By most accounts, Steven Spielberg and company have a masterpiece on their hands in their retelling of West Side Story, which hit theaters December 10th. The original West Side Story musical debuted on Broadway in 1957 and inspired a 1961 film adaptation by the same name. While Spielberg’s directorial touch is ever-present in 2021’s West Side Story, the film rides high on the strength of Leonard Bernstein’s musical compositions and Stephen Sondheim’s timeless lyrics.
Of course, ensuring that the musical side of Spielberg’s retelling meets the high standards of this iconic production is a tall order. Luckily, Executive Music Producer and Music Supervisor Matt Sullivan was there to bring his musical-movie expertise into the fold. Matt sat down with Screen Rant to discuss honoring the legacy of West Side Story, how the musical performances were created, and what it was like working with living legend Rita Moreno.
So, you were the Executive Music Producer and Music Supervisor on West Side Story. Can you break down your responsibilities on the film, and how you fit in with the rest of the music team?
Matt Sullivan: The way I – as Music Supervisor and Executive Music producer, it’s kind of like – I always compare myself to being the captain of the ship. Guiding the team and the efforts, creatively as well as organizationally, so it’s like – right from the beginning, it’s dealing with helping out with casting. And once we get our cast together, setting up – dealing with rehearsals, not only setting them up with my team, but I’m also sitting in and giving creative guidance, and my thoughts creatively on the direction. And then we start gearing up all the music and the scores, get ready to prerecord the music, and also, vocals. And really starting – getting the music into shape, how much music we need here, and arrangements. On this one, I was working with Steven with storyboards, and what action is happening in each shot, and therefore “Are we covered musically to achieve what he wants?” The story he wants to tell in each song. And then, I’m on set every day working with the playback, working with the actors on on-set performance coaching. So, if we’re doing playback where people are singing along with the music, lip-sync, or if we’re doing a live recording, which we’re doing a fair share of on this film, working with the actors on set for the live recording and the sound, making sure the sound is good. A good quality recording. And that they’re in time with the music, because we prerecorded the orchestra tracks that they’re listening to in their ears when they’re doing it live. And then I follow through with the team and kind of like – the shooting aspect is kind of like, it’s me and maybe one other person on the set. But then in post-production, we bring in music editors, we bring back the arrangers… David Newman came back and started really working with the edit of the film. And then mixing. A lot of mixing. A lot of sitting in the recording studio, and you know – we go back and finish off our recordings in post-production, but a lot of mixing and getting it to sound… I think it came out really beautiful and it sounds amazing in the theater.
Yeah, it really does. Okay, so how did you get involved in all this? I see the guitar behind you. Are you a musician?
Matt Sullivan: I’m a musician. And yeah, I’ve been doing music for films for… I hate to say this, but 20 years. It hurts me. But I got my start working with a music supervisor by the name of Maureen Crowe. She and I started working together, and my third film with her was the film Chicago, which, I was on set every day for Chicago. And after that, I became kind of like the “musical guy.” I’m on my fourteenth or fifteenth musical film, so I’ve been doing it for a while, and I’ve done a lot of it. But I’d say probably four, five years ago, I heard that Steven was doing West Side Story at Fox, and so therefore any chance I could go into Fox 20th Century and have a meeting about anything, I would go in and have a meeting and at the end of the meeting, I’d be like, “So anyway, West Side Story…” I chased it down and eventually got in the room to meet Steven, and I really really chased after it, and I really really wanted it, and I was very happy to get it.
That’s amazing. Does something specifically draw you to the musical genre over other genres of music?
Matt Sullivan: I grew up watching musicals, and going down to – I’m from New York, and my family, we would pop into New York and watch shows. My dad was a cop, but he loved musicals. He was a homicide detective, but he loved musicals. I started playing piano when I was about nine years old. My parents really wanted me to be a part of the music community and see it, so watching West Side Story when I was super young… the music is just so – you become obsessed by it because it’s so complex but also very simple in the same way, and it’s really accessible to people. And it was something that I always loved, and Stephen Sondheim’s lyrics, and the story and everything. It’s just beautiful music with beautiful lyrics to accompany it, so it’s something I’ve always been – always had in my life.
