Buck Sanders

Oscar-nominated composer Buck Sanders has carved out a niche as one of Hollywood's top musical experimenters, and as Marco Beltrami's right-hand man on nearly twenty years' worth of prestige films and genre classics. From horror standouts (Resident Evil, The Woman in Black) to modern westerns (3:10 To Yuma, The Homesman), from sci-fi (I, Robot) to mysteries (Knowing), zombies (Warm Bodies, World War Z), and family dramas (Soul Surfer) to heart-clenching war films (The Hurt Locker), he and Beltrami have forged a musical partnership that has won accolades and the loyalty of such filmmakers as Tommy Lee Jones, Wes Craven, James Mangold, Joon-ho Bong, and Roland Joffé. In 2010, Sanders and Beltrami received an Oscar nomination for their spare, searing music for The Hurt Locker, which took their integration of sound effects and narrative atmosphere to a new level. Sanders grew up in South Carolina, and was drawn to experimental music (and film scores) from an early age. He played guitar in a high school band and continued after moving to Los Angeles, where he studied guitar performance at UCLA. He was working at a laserdisc store in West LA when he met Beltrami, and rapidly went from "helper" to invaluable co-conspirator. Sanders' unique role in the team is bringing a technological wizardry and an insatiable curiosity for manipulating and inventing sounds (as he did on The Homesman -building an enormous, outdoor wind harp and recording piano sounds underwater). "I'm not surprised I gravitated to film music," Sanders says, "because it allows for so much experimentation, but gives the strict, dynamic parameters of a film's personality. For me, giving films unique, handcrafted sounds is just as important to the melodic and harmonic decisions we make during the compositional process."