Daniel Lopatin Discusses the Sound and Energy of Marty Supreme

EMILY SANDSTROM: I got to see the movie. It was so fun. The screening was completely packed. There was a line out the door.

DANIEL LOPATIN: That’s crazy. Why do you think it’s so popping off?

SANDSTROM: Everyone’s so ready for it.

LOPATIN: Fortunately for me, I’ve never worked on a film or a project that my heart wasn’t in. I’m so happy that I love this movie, because it makes it really easy to talk about. 

SANDSTROM: That’s great. 

LOPATIN: Have you met Timmy?

SANDSTROM: No.

LOPATIN: He’s cool.

SANDSTROM: Everyone loves him.

LOPATIN: I met him years ago. He’s totally bizarre, but he is actually genuine, and that’s the difference. He’s a true celebrity, which is the lost art.

SANDSTROM: I think that’s a pretty good read. Do you think he has the Oscar?

LOPATIN: I hope so. He deserves it. The thing is, I lived with this movie for four months, and I watched him do this role every day. Not only is he really good in it, but the more you meditate on the film, the more you just want to be there. It’s an incredible character study and he carries the whole time. He’s so charming. He’s so funny. He’s so fun to just look at.

SANDSTROM: He is.

LOPATIN: Also, Bob Dylan is many things, but he’s also the IP that is Bob Dylan. Willy Wonka is the IP that is Willy Wonka. Dune is Frank Herbert’s Dune. I was really, really excited to see Timmy do something that was completely fresh and made up by another crazy genius. 

SANDSTROM: I want to know, how does making a movie score work? Do they give you the finished product and then you start working on it? 

LOPATIN: That’s a good question. I got the script and I read it on a really long flight back from somewhere. It’s not like this in every situation, but I’m pretty much in the soup of these guys as collaborators and as friends. At that point I knew I was going to be scoring it, but for a long time I was like, “Am I…?” You don’t want to assume, because it could go any which way. 

SANDSTROM: Did they know it was going to be a big deal when they gave you the script?

LOPATIN: Oh, yeah. It’s calibrated to be a big fucking movie. Much like, I think, Paul Thomas Anderson did this year with his film. They’re both fascinating examples of a big fucking movie with a completely singular and individuated heart. Respectively, those directors can’t escape their own uniqueness, and they shouldn’t. But yeah, so I have WiFi on the plane and I’m just like giving Ronnie [Bronstein] and Josh the play by play as I’m reading it, because I’m falling in love with Marty in real time. 

SANDSTROM: Nice. 

LOPATIN: I realized that the film was about all these different forms of giving birth. There’s obviously the birth of a child, but it’s also about the birth of this new sport. And it’s the birth of a young man becoming an adult, so it’s a coming of age story. But also, it’s about artistic integrity. This is about a guy who refuses to sell out and then has to make compromises and find his way through this labyrinth of a vampiric old world of wealth and power, but also the incestuous world of the Lower East Side and people trying to hold him back. And Marty Mauser has this unrelenting belief in himself. To me, it’s also about being an artist and not selling out. It really, really hit me hard. I scored Uncut [Gems] and I loved working on that movie. But I had to look at it more as, “Okay, what’s the assignment?” Whereas here I was intoxicated with the character to a degree that I could feel myself in him, and it made it very easy.

SANDSTROM: How did the process go from there?

LOPATIN: Essentially, Josh starts calling me and he’s like, “What the hell are we going to do?” But the first question was, “Well, how much do we adhere to the period?” And he’s like, “A little bit, maybe?” But we talked some more and we’re like, “Fuck that. Let’s not adhere at all.” 

SANDSTROM: Oh, interesting. I was curious about that. 

LOPATIN: I reached this conclusion that the score should have these two essential qualities: one is just a neoclassical sound, which is the world as Marty finds it as a young man—a world that’s not his own. It’s a world of traditions and it’s a world of rules and limitations and scumbags like Milton Rockwell and police that he has to run away from. And then there’s the music of his dream for himself that he hasn’t yet reached, but he has to generate to propel himself on the way to where he’s going to go, even if it’s not the place where he ends up. And the electronic part of the score supplies that. And then they contend with each other or dance with each other.