That leads me to another question, which is how does the legacy of the 1961 film factor into the creative process of putting this one together?
Matt Sullivan: Yeah. Well, you know it was – Steven Spielberg’s – my first meeting with him, I think it was even our interview together when we first met to see if we were a good fit together, his first thing was “This is based on the 1957 Broadway show,” and the Broadway cast album that he grew up with at, I think he said he was 10 years old. And it was something that he loved, the 1957 show, and so when we talked about the music, we rarely kind of went back to the ’61 movie. We went back to the ’57 source material which the ’61 movie was made of. So, we, it was Steven’s not re-creation of something that’s been done before for film, it was his interpretation and his reimagination of the Broadway show. Just like they took their interpretation of the stage show, this is Steven’s and Tony Kushner’s interpretation of the stage show.
But you do have – Rita Moreno, who played Anita in the (1961) film is back in this as Valentina. What was the process like of having her involved, and what was it like working with her?
Matt Sullivan: Well, you know, first it’s like – I knew she was being involved from the beginning, and it came with the script that Tony Kushner wrote in Rita as Doc’s character, as Doc’s widow. And I just – it was like “Okay, great, I get to work with Rita Moreno, this is amazing.” And then it was, she’s going to be executive music – executive producer. I almost gave her my credit! Executive producer on the show, and you know, it wasn’t a name only. It’s not like, “Oh, we’ll just give her a producer credit.” She was there every day, she was there during a lot of rehearsals, she was on set when she wasn’t even shooting, and a lot of it was this guidance to these – Our cast is like 16, 17 years old to 25. Most of them had never been on film before. I’d say the majority had never been on film before. Obviously, they didn’t grow up in the time period that this show takes place, and she was just an ever-present encyclopedia, and also just guidance for all these actors. She was always there, always giving guidance, really just the rock of the show. And I don’t think we would have had the outcome that we had unless she was there.
Sure. And I understand you made some additions to the quintet version of “Tonight.” Can you talk about what it’s like to work with music that’s so established, and do something new with it?
Matt Sullivan: You know you’re working with a set piece of music, and in order to get Steven’s visual of it, and getting it working from beginning to end, and tell a story of everyone heading to this rumble, yeah, we did some additions and little tweaks to it. I mean, not a lot. It’s the same music, it’s just kind of just – a little bit of tweaks here and there. This music is so iconic, we never really wanted to change anything to the point where it wasn’t Bernstein so, therefore, we really stuck to, you know – if we had to extend, how should it extend that still feels like nothing – somebody didn’t come in and put pen to paper and create something different and new to it.
Yeah, I was going to ask if that was a deliberate thing, because you’ve worked on other film musicals like Aladdin and Beauty and the Beast that do add maybe one or two original songs. So it was decided early on in the process not to touch the original music, and just kind of present that as it is?
Matt Sullivan: Yeah, exactly. Like, comparing it to – one of my last big films was Aladdin. In Aladdin, we wanted to have Princess Jasmine have a song, for her to express her – who she is, and her frustration of wanting to be the sultan from being a princess. So, we wanted new songs to help tell the story, and then also you’d have Will Smith come in as the Genie, and you’re like “Where’s Will’s strength, and what’s he bringing to the role?” So, you know, I added some hip-hop drums and just kind of gave it much more of a driving Will Smith feel to, like, “Friend Like Me” and stuff. So, that was that direction, but on this, it’s like… the music is perfect, it’s beautiful, the original orchestrations are great. It was – we went from the 27-piece orchestra scores, and we then kind of set them to, so we could have an 85-piece orchestra, so that was the main goal. And you really don’t want to fix what’s not broken. So our main goal is to get the music sounding the best it can sound, played by the New York Phil(harmonic), the best that I think they’ve ever played it, and bringing Gustavo Dudamel to conduct them and raise it up. Something where, you know, it’s the New York Phil, it’s Bernstein’s orchestra, they’ve played this countless times. And getting Gustavo to raise them up, you know, when you’ve got Gustavo Dudamel and Steven Spielberg sitting in the room in front of the New York Phil, you know it’s going to be – they’re going to really really raise the bar up.
And you said that some of the performances were captured on set, while others were in time with the pre-recorded music. What was the choice between – when did you choose to have it be recorded on set versus pre-recorded?
