie and the second movie and try to merge them together. We wanted to have that very eerie, very tense, very atonal score that sounds like it's just crashing together, combined with a more militaristic-sounding, propulsive score. The thing that those scores don't really have is the emotional content. So, what Noah and I talked about doing was to connect the characters to the music.
What can you tell us about Wendy's music-box theme?
Russo: It's played on a celeste, which does have a bit of a music-box vibe to it. It's very high-pitched, and it looks like a mini upright piano. There is something that I wanted to inject into her theme, which is, she's a child in an adult body, so there has to be some whimsical aspect to her. We struggled with finding the right amount of whimsical feeling in it without being too whimsical, because then it just comes away from that dread. Taking a child who is dying and putting their consciousness into a synthetic body, there's something so dark about that. And what's behind it is this evil trillionaire wanting to take over the world with this idea of immortality.
Black Sabbath, Tool, Metallica, oh my! I don't remember a TV show having such a hard rock/metal feel to its music supervision.
Phillips: I certainly have never done it before. Look, there are no songs in any of the Alien movies, not a single one. Jeff and I got on a call, and we're like, there's gonna be some songs, because it's a Noah Hawley show. No one knew at first what we were gonna do. Noah put together a playlist of initial inspiration, but it was very eclectic. Black Sabbath at the end of the pilot was so satisfying and so fun and worked so well, that the end songs just grew out of that. We just wanted more. It's cathartic. It's this release. It feels like big emotions and big fun. Arena hard rock/metal are big enough for the show. It's just, how do we punctuate each episode with a moment that's big enough for what we just watched?
You're both Emmy nominees for , and Jeff, you won for that show. What would it mean to you for Emmy voters to recognize your work for ?
Russo: Just to be in that conversation is pretty spectacular. It's special to be involved in the creation of art that is inside that conversation. Noah has put together a team of artists that he trusts, that has come together to make these really great things. He has a way to tell stories that I'm not sure I've ever experienced.
Phillips: We really support each other, but we also all demand excellence from ourselves and each other. There's such a strong level of commitment to the craft, and I think just to be considered is always great, but to be considered amongst this family of people that we've been working together with for over a decade, that makes it just special.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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