SANDSTROM: That’s funny. It’s obviously very ’80s sounding, despite it being set in the ‘50s. But the score itself is very X Files. 

LOPATIN: I am obsessed with X Files.

SANDSTROM: Me too. This has some Dana Scully in it. 

LOPATIN: That’s so interesting. I’ve never actually been confronted about that. 

SANDSTROM: Really?

LOPATIN: No. I’m also obsessed with the music of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. But yeah, X Files, stuff with David Lynch, those are all really big touchstones. I remember going to a spotting session at the office, closing my eyes and listening to the movie. And I really locked into the table tennis stuff. What I really noticed was how buoyant and light the game is. And the sounds of table tennis are really different from football or hockey. They have their own formal parameters, the way they sound.

SANDSTROM: Totally. It’s quite a distinct, hollow ping. 

LOPATIN: Yeah. It’s such a light ball. And so I was like “Let’s use bells and mallets and vibrophones.” 

SANDSTROM: Right.

LOPATIN: But also, the buoyancy and lightness reflects how mercurial Marty is. In that shot where Mauser’s running through the streets, he’s in this beautiful silvery blue shirt that’s oversized. And as he’s running, it looks like a cape, and he looks like Superman or Silver Surfer. He’s this young, light-footed, fast-talking man. He is the game.

SANDSTROM: Right. He is the ball.

LOPATIN: He is the ball. And the score needed to insinuate that without words. Josh always says the score is like a second screenplay.

SANDSTROM: That’s a great read.

LOPATIN: My job is to understand allegorically the soul of the movie at any moment and then find the metaphor. And that’s the most fun part of it.

SANDSTROM: I remember that you scored The Bling Ring, which I absolutely love.

LOPATIN: Thank you. That was my first score.

SANDSTROM: It’s a really fun score.

LOPATIN: It’s really cool. The drummer in that band, Redd Kross, his name is Brian Reitzell. He’s high school friends with Sofia [Coppola], and he became Sofia’s go-to music supervisor. He puts together the most iconic soundtracks ever. Marie Antoinette, Lost in Translation, with Kevin Shields on it. The Virgin Suicides. He’s like Sofia’s trusted musical confidant, and a genius. And he has also played drums for Air for a while. Anyway, he’s this fascinating, cool dude. He heard my record, Replica, in 2011 and he reached out to me and was like, “Hey, come to Glendale, California and learn how to score movies.” That changed my entire life.

SANDSTROM: So you just went out there?

LOPATIN: I had no idea what I was going out there to do. I just went out there and it was on some Karate Kid stuff. I was just hanging out.

SANDSTROM: That’s the dream.

LOPATIN: It is the dream. I didn’t think it was ever going to get any better than that. Then he was like, “Hey, so Sofia’s making this movie. Let’s try some stuff out.” Basically, we just wrote a bunch of cool stuff and showed it to her. She was into it. She called my music “perfume,” which stuck with me my entire life.

SANDSTROM: I love that.

LOPATIN: I learned a lot from that. I love that movie. It’s just unreasonably disliked.

SANDSTROM: What is your relationship to film like more generally?

LOPATIN: I wanted to be a filmmaker more than I wanted to be a producer or a composer.

SANDSTROM: Oh, interesting.

LOPATIN: I had a whole Max Fisher arc—a precocious little fucker arc in me too. I thought I had it all figured out. I was obsessed with Quentin Tarantino. My first password for my Hotmail account was “Quentin.” But even though I didn’t end up in film, I still took the lessons of QT and PTA and folded that into my music-making practice.

SANDSTROM: Nice.

LOPATIN: They’re post-modern directors and they’re collage artists. The way that they work with idioms and tropes and they’re exploring stuff that’s marginalized and considered to be trash, too. 

SANDSTROM: Trash is good, too.

