SUNDANCE '23: Composer Heather McIntosh on the Horrors of Modern Dating in 'Cat Person'
photo credit Rachael Cassells
Heather McIntosh’s journey to becoming a film composer began in an unlikely place: synthesizer lessons.
“Back in the ’80s there was a show called Fame that I freakin’ loved. There was a character in there that was a composer/synthesizer player person, so I took lessons,” Heather explains, smiling. It was a CZ1000 with all the bells and whistles. She proudly took that synthesizer to Show and Tell in fifth grade and played Jefferson Starship’s “We Built This City.”
Knowing that McIntosh was inspired to pick up music because of Fame makes it obvious that film holds a special place in her heart.
“I always loved film. I worked at video stores when I was in college and stayed working at them when I was touring with pretty high-profile bands,” she recounts. “I’d come back from tour with Lil Wayne and go rent people their movies for the weekend.”
“It’s such magic,” McIntosh continues. “You can’t watch a Star Wars movie without hearing John Williams’ score…there’s something powerful about that…I was swept up in the [score] when I was a kid. Then it was a bit later when I was like oh, this is magic. The kind of magic that might be able to be a little attainable.”
Composing proved to be more than attainable for McIntosh, who has scored a plethora of films and TV shows. Most of her projects fall into the indie genre, which might be by design. “I love indie films,” she admits. “I always will.”
Her latest project is the score of Susanna Fogel’s Cat Person. That title might sound familiar. The film shares its name with his inspiration: a New Yorker short story from 2017 that went viral. The story spurred a conversation about modern dating, sex, and romance. The film, and the original short story, follow Margot (Emilia Jones) and her brief fling with an older man, Robert (Nicholas Braun). He’s a regular at her part-time job at a movie theatre, and the two awkwardly hit things off.
If you only listen to the score without any knowledge of the script, it’s easy to picture Cat Person as a horror movie. The bulk of McIntosh’s score is unsettling, and eerily builds toward something. What, exactly, is a mystery that can only be answered by the film itself. However, there are parts of McIntosh’s score that are filled with levity and the sort of sweetness that comes with falling in love. It’s this duality and juxtaposition that speaks to the film’s themes. McIntosh and Fogel wanted the audience to work, to really take in the film and ask themselves who they thought was in the right or wrong. Cat Person is intentionally murky.
“It’s a dating movie and it kinda does explore the horrors of it in a way, but there’s a lot of humor in there, too,” McIntosh explains. “I felt like I had such an important role being with Margot's interior journey and fear in those moments of dating. Like you just met this guy or whoever and am I gonna be murdered?” she laughs.
“It was also really important to not go too hard too fast,” McIntosh explains. “We wanted to make sure there was a lot of room, especially as the film started out, to really let the audience figure out their own feelings of it…we found through that process of peeling away, it almost sounded more raw…it let you sort of take it in.”
One of the most striking sounds of the score was inspired by the track selected for the film’s titles. Fogel chose a song by Molly Lewis, a whistler, called “Oceanic Feeling.” McIntosh was originally planning to score the opening, but found that “Oceanic Feeling” unlocked a key attribute of her score.
“That little bendy-sounding stuff in the music, that’s all her whistle…we kinda used it like a theremin or something. You know, like old-school ’50s, ’60s scary sci-fi spooky sounds,” McIntosh explains. “It was so cool to have this sound that you usually associate with Disney or bird songs or light, twinkly things, but then it can sort of get this uncomfortable ‘oh, no, what’s happening’ sort of feeling.”
“There’s a wild power [in composing],” McIntosh explains, so clearly excited about the endless possibilities that await her, whatever her next project will be.