Every composer’s route to Hollywood is a little different, but Nicholas Britell’s is one of a kind. After a youth spent training to be a concert pianist at Juilliard, he veered off that course to major in psychology at Harvard, where he joined a hip-hop band and began scoring his friends’ student films. When his group broke up, he began trading currencies in New York while continuing to score short films and even write telephone hold music. After quitting his job to focus full-time on composing, Britell found himself—within a few short years—contributing music to director Steve McQueen’s Academy Award-winning Best Picture 12 Years a Slave. That project would lead to a long- lasting creative partnership with Plan B’s Jeremy Kleiner and Dede Gardner, who went on to introduce Britell to his closest collaborators to date: Academy Award-winning directors Barry Jenkins and Adam McKay.

A deep, fraternal collaboration was forged with McKay, who came to rely on Britell to bring big concepts to his apocalyptic movies at the earliest stage possible. For The Big Short, Britell conjured the sound of “dark math.” The composer scored Vice, a cynical portrait of former vice president Dick Cheney, like an epic western gone sour. “Nick was four months ahead of us with his music than we were with the edit,” McKay said. “He was clearly seeing things that we were still trying to figure out.” Their latest project, the Netflix comedy Don’ t Look Up, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence as two low-level astronomers who go on a giant media tour to warn the planet of an approaching comet, features music for a kitchen-sink big band—filled with toy piano, mandolin, banjo, and celeste—along with big orchestral drama. Today marks the first live performance of music from the film.

Barry Jenkins drew on Britell’s facility with hip-hop in addition to his classical work for the 2016 Academy Award-winning Best Picture, Moonlight. The story of a gay Black man in Miami was told in three chapters of advancing age, and Britell’s simple, elegant violin theme for the protagonist likewise came of age through the digital slow-down process that characterizes the hip-hop subgenre of “chopped and screwed”—its voice dropping a register with each progression. Like McKay, Jenkins came to prize Britell’s input so much that he’s involved the composer on the ground level for all ensuing projects. That led to the melancholic, sensual, jazz-flavored score for If Beale Street Could Talk, Jenkins’ poetic adaptation of James Baldwin’s love story set in 1960s Harlem, and, most recently, the earthy horrors and fantasies in the critically acclaimed Amazon series, The Underground Railroad. “What I discovered very early on in the Moonlight process,” Jenkins said, “was how well he is able to receive the spirit of the film, the essence of the film, the energy of the film, and then reflect that in his sound.”