When it came to finding a composer for Charli xcx‘s mockumentary “The Moment,” no one made more sense than her longtime producer and friend A. G. Cook. Though he’d never scored a feature before, his fingerprints are all over “Brat,” Charli’s seminal 2024 album that became a lime-green, party-girl phenomenon and serves as the backdrop for the Aidan Zamiri-directed film.
In “The Moment,” which premiered at Sundance Film Festival before opening in select theaters on Friday, an alternate-reality Charli must choose between standing by her art or selling out when a sinister director (played by Alexander Skarsgård) is hired to make her concert movie. But “The Moment” mostly avoids songs from “Brat,” relying instead on an electrifying score from Cook that evokes — though doesn’t directly pull from — the sonic landscape of the album.
“I’ve been working with Charli for so long that, reading the script and seeing the fly-on-the-wall situations with venues, managers, tours — that feels very funny and also real and vivid to me,” Cook told Variety over Zoom just hours before he took off for Sundance. “‘Brat’ is used almost to haunt Charli as a character, so for me it’s just a really nice opportunity to think about the palette of that album but also twist it in ways.”
Below, Cook speaks more about scoring “The Moment,” how David Lynch’s “Mulholland Drive” inspired him and the film’s big “Bitter Sweet Symphony” needle drop.
When did you first hear about “The Moment” and how was the idea of scoring it brought to you?
I think it’s been exactly a year since I read the script and actually started doing some bits of the sound already. It was sent around in January, and it was during the L.A. fires as well, so I was supposed to be in L.A. and then I wasn’t and I used the extra week or two to start doing bits of the music. I did a lot it before they shot, and then obviously I worked on it again to picture afterwards. There was a lot of reasons for that, but it was nice because it also meant that it was part of the Coachella and Glastonbury sets and it was in Aidan and the cast and crew’s ears and minds as they were actually [filming].
“Dread,” in which you sample Charli and Icona Pop’s “I Love It,” is the song that was used at Coachella and Glastonbury, right?
“Dread” was used for that kind of first trailer at the end of Coachella, and then there’s a longer version we zoomed in on for Glastonbury with the “Brat” backdrop going on fire. They’re all sort of different parts of the longer track. And there’s other way subtler things, like me playing bits and pieces in DJ sets around that time. But “Dread’s” been the one that is the kind of main theme, even though it’s used a bit differently in the movie edit.
This is your first time scoring a feature film. What was your approach?
It’s a really weird, once-in-a-lifetime brief anyway just because of being involved in “Brat.” I had resisted doing full-length music scores — I’d done some short pieces and I have some really close friends who do film music constantly so I know how much work that is. I basically set up all these rules for myself. I was like OK, I don’t want any of Charli’s vocal in the score, like I don’t want to use her voice unless you see it on the screen — she’s rehearsing a song or she hears it in a car. And we only break that at the end with the “I Love It” [sample] in “Dread,” but that’s also such a strange use of it. It’s like, nothing to do with “Brat.”
I had this palette that almost felt like a full score before they shot, like really within a week of reading the script. But then, obviously there were these certain scenes that I really wanted to perfect to picture. Towards the end of the film is where this other, more emotional music takes over that really has to work with the exact dialogue and monologues.
Tell me more about subverting the sonic palette of “Brat” for the score.
There’s bits and pieces of “Brat,” but I’m not using the actual melodic content — there’s a few of the same harsh synth textures, but they’re actually used quite sparingly and toward the end of the film they start to fall apart. There’s some referencing of that bass that you might hear on “365,” so it was a little bit of that DNA. But on “Brat” itself, I was having a lot more fun. You know, even just how we did drums and recording stuff, this was a lot more controlled. Like there’s not much drums in this, and when they come in it’s really obvious.
I’m also a big fan of scores with a lot of silences in them, so this is something I had to push and pull a lot. There’s something really awkward about the way this whole film is shot, you know? It’s got this fly-on-the-wall quality and occasionally you see glimpses of Charli as this superstar. So I wanted it to have this feeling of really extreme music moments and then things completely vanish.
Were you inspired by any other film scores while making this one?
When it was the L.A. fires and I was writing was also the same week that David Lynch died. And I’m a big fan of Lynch and all the Angelo Badalementi soundtracks like “Twin Peaks” and “Mulholland Drive.” I was rewatching some Lynch stuff, especially “Mulholland Drive,” which thematically felt like it was some relation to “The Moment.” There’s that opening shot where they’re driving the canyons and it’s reminiscent of the kind of “Twin Peaks” style of suspended classic chords, but the chord progression is moving so slowly that your brain doesn’t necessarily latch on to them being the typical positive or negative, happy or sad — the emotion is pretty ambiguous. You can hear that across some of my other stuff, but I would say even though “Dread” has this big panic thing, a lot of the chords actually move in this way. There’s also one piece of music towards the end where Charli has a monologue and it shifts around but it never completely sits on one emotion. So that was a very conscious influence.
Charli xcx in “The Moment.”
Besides bits of “Brat” songs here and there, the only needle drop in “The Moment” is the Verve’s “Bitter Sweet Symphony.” How did that come to be and how did it work with your score?
It was in the script and it was pretty much like, “We’re going to blow all the budget on one big sync.” It felt very on brand, like “OK, there’s going to be only one needle drop and it’s going to be really good and really important.” And it stops the score itself from having to do this thing where it’s just working around these big songs all the time. That gave it somewhere to go and kind of crescendo towards. And for that reason I have no strings in the score, like “Bitter Sweet” will be the first string you hear. Probably the most intricate bit of the score is where it sort of morphs into “Bitter Sweet,” and that was done really carefully. They managed to find some of the original stems, so I could really finesse and have it come in at just the right moment. I haven’t heard many scores that really do that, where the one big needle drop also kind of morphs and oozes out of the previous score.
Would you score a film again?
What’s funny is my tracks as A. G. Cook were getting longer and longer — from “7G” onwards I have these 10-minute tracks. And then some of those longer ones were already being used in small films here and there, and I’ve done things for fashion soundtracks as well. There’s a part of my music that really is related to that. So I think definitely, as long as the project is something that feels fresh. I’m almost certain that I will.
This interview has been edited and condensed.