TRAP follows father (Josh Hartnett) as he attends the concert of Lady Raven (Saleka Shyamalan) with his daughter (Ariel Donoghue). He later learns the concert has been staged to capture serial killer, ‘The Butcher.’
FILMHOUNDS sat down with Saleka Shyamalan who wrote and performed the original music for M. Night Shyamalan’s — you guessed it, her dad’s — latest film.
What was it like working with your father?
It was so much fun. I mean, it’s like a dream come true, to work with your family and be able to create something together with the people you love and care about.
And I think my dad loves it. He loves, you know, working with his kids. And I think in some ways, it’s like this perfect collaboration, because he’s raised us, and so it’s like, imagine if you could build your perfect collaborator. He’s raised us with his value system, his work ethic and his taste in some ways. So it’s this really easy, kind of smooth thing where we get each other, even I’ll play him a bit of a song and I’ll just see in his eyes, “Okay, he doesn’t like it or this, or he does like or this or that”. He doesn’t need to say much. And I’m like, “You know what? Let me go back and change this.”
So it’s this instinctual thing, and I think that makes the process feel so smooth and wonderful.
How did you enter the process of becoming Lady Raven?
I mean, it was fun. We got to, you know, create a backstory for the art, which is always nice. And, you know, there’s one song called ‘Save Me’ that is in the movie, which we kind of like imagined as, this is a song from her old album that was maybe a single that the kids know the dance to already. The album that she’s touring is this new album, and then, you know, there’s fun backstory elements like the encore song, when she brings out the singer, The Thinker, (played by Kid Cudi) there’s kind of this introduction of him as, you know, this big singer that kind of gave her a chance and maybe helped her break into the music space. He’s done this collaborate, collaborative song with her, so it’s cool to kind of flesh out the world in that way, because it makes it feel more grounded and realistic.
How did you approach Lady Raven differently to your own craft and work?
There were a lot of differences, I would say, because, you know, I’m imagining her as this…she’s done these stadium tours. This is normal for her. She’s walking out, and she’s got all this whole crew, and she’s kind of like this CEO and she’s you know, all these things that I’m not. So, you know me when I’m walking on the stage, I’m shaking, I have stage fright, I’m nervous, and so I’m trying to imagine what would it be like to not feel that way. To be so confident and have done this a million times and so I’m trying to channel that energy, like, how would Taylor Swift walk out, she does this all the time, she knows she’s got all her loving, adoring fans. So I’m trying to imagine those things.
But it’s fun to feel that, because once you kind of fake it you feel like, “Oh, actually, it’s not as scary to walk out on stage.” If I imagined myself as confident, I started to feel it. So it was really fun to get into that. And then working with the featured artists that came and did songs, and they’re, you know, real artists, it was fun seeing them getting into their own characters. So we had a lot of fun with that.
What was the studio process like?
The studio is my happy place, so that’s where I feel comfortable. That’s my zone, I’m a songwriter at heart. I feel like that’s my true passion, you know, more than performance and all of the other kinds of stuff. So that was like for me, you know, I felt very confident in the studio and just loved the process of writing for the film and writing to the script. There’s just so much to take from and be inspired by that’s outside my own life. You can just take yourself out of it and not think about defining you, or having to be about your own relationships or things like that. So, it was fun and I got to dive into, you know, this movie is very dark and it’s creepy and suspenseful, so kind of pulling those elements into the production and riding with that as the movie goes along was a huge source of inspiration for me.
What was your favorite Lady Raven song to work on?
Oh, man, there are a few. I mean, there’s, there’s two kind of back to back songs. One is called ‘Empathise,’ and one is called ‘Love You,’ and they’re later in the concert. Those I wrote while we were shooting the movie. And so there was this really fun energy around them because we were already kind of deep in the process. And so I knew the choreographer very well, and I knew the dancers very well. So I was like, imagining all of it as I was writing. So it kind of added this, this flavor to it. We just had so much fun with that. It was like, and we were comfortable in the process because it was a little later in the concert shooting. So we were just having time of our lives.
Standout moments on set?
I would say the last day that we shot the concert was a very special one for me, because we were wrapping this enormous kind of thing that we had been working on. For me, I had worked on it for many, many months, which is from the initial writing of the music to adding the elements, costumes, the choreography, then shooting it, and all this kind of stuff rehearsal. So it felt like, you know, this celebration, and then also that was the same day we shot the song with Kid Cudi, so it was like this encore of the concert. And then the audience members, some of them had been there for many days, and had like, seen a lot of the concert. So it was like we were putting on a show for them, kind of in slow motion over many days. By the time they got there, they were just vibing and then at the end of it they were like, asking for my real autograph. They were loving Kid Cudi, they were screaming, and it felt like there was a real, genuine kind of connection, this thing that we had built and felt in the moment really real.
Trap is in UK cinemas from August 9th.