LOPATIN: Trash is the best for me.

SANDSTROM: And it makes the good good.

LOPATIN: Yeah, it imbues the good. You have to imbue the other, always.

SANDSTROM: 100%.

LOPATIN: Any over-reliance on highbrow or lowbrow, you’ll find yourself in a really awkward place.

SANDSTROM: One million percent. Let’s talk about the album, too. The record has been out for a second, and I know it got a really good critical reception. I read a couple of things that referred to it as “a near-perfect piece of music.” I wonder what it felt like to hear people refer to your music like that.

LOPATIN: Well, the record is set up almost to be like a mirror. It’s like a holographic entity that shows up and you’re in your mind’s eye as music. If you want to hear how overtly melodic it is, you pick up on that. If you want it to be an ambient record, you pick up on that.

SANDSTROM: Right. 

LOPATIN: If you don’t like it, it’s like this weird Jungian thing where it’s like you start criticizing it for the things that you’re not picking up on. I find that to be really satisfying. When I hear people say, “This is very refined” or “the craftsmanship is really excellent.” I’m always like, “Well it better be, because I’ve been doing this for two decades.” 

SANDSTROM: But I imagine it’s a relief to hear, too. 

LOPATIN: It’s a nice part of getting older. Because you refine certain skills that are in the arena of craft. Craft and art go together ultimately for an emotional experience. But if it’s just someone going, “Yeah, that sounds really like you did a great job recording it,” I’m like, “Fuck you.”

SANDSTROM: Yeah. 

LOPATIN: But when I hear that people pick up on the ecstasy of it or the joy of it, the emotional qualities of it, whatever they might pick up on it, that’s really interesting to me. Because it’s a record to me that sounds like I’m having a really good time. I’m just making these really crazy, almost surrealistic paintings.

SANDSTROM: That’s a cool way to describe it. I think that can be said about a lot of your music. I was wondering about this record and just having so much access to music history and things you can assemble. Did it feel like in 2025 that it was too much?

LOPATIN: This is all I’m ever going to have to say about sample-based music: I made Replica, and I thought it was a little bit incomplete. I think it’s a really good record, but I had something else to say musically. And with Tranquiliser, I feel like I got to make Terminator Two to reflect Terminator One. You can agree or disagree, but Tranquiliser is the platonic ideal of the record I was trying to make in 2011. This is a record I knew I was going to make one day. I didn’t have the source material for it. When I got it, I lost it and then had to go get it again. I’ll never make this kind of record again. I’ve done it.

SANDSTROM: How did you lose it?

LOPATIN: I bookmarked that internet archive thing and then it got pulled, obviously. Then I had somebody scrape a website and find it on somebody else’s thing, and I got it back. But that whole experience is what I’m talking about. This stuff is fleeting—it’s like sand through your fingers. And I want to make a record that captures that movement, the things materializing and dematerializing and coming back together. And I wanted to make a record that had something to say about ambient music and escapist music versus music that’s engaged and aware. Because a lot of what I’m perceiving in culture is symptomatic of everyone’s tiredness and melancholy, and a need to cope with how incoherent and overstimulated everything has become. It’s called Tranquiliser not because it’s about being numb, but it’s about not wanting to go down, and wanting to stay awake while you’re getting the jab.

SANDSTROM: What’s the jab? The jab is life? The jab is 2025?

LOPATIN: Yeah. The ongoing jab of life.

SANDSTROM: Everything you just said leads me to believe that you feel complete now. You put a bow on this thing.

LOPATIN: I’m forever going to be irritated because I’m an artist, but I don’t think I need to make another record like this again. I think I’ve done something here that I really, really wanted to do ever since I tried to do it the first time.

SANDSTROM: Nice.

LOPATIN: Whatever’s next, it might have shades of it, but I said my piece about a lot of things that I’ve been circling for my entire career. I’m very, very proud of the record and it could be the last OPN record, but it might not be. But if it is the last one, to me it feels pretty definitive.

SANDSTROM: I feel like that’s a really good place to end.