Matt Sullivan: A lot of it was conversations between Steven, and myself, and Jeanine Tesori, who was our supervising vocal producer. And it really was my expertise in what’s feasible on set, what we can do on set. Like, for instance you mentioned “Quintet.” Getting that cacophony of singing and all that, trying to do all that live is near impossible. A lot of ensemble vocals, overlapping, it’s – for shooting on film, it’s really, really tough to do. And it was one thing that we’re just like, “Okay, that’s going to be playback.” But then you have, say, “Balcony Scene” with Tony and Maria, and you have two performers who can really, really… really, really emote to each other. There’s something about pre-records… if we’re shooting it on, you know, day 31, and you’re pre-recording before, they may not be in tune with each other as characters yet. And therefore, once you live the life of shooting the movie and on day 31 when you shoot it, you go live and it’s just – it’s just something that you really can’t capture in pre-records. A lot of decisions of like… “Balcony Scene”, “A Boy Like That” and “I Have a Love,” when they’re in the apartment together, that’s all live. So there’s so much… there’s so much happening between the two of them that, if you do it to playback, it won’t be the same.
And the cast is so amazing in this as well, so they’re up to it.
Matt Sullivan: I used to say Steven hired us a cast who could come in, perform this 8 shows a week on a stage if they needed to. And therefore, we just had to take them and just raise them up a little bit, and get them used to shooting on film. But otherwise, he brought us a cast which was just impeccable.
Sure. And you touched on this earlier, but can you talk about the process of – I think you did sketch-ups and plotted out all of the musical performances in advance of shooting. Can you talk about what that was like?
Matt Sullivan: Yeah, so, you know, it’s a – compared to a lot of big music numbers in films, where you can set up like 4 cameras and shoot – if you’re all in one space, you set up a lot of cameras, you shoot it, and you figure it out in the edit room. This is very – the music itself is very dialogue-driven and story-driven, so it’s scenes. And first, we wanted it to feel seamless so that when you’re going from dialogue right into the singing, it feels as one scene. And the next thing you know, people are singing and people in the audience are like – it’s not jerky to them, it’s very, very smooth. So we wanted that. And then, since we’re shooting it very linear, that the first three lines of a song is Riff singing “Jet Song” in one location, then it moves to the next location, we wanted to storyboard out – well, Steven wanted to, he had storyboards for everything. And then I worked with an assistant editor, and he and I started shooting the storyboards and setting it to the music. And then, knowing where we’re cutting. So when we went on a set, I was the encyclopedia on set of how we’re shooting it, what we’re shooting, from beat 1 to – you know, bar 1 to bar 24, and then – “This is the amount that it is, it’s 25 seconds long, this is where the actor needs to move through.” And working with camera and sound, and making all – it was really super helpful so when we were on set, everyone know what we were shooting on those specific setups.
So, it sounded like the answer to this might have been West Side Story, but if there was any other musical, after all the ones you’ve done… if there’s any other one that you could help transition from stage to film, what else is out there that you would love to do?
Matt Sullivan: You know, right now I’m actually kind of – funny you ask, because I’m right now kind of looking through what’s out there to see what’s to do. I’m not sure if the timing works out for me, but I’m dying to see what they do with Wicked, so it’s uh, there’s some stuff out there, but nothing right now that is really – talking about.
Sure, sure. Okay, and finally, is there something else that you’re working on right now that you can talk about?
Matt Sullivan: Sure, yeah, so when we finished this one I went to England earlier this year and shot Disney’s Pinocchio with Robert Zemeckis. So, going from Spielberg to Zemeckis was very much a “pinch me” moment, like “Oh my god, is this really happening?” So, I’m working on Pinocchio with Robert Zemeckis for Disney, and it’s so good. And working with Bob Zemeckis who’s another brilliant filmmaker, it was really exciting. And then I’m also – I went to Ireland and we shot Disenchanted, which is the Enchanted sequel with Amy Adams, Patrick Dempsey, Idina Menzel, James Marsden. So I’m deep in post-production on that one right now, so it’s really – Alan Menken and Stephen Schwartz wrote more great songs that are just really incredible, so it was fun.
West Side Story is now playing in U.S. theaters.